I always knew on a theoretical level that representation mattered and that it was important. I knew that it is important in humanising people and I knew that, on some level, that extended to me, too. I grew up in a place where I was a minority in terms of race, but I was privileged in many other ways. I was blessed to be in an environment that allowed me to be my full and complex self - I was me before I was my composite identities. It wasn’t until I went to Taiwan, a country where I fit in as a member of the majority, that I experienced the very visceral way that being represented can be felt.
Clothes were catered to my physique – I never had to roll my jeans up to make them fit. Eyelash curlers were made specifically for my eye shape. No one scrunched their nose at the smell of the food that traveled down the street. Growing up, these kinds of things bothered me, but I was lucky to be in place that they only featured as minor annoyances. Being in Taiwan, however, I felt the feeling of not having to adjust to anything for the first time. There was always some kind of minor adjusting that I had to do back home. I wasn’t aware of the small adjustments that I’d been making until I went to a place where they had become unnecessary.
The humanisation of representation that I wasn’t aware of for a long time was the way that things – clothes, food, habits, rhythms of life – leaned towards you as opposed to you adjusting in order to lean into them.
Nothing struck me more than when I went to a Nike store in Taiwan. I picked up running as a hobby recently, but it was sometimes tough for me because I have bad stamina. Still, I enjoyed it because it was a stress-reliever and it was a channel for my restless energy. I wasn’t really exposed to many Asian athletes growing up, and with the ones that I was exposed to, they were always professionals at the highest level in their respective fields. That was something that I liked but didn’t necessarily relate to. In the Nike store that I went to there were pictures of a group of Asian people running. As far as I knew, they weren’t famous athletes, but just a group of people running along a street. They were me, they did what I did, and they were overwhelmingly normal.
I stood there for a long time, because I realised that I was overwhelmed. Even when I eventually walked away my eyes always strayed towards it. In that moment, the gap between myself and those people and what they were doing wasn’t present in the way that I sometimes felt between myself and the athletes back home, or professional Asian athletes. There and then I felt what it meant when people say that they are seen. I felt the why and the how that I’ve only ever learnt about. There was a simultaneous process of revealing that there are a lot of insignificant things that I found inaccessible, while eliminating that distance that I didn’t know I always had. Representation, I realised only now, isn’t just monumental in the grand possibilities of a new narrative, but in the very small, mundane ways, too.