a study, renunciation, and valuation of the self

May 12, 2026

I observe a set of dualities in several relevant identifications of myself: my cultural upbringing, the approach I take to my decisions, and the way I define -- brand -- myself.

I have come to suspect that my decision 4 years ago to do the purported "180" away from the sciences has not only made me a different branch of my past self, but less Asian in my essence. It's become increasingly more difficult, ironically, to extricate the Asianness with which I am familiar with the culturally acceptable career path (i.e. one's major). My high school identity was ingrained in not only the sciences, but the people I forged friendships with -- many of whom I may have categorized as both Asian and STEM nerds, two distinct categories that apparently have more overlap than I had imagined. My transition away from such a category, therefore, simultaneously came with an exiting of a category I am still inherently labeled with: Asian.

How can it be that I am, or at the very least, feel less Asian because I am a humanities scholar? And yet, when I redefine myself within the realm of the humanities, I am suddenly more Asian -- the same way Zora Neale Hurston had described, "I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background." Because in the humanities, I am much more regarded as a minority with minority perspectives. In STEM, I would blend in: just another Asian STEM kid, of which there are understandably many. In the humanities, my subjectivity matters almost as much as what I argue, since the medium (me) is the message (this girl is Chinese American, make of it what you will). In STEM, my subjectivity is much less so in question.

But perhaps that is why I prefer the humanities, because there is an acknowledgement of the self. I renounced my identity in the sciences because it was hard for me to imagine producing unique results attributable to me, traceable to me in my entirety, acknowledging my experience as a 1.5-generation Chinese American first daughter of first-generation immigrants who came to the US a year before I was born?

Suddenly something about the past relationship made almost complete sense. Perhaps I was attracted to what I understood as a cultural whiteness within him, a complete type of assimilation, yet flourished, or so I thought, in the familiarity of a type of Asian traditionalism in his pursuit of medicine? Was that why my ego had been so terribly dismantled in the wake of it all, when it felt like a scathing rejection from both cultural ends?

In this lens, when I perceive major struggles in my life not as a conflict between a traditionalist home and my western self, but rather an Asian self and an assimilated self, some things become more apparent. Asianness is still wholly tied to expectations posed by parents, the same way that "whiteness," a label many of my Asian American friends might decry or use mockingly, is tied to "passion" -- apparently a western concept. Several spheres in Eastern and Western values at play: Asian, Eastern, traditionalist, science, money, and security versus American, Western, humanities, passion, and freedom.

(Asian, science) versus (American, humanities)
By choosing the humanities, I deny an Asianness...