This past week I have been really angry. It's such an unfamiliar emotion that I didn't even recognize it at first. Listening to Rage Becomes Her by Soraya Chemaly, I realize it was like white noise in the background, even as I took pleasure in work and the great weather

My thoughts go into a loop of disbelief when I think about how others want to claim an identity or story not their own, and how I don't have that luxury. I wear my identity visibly so it precedes me and tells a story for me

I can claim to be Canadian but if I go abroad I get strangers and children singing "ni hao" and "sayonara" to me, and I can't explain to them that as the descendant of Cantonese/Shanghainese speakers I never would have been able to respond in the languages they claim I speak.

I also cannot claim to be Chinese to other Canadians because I was born here and have never lived in China. However I will continue to be mistaken, as if others want my story to something different than it is.

Of course I am grateful that if anyone were to challenge me on my heritage, I have an army of aunties and elders and cousins who I really should visit and call more. I have the times I have spent with them, which have been invisible to most of my friends and coworkers.

So that part of my ethnic identity which is "authentic" or that can be claimed necessarily must be invisible because it does not fit into my participation in Canadian society. I usually don't even talk about it or to name myself as descended from Cantonese/Shanghainese

There is no need because there is no interest in that identity and there is no interest because I am Canadian and I am Canadian because the ways in which I am Chinese is rendered invisible by the projections of my identity and story

What interest there is falls into two categories: 1) needing to correct the belief that I am not Chinese-born/not Mandarin-speaking/not an immigrant/not mixed race/not Japanese or Korean or Tibetan or 2) others who have similar experiences of malleable identity

Sometimes this confusion and pain itself becomes part of the identify of a racialized person and so when someone who is white-passing claims a BIPOC identity it’s like, you want to appropriate not only our claims and community but also that pain? What is left to us to claim?

And is it now necessary for other BIPOC to perform their identity to authenticate it for a white society who did not look too closely in the first place? And so the loop closes.

And yet it does not close. And I am still angry. And I don’t want to explain. I want to simply be in all the complex ways I am, without encountering the wrong story.