Looking For America

Belonging Begins With Us

How this half Asian kid learned how to fit in and still be herself

Philippa Hughes
Art Is Fear
Published in
3 min readDec 3, 2020

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“She’s not like other people.” That’s how a friend’s dad recently described me and he meant it as a compliment and I took it that way. I don’t want to be like everyone else. That hasn’t always been true, though. Growing up as the only Asian-looking kid, apart from my little brother, in a small Southern city, I desperately wanted to be like the other people I saw around me. I wanted to feel like I belonged.

Our hometown was clearly divided between black and white people. I looked neither black nor white, so I belonged in neither group. My half-Asian face and physique also did not look Asian enough for “real” Asians, so I did not belong in that group either. They could see the difference at first glance and treated me as an other, the same way black and white Americans treated me as something apart from themselves.

Even in my own family, I felt like an outsider. I did not speak Vietnamese, which impaired basic communication with some of the older members of my family, and I never learned how to “be” Vietnamese, which created a gap of understanding between my cousins and me. I never learned the cultural underpinnings of Vietnamese-ness that was instilled in them by their parents. “You are too American,” accused my mother on numerous occasions.

I’d adopted an openness and casualness that clashed with the stoic reserve of the Vietnamese nature of my mother’s side of the family. “You Americans are always smiling at strangers,” a European acquaintance remarked to me once. And yet, my fellow Americans demanded to know, “Where are you really from?” My friend Sebastian, who was born in Germany to a German father and Brazilian mother and holds three passports, joked that he is less American than I am and no one ever asked him where he was really from.

During a frenzy of quarantine cleaning back in March, I found several official documents associated with my birth proving that I was an American citizen by birthright. A “Certification of Birth” issued by the U.S. Department of State and my very first passport with a picture of a napping, chubby infant.

These documents guaranteed my right to enjoy the benefits of U.S. citizenship. These documents did not, however, ensure that I would feel a sense of belonging in this country. My Asian face made me feel like I had to prove my American-ness despite having the proper credentials. Sometimes I wished I could carry around my passport to show anyone who ever told me to go back to where I came from that I belonged here and nowhere else.

All of that sounds pretty gloomy! Except over the years, I began to feel more and more like I belonged as people along the way invited me to parties, asked me to join their clubs, said hello, sat with me in the cafeteria, helped me move, drove me to the airport, bought me a coffee, visited me in the hospital, cooked a meal for me, enjoyed a beer with me, invited me into their homes. By making me feel like I belonged, they drew out the best in me, and in themselves.

The more I was made to feel like I belonged, the less I yearned to be like everyone else, which meant I could work on being a truer version of myself. That’s what I think my friend’s dad meant when he said I wasn’t like other people. That I was a truer version of myself. I hope we can create a country where it’s possible for every one of us to be the truest and best versions of ourselves, regardless of what we look like or where we were born.

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Creating space for conversations to transform society. Exploring what it means to be American. Recovering lawyer, public speaker, art fanatic philippahughes.com