Gillian Chiang

Gillian Chiang (she/hers) is a senior at UNC Asheville. She is a Jewish-Chinese-Filipina-American student majoring in psychology and minoring in neuroscience. She transferred from Drexel University in Philadelphia to UNCA in the fall of 2020 for her sophomore year. She was born and raised alongside her two older siblings in Durham, NC, which is a relatively diverse community.

In terms of race/ethnicity: “My relationship with my racial and ethnic identity has always been tumultuous and complicated, to say the least. I’ve been going through an ongoing identity crisis since childhood. Every time I think I’ve become comfortable identifying a certain way, something happens, or someone says something that makes me question my right to claim that identity. My maternal grandparents are children of the Jewish Diaspora. My great-grandfather and great-grandmother met in the states after immigrating and fleeing from growing anti-Semitic turmoil in their hometowns of Zhytomyr, located in Ukraine, and Throchenbrod, which was destroyed in 1942 and formerly part of Poland. My paternal grandparents immigrated to the U.S. in pursuit of higher education. My paternal grandmother moved here from Batangas province in the Philippines. My paternal grandfather was born and raised in Hubei Province, China from where he fled to Taiwan during Mao Zedong’s rise to power. He eventually made it to the U.S. Due to my family’s diverse origins, I was taught to take pride in my heritage. I grew up with an unconventional mix of practices, perspectives, and traditions. What I considered to be normal was thought unusual by strangers and my peers. Unfortunately, the older I got, the more insecure I became about my place in the communities I had been raised to be a part of. I became jealous of monoethnic kids who didn’t seem to need to defend their identity. For a time, I didn’t want to look mixed or ethnically ambiguous. I grew tired of hearing the same questions that inquired about my race and ethnicity. One of the most common questions was, 'Where are you from?' to which I would reply, 'I’m from Durham,' which would then be followed by the question every ethnically ambiguous person has been asked, 'No, no, but like, where are you really from?'

When I started college, I made extra efforts to become involved with the affinity groups at my university. I wanted to feel like I belonged to a group that I could personally identify with. Instead, I found myself feeling like more of an outsider than ever. Oddly enough, it took the rise in blatant animosity against the Asian American and Pacific Islander communities beginning with the Covid pandemic for me to feel closer to my Asian heritage and peers.

Somewhere along the way I’ve come to realize that in the same way that there is no single way to exist as someone who is monoracial, there is also no one way to exist as a multiethnic individual. It’s something I’m still learning to accept and become comfortable with for myself, but I think one day I’ll be okay enough to the point where the question, 'What are you?' won’t bother me anymore.”