by Ginger Yifan Chen
I’m not a woman, but I’m still my father’s daughter.
Sometimes I run the scenario through my head. Coming out to my family, I mean. There’s not much progress to be made in terms of language, since Chinese pronouns all sound the same (他/她/它). Nor would it dissuade any aspirations of childbirth; my reproductive organs are in tragic working order. The problem is that most of my family probably can’t grasp what it means to be nonbinary.
No matter how I look at it, coming out would only result in a lot of wasted breath. Various factions would acknowledge or ignore the issue, and once the gossip dies down, I’m left in the same role as before: second-favorite grandchild and the eldest of the unmarried.
So I don’t come out, and I revel in the peace and quiet of it.
To my generation, undercuts, eyebrow piercings, and carabiners usually add up to a pretty clear picture. Yet when it comes to my family, I’ve kept the closet door wide open and no one has bothered to peek around. Only one A.M.A.B. partner has braved a family dinner, so my bisexuality is hardly a topic of debate. Even my chest surgery went by with minimal transphobia. Sure, I surprised them a week before my surgery date, but I never lied to them. “Yes, this is for my ease and comfort.” “No, calm down, I’m not transitioning to male.” And “yeah, the gender clinic and plastic surgery department share a building, what of it?”
We all immigrated to San Francisco somewhere between the late nineties to early aughts. The elder generations lived through poverty and revolution, somehow adapting to American life without gaining any fluency in English. The youngest of us stand at the precipice of an enormous cultural divide. It took a while for me to figure out where that leaves us: conservative, dysfunctional, and isolated.
Every now and again, I accept a family invitation to dim sum. The lazy susan is laden with translucent shrimp dumplings, crispy chive pancakes, spicy mapo tofu, roast pork belly, and lobster chow mein. I endeavor to sample as much and speak as little as possible, dodging questions about my recent breakup, career plateaus, and general lack of contact.
In this economy, sometimes a free meal is worth the psychological damage. I play my part in the ensemble, the head-in-the-clouds slacker-artist, because if I was still a high achiever, wouldn’t I be more involved with my family?
Part of me wants to be brash. To show up with my lesbian-law-student fling and piss people off. To spend time arguing and defending and explaining. Maybe, with enough effort, I could change their minds.
But I know my family. I don’t expect pleasant surprises from them.
So I run through cost-benefit analyses. Is the bag of free groceries worth the half-hour lecture? The luxurious Lunar New Year banquet in exchange for a few hours on autopilot? And slowly, I realize I’m simply not motivated enough to come out. Too lazy to dismantle my family’s deeply-ingrained gender norms. Too petty to put elbow grease into the vague possibility of intergenerational healing. And despite my detachment from gender, I’m still pleased that I can occasionally be a good granddaughter.
I want to stay in touch with my culture, but my family isn’t the only avenue for me to do so.
It’s Monday night and I’m at my friend’s house for dinner. We’re part of a queer/trans Mandarin-speaking dinner club. This time, the table is set with marinated cucumbers, mung bean soup, ttebboki, curry, sticky rice, and 5-spice tofu. The centerpiece is a wok filled with jiajiangmian. Dessert consists of pineapple buns, binsu, and a homemade popping boba experiment that doesn’t go quite as expected.
It’s a boisterous space where we can talk about politics, pop culture, and our actual love lives. We update each other on the newest Chinese queer slang. (Fun fact: 酷儿/kù’ér/queer directly translates to ‘cool kid’.) At some point, I joke that I’m out of practice because I only use Mandarin to argue with my family. Everyone laughs. I don’t need to explain myself.
One night, I find myself in conversation with a colleague from a short film production. Our 2 a.m. post-screening drinks have concluded, and he’s walking me to the bus stop. He’s telling me about how he came out and left the Mormon church. His relationship with his family is ‘complicated,’ a word that means as many things as it does not.
But I have a good guess as to what’s going on: “They love you, but they don’t understand you.”
He seems to nod in affirmation.
I say, “I haven’t come out to my family.”
“It takes time,” he says, trying to be reassuring. But behind those words, I sense the expectation to come out in the first place. The narrative that you have to be honest with everyone, to be your truest self in every situation. But to me, queerness is a question, not another set of labels.
And like I said, I’m a bit lazy. Sometimes I don’t correct people when they say the wrong pronouns. Not because I’m afraid, I know what fear feels like, but because some situations just don’t matter enough for me to explain myself at length. I know who I am.
The bus arrives, and I think he’s projecting onto my silent contemplation. “It’ll be okay,” he says.
But I’m already okay, I want to tell him. And I’ll take all the damn time I need.
