Bizarre? My Grandparents in China Don’t Celebrate AAPIH Month

Do they know how important it is to embrace your culture? 

May 17, 2022

By: Julia Zhen

In honor of Asian American and American Pacific Islander Month, I’ve been doing all of the most Asian things that I can imagine: Going to H Mart while listening to BTS in my Airpods; Patronizing Chinese-owned restaurants and paying in cash; Having naturally good skin. 

However, I realized during one of my usual WeChat video calls with my grandparents in China where I usually just end up trying to understand everything they’re saying while I struggle to get out whole sentences in Mandarin that they do not celebrate AAPI Month. Not even a little bit. I was so completely shocked by this. How are they not aware of how important it is to embrace your culture? 

To be fair, I’ve been in their shoes before. I remember when I had a time in my life where I was ashamed to be Chinese, but now I fully embrace it. My grandparents probably are still existing in this self-hatred phase, and that’s okay. I will coach them out of it with my extremely limited Mandarin vocabulary. 

The craziest part is that they don’t even rejoice about all of the corporate advertisements and media campaigns with Asians in them. As a matter of fact, all of the television and movies they watch are all Chinese people. If that were the case here in America, I would be outraged. Where are the rest of the AA and PI of this appreciation? My grandparents are really just so ignorant. It’s a different generation, so I guess you can’t really blame them.