Yeah, Filipinos don’t do Lunar New Year, so growing up, I didn’t either (Rei’s note: I am Filipino). Mostly for me it was an annual event where I was jealous of how much money my friends got.

But over the past few years, LNY has felt more and more important to me. I am Filipino, but I am also Asian, and so while Filipinos may not celebrate LNY, Asians do… right?

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I have an inside joke with one of my best friends that I didn’t realize I was Asian until my late 20s. Which like, lol, but there is something in the idea. I grew up in San Jose, California, which I sometimes like to call a little accident. Some weird confluence of fate meant that lots of different immigrant communities from Asia ended up in an (at the time) affordable place, that had the benefits of the California public education system, and also ended up becoming the center of the technological revolution. Because of all that, these Asian communities were able to thrive in a way that unfortunately feels unique in this country. Three decades after I was born, the Asian population in San Jose has doubled from 20% to a nearly 40% majority. Because of this, it wasn’t until a few years and a few moves to significantly less Asian places that the realities of my identity began to sink in.

It’s not like I didn’t know, it was just that it was an easy thing to take for granted, like breathing. To me, it was just regular ass life—not something unique—doing my day-to-day among a bunch of other Vietnamese, Chinese, Korean, Lao, Thai, Hmong, Japanese, Taiwanese, Indian, and Filipino kids, some with families that had been here for generations and some who had just gotten here. We all had our own cultures, but we were all also united in being this vague thing: being ”Asians” in America (Rei’s note: I’m going to keep using the term “Asian” and not “Asian-American,” which is probably more pertinent for this piece, but it also feels really important to me to be able to be grouped with Sandra Oh).

And like, I promise I’m not high, but it makes me ask, what even is Asia?

In third grade you learn it’s a continent, but what the fuck is a continent? Europe and Asia are on the same piece of land. And so maybe you accept it’s just arbitrary borders, but even then I think about how the majority of Russia’s landmass is in “Asia,” but unless a person looks a certain way most people aren’t going to think of a Russian as Asian.

As a Filipino Asian, it gets trickier: there’s this whole thing about whether Filipinos are “Pacific Islanders” or “Asian”—the first term makes technical sense to me because the Philippines are islands in the Pacific… but so is Japan, a definitely “Asian” country? Once you do enough research, you find all these technical and historical reasons that people get catalogued as one thing or another. Sure, I guess. More made-up rules, ok. But like, to what end?

The obvious and unfortunate conclusion I end up with is the same one that many activists and thinkers had already reached long before me: racial and ethnic identity is mostly defined by and done for the purpose of oppression—I’m more likely to be discriminated against in the same ways as someone from China or Vietnam than I am someone from Brazil or Senegal. It’s all just buckets that people decided on a long time ago to distinguish people into distinct groups of “other.” It’s a bummer.

And as much as it would be nice, when I think about my identity, I don’t think I really get to get rid of that aspect of it. It’s too big, affects too much of my daily life. There’s a difference between being a tourist, being a member of a community, and being the thing itself, and the delta between those, far as I can tell, is degrees of pain.

But I also think about San Jose, and everything it means to me, and if I get to write my own version, I like to think about an identity that isn’t solely defined by oppression, but also adds some other intangibles from the lives me and my friends and our families and our communities shared and created together. So for me, being Asian also lives in the games of Thirteen played in circles at break, and the inevitable confusion when a Pinoy says you all should play Pusoy Dos. It lives in how the “FOB Squat” is simultaneously a cutting case of inter-group racism, and also a mark of pride if you can do it right. It lives in the quiet struggle between whether we were going to commit to calling it “bubble tea” or “boba,” or how we knew anime was cool before everyone else. It’s the way that every grade in every school had 10 kids named Kim and at least 2 of them had the same last name, or how you learned the difference between Wong, Wang, and Hwang. It’s so many fucking garages: the one where your car friend kept his “baby” under wraps, the one where we did too many shots, the one stacked to the ceiling with Costco packs of Cup Noodles, the one that was always too cold but also it had a couch. It’s dry, crushed up packets of MAMA noodles, spiked hair, and knowing that Jack Harlow doesn’t know what the fuck he’s saying when he says those three letters. It’s the strip malls and fancy malls that no one else went to until a few years ago. It’s unfortunately also “Got Rice” by Asian/AZN Pride (Rei’s note: IYKYK, and I’m sorry IYK, but we can all cringe together).

That’s the thing I think, ultimately. I don’t really participate in the firecrackers, or the dances, or the envelopes. But all the same, Lunar New Year reminds me of home, where me and people like me got stuck with some label so we could be deemed lesser, and instead lucked into a place where we got to really live, really thrive. And it’s not like that’s a concept owned by San Jose: Asians are thriving everywhere, in different ways. Just take a look—it’s especially easy to see this time of year.

And so whoever you are and wherever you are, I wish that kind of thriving for you too, in this new year, and all the next.

-Rei