My middle school principal used to talk about having a passion. It was supposed to be something you devoted yourself to, something you loved. “How many of you know your passion?” he asked us. I didn’t.
And I’m still figuring it out. But I’ve learned more about what really lights me up, which I believe leads you to what you do as a passion. When I took my first Asian American Studies course, Experiments in Life Writing, I loved reading the memoirs of other people like me. For the first time, I felt like I was looking in a mirror. The thoughts and feelings of many authors were eerily similar to my own. I’m Chinese American but I was adopted by a white family and have resided in a predominantly white community for most of my life.
This course was the first time I was looking at Asian America in an academic setting. Soon I realized that I was not the only one who applied a critical lens to AANHPI (Asian American Native Hawaiian Pacific Islander) experiences. As I explored Asian American scholarship further, I learned of the formation of the Asian American identity, one created based on the political necessity to access civil rights. We became a coalition because we had to. The personal really was political. In my papers, I looked at existing discourse on transracial adoption and tried to understand my own experiences in the context of what I had learned.
While my East Asian Studies courses provided insight into the history of Japan, China, and Korea, my Comparative American Studies courses on Asian America provided an analysis of the human experiences existing as Asian in the United States. It's what I had always been looking for but couldn't quite articulate.
Sometimes I stayed up late just reading the assigned texts. Often I had to pause or take breaks, because the words in front of me felt like I had written them myself. It was such a novel experience, so jarring that I often teared up. How could this author I didn’t know express everything I felt?
I'm learning that finding a passion isn’t just about a hobby or a subject. It’s about what stirs you to emotion or action, or both. It’s what calls to you deep inside and sometimes awakens something lying dormant. The song from Frozen 2, "Into the Unknown," describes it the best for me. You hear the call and you follow it. That’s where it starts.
