This is part of a few pieces I intend on doing about the tricky subject of definition.

When I started down this path in 2023, the first question I wrote down was “What’s the definition?”

Who are we? The group, the kids of immigrants and others who feel like they are of two worlds? How does one know if they are part of the group? What lines can I draw to show we are legion?

That question has remained unanswered. Here’s why it’s tricky: Just being a person of color in America, as it stands, often means proving your worth. Prove that your parents’ hardship was worth it. Prove that you are not too fill-in-the-blank-stereotype-here. Being a person of color who is tied to two places, you need to doubly prove your worth. (Dive deep into identity theory if this is of interest to you, it’ll be worth it).

Language is a good representation for this. You grow up with your parents speaking one language (often) and people at school or elsewhere speaking another. Sometimes you speak one language well (great job! Your English is so good!) and then you speak another poorly (A butcher once told me to call my mother because my Vietnamese was so poor). The next week, the reverse can be true. My mumbling and shyness as a child likely had to do with the feeling like those interactions meant I spoke neither language well enough to belong.

Carrying this push and pull is exhausting. Not just emotionally exhausting, but studies have shown not belonging can have real physical consequences.

“Not feeling you belong can lead to inflammation and unhealthy lifestyle behaviors, all of which have been shown to impact cardiovascular health,” Mary T. Imboden, a research scientist at Providence's Center for Cardiovascular Analytics, Research, and Data Science, in a 2024 paper in the American Journal of Health Promotion..

My systemic brain longs for proof positive that can stop the cycle. The root of the question “What is the definition?” is a hope that somewhere there is a piece of paper or spreadsheet that can say, look, this is what I am, this is who I am, please stop asking.

The truth I’ve landed on? That’s not happening anytime soon, not if we continue to systematize identity.

Why? The system of identity we’ve created is inherently flawed. We want to define who gets to be a cog of modern society, who gets to be a person. Personhood is defined by whatever checkboxes are on the Census, or otherwise, at the moment. But when you ask people who they are, what makes up their heart and soul, their replies aren’t checkbox material.

We have a system built to expect square cogs, but the cogs we have are squishy. To keep things as refined and efficient as we like them, we’re forcing squishy cogs to fit cleanly into a system, but that’s just impossible. The cog can work, but it’s effort.

And what does that do to us? What harm does that cause, beyond what I mentioned earlier?

Like the effects of not belonging, to be forced into a space results in loneliness, the feeling so many people have of being alone in a crowd. What you feel is that you don’t fit into the perfect definition, and you feel left out, and your assumption is that this is a you thing, not a system-level problem. You are shaped incorrectly. Or, perhaps you fit so poorly that you’re not even allowed or believed to be part of the system. Legal status sometimes is viewed as analogous to identity. But that leaves DACA recipients feeling like they’re not real citizens in the only home they’ve ever known and Indigenous people seeing stories of their annihilation when they are standing in front of us.

For many, being a child of immigrants, a complex identity is to explain yourself through your experience. Recently, I was in a Lyft in Minneapolis with a Somali driver and we bonded over our shared experience. We had mothers who made the best of what they had (we started a list of things our mothers used to substitute ingredients they couldn’t find), and chose cities where they felt there might be community.

If shared experience is the definition, it goes back to an earlier problem. Someone needs to define that experience. It is discomforting to claim being part of a group by just vibes. Each person’s experience is slightly nuanced. Could a man whose mother immigrated from Germany and father came from Russia feel like they could join in my conversation with the Lyft driver? Of course, but the friction in the definition that is in my mind sometimes might lead me to think we don’t have a shared experience because their “immigrant-ness” doesn’t show up in their skin color.

When you have any form of checklist of who gets to be, that means someone isn’t going to squarely fit. Someone is going to be left out. And not always who you intend.

Next time, more on that legal status definition thing, particularly birthright citizenship.