Personal Narrative: Personal Identity

Words: 617
Pages: 3

From the moment I heard about it, I was immediately curious. It was peculiar but spitting into a tube and shipping it across the country so that I could potentially know something unexpected about my heritage was something I desired. The possibility of having ancestors from different countries that met and fell in love with each other like in some cliché movie.
Years later, while learning about genetics in biology class, my teacher said that she did the DNA test and it was a great way to learn about yourself. That was the spark I needed to go and take it myself. My tube of saliva was mailed to the opposite coast of America. In California, my sample was analyzed for months before I got my results. The results were a double edged sword: 98.2% Chinese. I was surprised but not in the way I expected, I began to think of all the ways I was stereotypically Chinese and saw myself differently.
The Chinese culture is all I’ve ever known but I still feel excluded. I don’t speak Mandarin, the official language of China, I don’t know when the holidays are until everyone is already celebrating, my family calls me American because I don’t share their traditional, narrow-minded views and speak my mind. I am Chinese anyway you slice it and the heritage runs through my veins and the identity rests of my
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When she was my age, she moved from Fukien to Hong Kong where the population spoke using a different dialect, Cantonese. She would fail several subjects because she couldn’t understand, however, she excelled in classes that did not require the knowledge of Cantonese such as math which shows the opportunity she could’ve had to do well in school instead of flunking due to a language barrier that would invisible to the naked eye of anyone outside of China because to many, all chinese is the same. Those years of loss education did not stop my mom, after immigrating to America she was able to support herself and start a