I was adopted by white parents. I grew up in a white neighborhood, went to mostly white schools, and for a long time I didn't think much about being different. I integrated easily. I wasn't curious about my culture. I just lived.
Middle school is when the gaps started showing up. Small things, mostly. Nothing that felt like one big moment until enough of them had piled up.
In seventh grade, a popular boy asked me to be his valentine in front of the whole class. I didn't know how to respond. Confused, mostly. Why was he talking to me? Then something that felt almost like hope. He laughed. I hadn't even said anything yet. I just stood there, feeling the room shift around me before I fully understood what had happened.
I didn't get cast in roles my friends got. In high school I got called back for Grease and didn't get it. I'll never know for certain, but I wonder how much of it was typecasting, whether it was less about talent and more about what I looked like on stage.
I didn't have language for any of this at the time. I internalized it as personal failure. I thought I was unattractive. Not talented enough. I genuinely wished I was white, not as a passing thought, but as something that lived in the back of my mind. Like if I could just be different, things would be easier.
Junior year, something changed. Anime was going mainstream. Boba was showing up everywhere. I started getting attention I hadn't gotten before, and at the time I didn't connect it to anything except that maybe my luck had finally turned.
I hadn't changed. Asian culture had become trendy, and I ran parallel to that whether I wanted to or not. The connection only seems obvious in hindsight.
I remember being on Tinder and getting messages from men who had already decided what I was. They led with how much they loved Asian women, or my culture, as if that was supposed to flatter me. As if my ethnicity was the thing they were matching with, not me.
That was a different kind of invisible than the one I'd grown up with. I went from being ignored to being wanted for something I represented. Neither one actually saw me.
Now my culture is everywhere: anime, K-dramas, K-pop, ube, boba. Things that used to mark you as other are suddenly cool. Western culture decided they were worth claiming.
Starbucks just added ube drinks and popping pearls to their menu. They claim it's "inspired by drinks from around the world." And I'm glad people are enjoying it. But those aren't new things. Asian-owned shops have been serving them for decades. Starbucks gets to cash in on the moment while the businesses that actually built that culture don't get that same spotlight.
I watched that happen and felt something I couldn't quite put into words. Something ugly. And then I felt something worse. Like I didn't have the standing to say it out loud.
Because I don't know enough. I grew up disconnected from my culture. Not entirely by choice, just by circumstance and the environment I was raised in. That disconnection is the very thing that makes me feel like I can't speak when something from it gets flattened or sold off. I feel silenced by something I didn't choose.
We're accepted for what's consumable. What's profitable. Easy to repackage. For our perceived proximity to whiteness. I'm watching it happen, and I still don't feel like I have the ground to stand on when I object.
I've always been too Asian for one world and too American for the other. I've never fit neatly into either, and I'm not sure I'm supposed to.
I've made peace with that. Mostly. Some days it feels like acceptance. Some days it still just feels like distance.
I fit in the in-between. I'm just not always sure that's a place I'm allowed to stand. Especially when my culture gets celebrated before the people in it do.