Lily Kim | Daughters of the East | Asian American Culture

This week, I’ve been thinking about what it means to be American. 🇺🇸

For some Asian Americans, we live in the tension of being both. Too foreign to fully belong in the country we were born in. Too American to live in the country people tell us to go home to. 💔

This tension has existed since the beginning of our history in America when Chinese immigrants first arrived in California. (Gold Rush, 1848).

Less than a couple decades later, we were indispensable, serving as the primary labor that built the railroads that physically stitched this country together. (1860’s). In 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act became the first U.S. law to ban immigration by nationality. but what we carried here had already taken root. 🛤️

We spoke our language at night, cooked our food from home, and lit incense for ancestors thousands of miles away. 📿

And by 1930, our ancestors had built Chinatowns in cities coast to coast, small but meaningful worlds where future generations like me could begin to understand a home we had never lived in.

And along the way, America and home stopped being two different places.

Maybe being American isn’t something we are, but something we’re becoming. And part of that becoming is building ourselves into the “more perfect union” we want to live in.

That’s why wearing a qipao to celebrate Independence Day feels right.

Belonging happens when we carry our culture into the country we call home. 🏠❤️🇺🇸

What does it mean to be American?