Some white Americans assume that living here automatically means I owe them loyalty or support, but that expectation feels hollow. “Assimilation” gets thrown around a lot, but what does it actually mean in practice? Too often, it comes across as pressure to abandon your identity, to conform in ways that feel like betrayal, or to accept a subordinate role just to be accepted.
There’s also a deeper frustration behind it. If U.S. foreign policy hadn’t destabilized my home country, I might not even be here in the first place. So being told I should support a country I associate with that kind of harm feels unreasonable. From my perspective, it shouldn’t be surprising that I still feel connected to China and view it more favorably. And if China continues to develop, returning to my home country could become a real option.
The “American Identity” is a joke. This is a country that bombs and invades others to pilfer resources. America is a terrorist country.
It really does, though it more feels like colonization and dehumanizing yourself than trying to earn money. Some white people including a couple of family members have tried to get me to abandon my Asian heritage. Why? There’s nothing to be gained from beside alienating myself and probably other Filipinos by doing that. There’s also no point in trying to attach your heritage as a “minority”, a term that actually applies to white people since they only make up a small percentage of the world population, to the “amerikan identity”.
One time my great-grandparents bought me a shirt that was about “celebrating your Filipino-amerikan heritage”. Yeah, a shirt about attaching my asian ethnicity to the empire that colonized and genocided our people? not wearing that. I asked for traditional Filipino clothing, not shitty colonizer shirts. And I have explained several times as to why I don’t wear it.
I’m thinking of moving to Asia in the future, to either the Philippines which is my home country, or China.