Ich bin Palästinenser

"Where are you originally from?" meant something different for him

After an extended vacation for New Year’s, my friends and I boarded the bus out of Berlin. The man we sat next to asked where we were from. Peru. Mexico. The United States.

A beat.

“Wirklich?” he asked me. To this day, I’m not sure how to interpret his tone. It sounded sarcastic. Teasing. Perhaps he was genuinely surprised. I have no way of knowing. It was so long ago, I no longer trust my memory on the small details.

What I remember with full certainty was my strict, bristling “ja,” full of the “are you stupid?” energy I emit when people ask me where I come from “ursprünglich.”

He turned to my friend, and began talking to her instead. After further interactions, he said, proudly, with his whole chest, “Ich bin Palästinenser.”

“I am Palestinian.”

Ah.

As a Chinese American growing up in Flushing—an Asian dominant enclave of New York—I never experienced the “never fitting in anywhere” experience they talked about. I never did anything by half. I belonged amongst Americans, and I belonged amongst Chinese people. Cut me down, and each piece of me would be an even amount of both. I was enough for both, and I knew it. The issue was just that once I left Flushing, they wanted to assign narratives to me. “You are not American” was what my racist neighbors clearly thought when they told me to “go back to my country.” “You are not Chinese” was what my nationalistic teacher said when she negged me in my university courses in Wuhan. I bristled, not because I believed them for even a moment, but because I was so proudly both that I would not tolerate being diminished by some ignorant bystander.

If people in Germany asked me where I was “originally” from, I dodged those questions not much differently than when I parry and slip in Muay Thai. “No, but you should be proud,” they said, while trying to find out what kind of Asian I am. Oh, I am. I have always been. That is not why I dreaded the question. Withholding my answer was the power I had over their ignorance, over letting them decide what I am. I decide who gets to know about my identity and what it means to me. And if you have the gall to demand this information of me, you don’t deserve it.

But perhaps this German-speaking Palestinian yearned for that question. China is alive and well, thriving after over a century of imperialism and infighting. With a global population of 1.4 billion Han Chinese in the world, we’re fine.

I understood then and there that this question means something different for us. For me, it was meant to take my identity from me. For him, it meant giving it back to him, his land, and his people.

I would also come to understand that for many people in diaspora, they would not identify with the country they inhabited, even if they were raised there for most of their lives. People from the Bronx who would not identify with “Americans,” perhaps because when you say that word, you think of a very specific type of white suburban family. A Polish woman who grew up in Germany, and in all our conversations talked about a childhood identical to my experience as a child of immigrants in New York. “Maybe I should get German citizenship,” she mused, as though she had been putting it off. That is unthinkable to me. Where I come from, American citizenship is a long, expensive process. In school, we would joke about the lengths people would go to to get their green cards, like joining the military. Our undocumented friends, who had no memories of the country they were born in, could not even think about taking a vacation overseas in fear of being locked out of their home.

The United States demands assimilation, demands your complete and utter devotion if you are to stay on its soil for more than three months. It demands that you covet its identity, but Germany? Germany, where people only display the flag once every four years?

I don’t know this German-speaking Palestinian’s story. He spoke well enough that I could believe he grew up in Germany. His declaration, however, told me that he believed he was just a Palestinian living in exile from his homeland. It is likely he or his parents left because they felt that their home had become too hostile or restrictive for them. I cannot understand this. My connection to Flushing and my hometowns in China are alive and well. Just as my withholding of information gave me power, the opposite was true for him. He leaped for the opportunity to tell the world, “We are still here.”

I have thought a lot about him since October 7th of last year. I wonder where he is. If he is rallying for a free Palestine in Berlin. I wonder if he has a supportive group of German friends—white Germans and the children of immigrants—who check in on him the way people checked in on me when anti-Asian hate spiked in 2021. I wonder if he, like other Palestinians in diaspora, is mourning the loss of his family or doing everything he can to fund his cousins’ escape from their home. I wonder if one day, he will invoke his right to return and rebuild that home is he so proud of.

I wonder how Germans are treating him now, when he declares “Ich bin Palästinenser.”