Chinese Culture Club was a nice safety net, but it felt like a regression. I didn’t want to spend the next four years of high school hibernating with three other Chinese kids inside of a dank classroom; I could have done that back in Hong Kong. I wanted to have the all-American high school adolescent experience. I wanted to play in the homecoming football game, I wanted to take a road trip in my dad’s car and I wanted to go to prom with a white girl. I didn’t care about hanging out with the cool kids, but I was tired of being the foreign kid. All I wanted to be was a “normal” American kid.
