A Chinese American Show That Doesn’t Bother to Explain Itself

Growing up in suburban New Jersey, I dreaded having new visitors over. I wasn’t asocial; I just feared that anyone who wasn’t Chinese—as in, the majority of my classmates—wouldn’t understand my family home and all of its inevitable differences from their own. Even if they didn’t ask me about the cultural objects they might stumble upon around the house, I felt the need to explain what they were seeing, in order to make them comfortable. We have this taped to the wall because it’s theIn an attempt to prove that my surroundings were perfectly normal, I turned myself into a tour guide, and my own home into a sideshow.