Joanne Saunders
Updated March 14, 2024·6 min read
I was raised in a primarily white community in Southern California. Instead of feeling proud of being Chinese American, all I wished was for my hair to be lighter, my eyes rounder, my skin a slightly pinker shade.
I grew up feeling out of place. I tried to blend in as much as possible through clothing, music and food choices. But still I would be reminded that I was “an other.” Kids would pull their eyelids back with their fingers and make sounds they thought mimicked the Chinese language. A student told me to go back to where I came from. I deflected idiotic questions ― why I didn’t have an accent, why my family ate with chopsticks ― by shrugging instead of challenging the askers. These microaggressions chipped away at me, forming the foundation of how I viewed myself.
So when I started at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where most of the 18,000 students had come from other places, the diversity felt like a different world. Groups of young Asian adults congregated in front of the student convenience store and walked to classes together. At home in northern San Diego, there was rarely more than one Asian in a room. Here, the Asian students seemed to revel in being together.
In my second year of college, a roommate asked me to pledge an Asian American sorority with her. In the early 1980s, independent Greek fraternal organizations were being created by minority students, mostly Asian and Latino, modeled after the African American organizations founded much earlier. Established in 1989, Chi Delta Theta was the first Asian American interest sorority at the university. Its focus was on bonding among sisters, performing community service and educating the public and one another about our cultural differences.
I had never thought of joining a sorority. After all, I already had friends. But because I had been curious about learning more about Asian culture and meeting more Asian Americans, I attended pledge week and found immediate connections with a number of the women in the sorority. Our conversations didn’t have that extra distance of having to wonder whether someone was judging or stereotyping me because of my ethnicity.
