I think my natural line has always been to be a pushover, someone who would lie down in the sand. I don’t really necessarily know where this comes from, but then at the same time I massively do. Even though I was built in a case that is Chinese 🇨🇳, it’s not who or what I felt inside. But this outer case always felt confusing to me, because OTHER people would mistake this casing for how they then related to me. And relate to me a certain way they did: they threw on me all the expectations they would heap upon a person of Asian descent, whether they were expectations of mildness or meakness or overt sexuality, but that’s not really me. The real me is quiet, introverted, prone to long bouts of self reflection. She is not extroverted, and she doesn’t enjoy all of the associations with being an Asian woman. I don’t even know what being an Asian woman is. Right now I just associate it with kindness, and yes a gentle docility, but also with fierceness, a towering pillar of strength, formidable, that of a Tiger or a Dragon. I never understood why these words like Dragon Lady or Tiger Lady existed because they were always derogatory. Like Lilith in the Western canon, being a strong powerful woman was never a good thing, and these were the words that were associated with it, to make us feel repulsed by women. When women become the most repulsive creatures, then everyone benefits, because then they’ll be able to keep women and girls down. We seemed obsessed with putting people into boxes, whether it’s man, woman, Chinese or Western. It’s as if society couldn’t exist without these boxes. Nay all Chinese values I have failed.Â