This article is a part of the Cultural Confusion series. Read more here.

“Look!” a woman called out, pointing at me, “The American’s eating a hamburger.” Her friends giggled as they all walked past me. I rolled my eyes and shrugged it off.

I was sitting at a departure gate at Hong Kong International Airport when this happened, munching on a Big Mac. The women and I were members of a guided tour group traveling to Singapore and Malaysia. Everyone else on the trip besides me was from mainland China. When the tour guide gave her standard trip introduction, she identified me as the lone American born Chinese in the group. This surprised some people, who initially thought I was the tour guide’s assistant. Though I was born in the US, a combination of frequent vacations to China, weekly Chinese language school, and daily attempts at speaking to my parents at home gave me at least the ability to speak colloquial Mandarin fluently.

Once the group got to the airport, I got hungry and, without really thinking, went to a McDonalds. I should have foreseen the associations people would make. Little did I know how relevant that moment would be later on in the trip.

I was born in Pennsylvania, a few years after my parents came to the US from China in the late 80s to pursue doctoral degrees. They named me, 卢宾 (Lu Bin), as 宾 is the first character in the Chinese word for Pennsylvania.

Growing up in America, eating cafeteria food at school and Chinese food at home, I developed a mixed set of tastes. When I was eight, I traveled to Beijing without my parents for summer vacation, staying at my cousin’s. About a week in, after eating home cooked meals, my aunt asked me what I wanted to eat for dinner. I gleefully replied, “French fries and chicken nuggets!”

And so, throughout that summer, my aunt took me and my cousin to KFC and Domino’s numerous times. My parents later noticed my cousin’s increased affinity for American fast food after my summer visit. Forces of globalization in China may have given my cousin access to hamburgers and fried chicken, but my parents ultimately blamed me for his change in tastes.

I also gleaned whatever eating practices I could gather from television and tried mimicking them at home. If you came over to my house for dinner, you would know exactly where I sat, just by looking at what was already set at the table. Dinner usually consisted of a giant pot of broth and a few plates of mixed meat and vegetable dishes placed at the center. My parents ate with just chopsticks and a bowl of rice, picking from the center plates. If they ever got thirsty, they would scoop some soup into their bowl and drink from it. When they were almost done with their bowl of rice, they filled the bowl with soup to collect all the scattered rice grains and finished the meal with one gulp of their bowls.

I, on the other hand, had the following setup: a bowl of rice, another smaller bowl for just soup, a pair of chopsticks, a glass of milk, and a spoon. Though I would still use chopsticks, I resorted to the spoon to scrape the bowl of rice near the end of the meal, believing it was more efficient. I drank the soup separately, usually towards the beginning of the meal. Sometimes I would try placing everything on a plate before eating.

The one time I came close to my parents’ eating habits was after watching a Campbell’s Chunky Soup commercial. The closeup shots of meat and vegetables in thick creamy broth starkly contrasted the soup my parents made at home: tofu and cabbage in clear pork stock. Inspired, I decided to make my own version of Chunky Soup, right then and there at the dinner table. Before I began eating, I filled my bowl of rice with soup, then added stir fried beef strips and string beans. The TV commercial narrator’s deep voice played in the back of my mind as I ate, as if it was helping to fill my stomach.  I patted my belly upon finishing, satisfied with this on-the-spot idea. Later experiments involved raiding the kitchen cupboard’s many McCormick spices and blindly adding them to whatever soup my parents made. Sure, the mix of marjoram, oregano, and bay leaves dumped in pork broth with tofu was probably one of the most vile fusion food creations the world has ever seen, but I loved the taste because it was different from the everyday. (That said, I will never use marjoram in soup ever again.) I enjoyed eating what my parents made, but my curiosity egged me on to escape in whatever means I had in the kitchen to experience whatever I thought was mainstream American cuisine.

It wasn’t until college that I started to realize how these peculiarities arose from my identity as an Asian American. The summer after my freshman year in college, I was back in Beijing at my cousin’s. One day my aunt wondered out loud, “What the hell are you? You’re not Chinese. You hardly know how to speak and write Mandarin. But I can also see how Americans don’t immediately see you as American either…I know! You’re a banana!”

I shook my head in dismissal. I knew where she was coming from: a banana has yellow skin but is white on the inside. But my experience of that term had been very different. When I was in high school, my friends told me of two guys, Alvin and Rick, who went to a neighboring high school and were considered complete opposites. Alvin was Asian but hung out with a lot of white people. Rick was white, but took Chinese as a foreign language class instead of the conventional Spanish or French, and enjoyed watching anime. Alvin was considered a “banana.” Rick was considered an “egg,” white on the outside, yellow on the inside.

As I grew up, I heard the term “banana” more often used to label the Asian kids who not only tried to assimilate into mainstream American culture, but also vehemently avoided anything associated with being Asian. They didn’t learn Chinese and speak it with their parents. They never went with their parents to Lunar New Year parties. Or if they did, they would grumble miserably the entire time. They often commented off hand to me, “Dan, you’re so ASIAN!”

And they were right. I practiced wushu, Chinese martial arts. I enjoyed reading manga and listening to Japanese rock. My AIM screen name was T0pRamenB0y. It wasn’t that I consciously stuck to the Asian American stereotype like a cooking recipe. I simply fell into it, following whatever interested me.

So when I heard my aunt wonder about my identity, I started to see the how it was all relative. The American bananas saw me as Asian and my Chinese aunt saw me as a banana.

From then on, I gradually realized how, in China, my face is a mask. The mask usually lasts for about 10 seconds in a conversation, after I commit a grammatical mistake in Chinese or misunderstand an expression. At best, the mask lasts 10 minutes, when the person finds something peculiar about the way I speak and behave. They would stop and say, “Wait a minute, 卢宾 (my Chinese name), where are you from?” This question is usually answered with a particular province or city in China, so I would reply “宾州 (Pennsylvania).” And from then on, with my mask broken, Chinese people would see me as “the American.”

During my trip to Malaysia and Singapore, however, I ended up briefly recovering my mask. As everyone in the tour group expected, we ate lunch and dinner at prearranged Chinese restaurants, which served mass quantities of cheap food, usually with some variation of sweet and sour pork. But for the last meal on the trip, we were served whole fish steamed in wine and black vinegar, fried prawns, smoked tofu strips and chives, and a few other dishes I typically ate at home or ordered at higher end Chinese restaurants. As we savored each bite, one person asked me which meal during this trip I liked the most. I instinctively responded “This one of course!” Another remarked, “Looks like you still count as Chinese.”

I laughed. In America, whenever my ethnic background comes up in conversation, I make a deliberate effort to remind people that my parents are Chinese but I am American. And yet, when I heard that person say I counted as a Chinese person, I have to admit that I felt a deep warmth in my chest, a comforting sense of belonging.

Not because I wanted to be considered Chinese in particular. I just felt closer to the people around me because they recognized something we had in common. Looking back at these moments, I see that as much as I tried to be my own person, I also wanted to fit in within each environment, whether it was a cafeteria in school, a dinner table at home, or a Chinese restaurant in Malaysia.

Every now and then, I come across an article about Asian American identity, where the author is going off on a poetic monologue about how they are never really a part of either Asian or American worlds.

These days, the question of what it even means to be just an American is becoming difficult to answer. What I know for certain, however, is that a significant part of this struggle comes from a binary view of identity, and in extreme cases, an Us-versus-Them mentality.

I can see how it could feel good to draw up lines between people, as if that could somehow simplify how we define ourselves and bring a sense of order to the world around us. But people are more nuanced than census labels and that confuses a lot of people. A good step to resolving the confusion is to accept the confusion. Only if we appreciate both our similarities and our differences can we begin to feel like part of a greater whole.

On a personal level, I prefer to see things like the main character in Life of Pi, Piscine, who grows up simultaneously practicing a few major religions: Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam. While his family finds these pursuits very unusual, Piscine sees it as a way to love God as much as possible.

Instead of making a decision to strictly follow one set of cultural norms, I embrace whatever I find interesting in both Chinese and American cultures. I feel like my life is much richer, as I am free to follow my curiosities and less ashamed in presenting my “other self.”

I am less ashamed when Chinese people correct elementary mistakes in my spoken and written Mandarin. I am less ashamed to profess my love of wushu and Japanese rock to Americans, even if that might put me in the “Asian” box in their heads. I accept the fact that I am never going to settle neatly into a category. I am not “Chinese” by conventional definitions. Nor am I a banana, yellow on the outside, white on the inside.

I am a scrambled egg, a heterogenous swirl of different shades. I speak Chinese and English to my parents, often in the same sentence. Sometimes while speaking English, a Chinese word more readily comes to my mind that better describes what I want to say. My childhood superheroes were Luke Skywalker and 令狐冲 (Ling Hu Chong). I begin eating my rice bowl with chopsticks, but finish it with a spoon. I drink regular milk in a cup and soy milk in a bowl. I crave 老干妈 (Old Godmother) chili sauce as much as Tobasco. I love eating lap cheong and hot dogs, smoked tofu and smoked cheddar.

I am 卢宾。I am Daniel Lu. I am a scrambled egg.