On identity and posting
I began making websites during my early adolescence, in 1997. I cut my teeth learning HTML to build Final Fantasy VII fan sites. By 1999, I had discovered and become enamored with early iterations of the burgeoning concept of “blog”, specifically Justin Hall’s links.net. I made friends in AOL chat rooms, and one of these friends offered me some space on their webserver, which I used to host my own manually-edited HTML blog. I updated this blog regularly until I found LiveJournal, which made the whole process a lot more streamlined. I was a very active LiveJournal user for many years; then I was a very active Facebook user for many years; now I’ve been a very active Twitter user for many years.
So I’ve been posting online for over 25 years, and I’ve been thinking about why exactly it is that posting has been so appealing to me for so long. I have a theory about it.
Growing up, I always had a bit of a split identity: At home with my parents, I was always just an obedient model Chinese1 kid who was good at math and got good grades; but outside of the home, I was able to explore other things and not only be the goodie two shoes math nerd that my parents thought I was. This is not to say that I was some crazy wild kid, but just that I was interested in stuff beyond math, that I partied sometimes, that I had premarital sex, that I engaged with ideas and thoughts and opinions and things beyond what my more conservative, traditional parents would have considered kosher.
The second side is essentially who I am online when I post; let’s call it my “American side”. The thing about my American side is that almost I’ve never talked to my parents about it, it was always kept secret from them, in part because I feared their disapproval, but also because I never thought that they’d be able to understand whatever the hell it was that I was on about.
Since I never received recognition from my parents for that second half of myself, I enjoyed the recognition I got online, which I think has served as a proxy for that missing parental recognition of my full self. I think this is my (unconscious) motivation for posting for so many years of my life.
I think this is kind of a classic Chinese American or Asian American story, where you want to be more free, more American, but you don’t get recognition for this from your Asian parents, so you rebel against them. The difference with me is that I just kept that side secret, so from my parents’ perspective I was just what they wanted me to be, from my parents’ perspective I wasn’t rebellious at all. I’ve just lived two different parallel lives.
For the most part having this dual identity has been fine and unproblematic for me, and the anonymous @yeetgenstein account is sort of a continuation of this dual identity, except now instead of just the duality of being Chinese vs. American, it’s other things too in addition, like professional identity vs. personal identity. In the same way that I don’t think my parents would understand whatever it is that I’m on about, I don’t feel that my coworkers at my corporate job would understand whatever it is that I’m on about, either. So it’s nice to have this space where I can express myself freely and be recognized.
But I do feel increasingly that having these dual identities is laborious. It’s tiring to code switch all the time. I should merge all of my identities into one. Maybe I don’t give my parents and my coworkers enough benefit of the doubt. Who’s to say they wouldn’t understand me? Why am I so afraid of being judged, of offending one side or the other? Why shouldn’t I just live more freely, less psychologically encumbered by all these mental gymnastics?
Of course this is a specific notion of “Chinese”, not a universal one, inherited from my immigrant parents who came to the US to study science and engineering, like many other Chinese and Asian immigrants in the 1980s.
Always like reading your essays, and I enjoyed this one too! The "I don’t think X would understand whatever it is that I’m on about" really resonated, but without feeling like tension in my life. But it does remind me of a piece I wrote in Spanish that I consciously wrote with an eye toward sharing with my Mexican parents. My weakness in written Spanish really helped me express myself more relatably, and it connected with them. This makes me want to try that again. A rare reaching out from my writing self to my family, and it's a happy memory.
Brilliant article. A very vivid struggle between Persona and Self. I wish you belief in your duality and the courage to show it to the world.