Unapologetic

Me: Hi everyone, I’m Alice and I’m from Wuhan, China.

Person: Oh you’re from Wuhan? So you must have an opinion?

Me: …On what?

Person: You know, the virus—do you think it came from the seafood market or the lab?

This conversation happened on my first day of orientation at Harvard, at a table of 10 people, within the first hour of me stepping into WCC. They were probably trying to be funny. They heard Wuhan and thought of the only thing they knew about Wuhan, and assumed I’d want to talk about it. I don’t hold it against them. But before I could be anyone, I was already something.

I’m reminded of my place every time I check in for a doctor’s appointment, when I sign my bill, when I try to spell out my last name with an odd “Z” that for whatever reason always gets mistaken as a “C” or “T” or “D”. I chose to be called and remembered as Alice, because that’s how I chose to represent myself in this culture. My first name, 逸之 (Yizhi), means graceful ease, excelsior, and transcendental in Chinese. None of those meanings survive in five letters. In a world where at least 1 billion people could pronounce my name, it simply has no footing here.

At a dinner party, someone found out I went through high school on the Hamilton soundtrack. They looked genuinely puzzled. Doesn’t China not have free speech? How can you even watch that? My enjoyment of a musical apparently needed a political explanation, as though everything I touched had to first pass through the filter of where I come from before it could be taken as simply mine. As if you could not name the discomfort of being foreign here, until you have first confessed the sins of being from there.

It’s the same reflex everywhere here. When I try to describe what being foreign actually feels like, the friction, the smallness, the daily limbo in-betweens, the conversation gets constantly rerouted to grander narratives. Suddenly, I’m not a person with a home, but a representative of a government, an official record, in a framework where the only acceptable response is contrition. China exists in the American imagination not as a place where people live and eat and grieve and dream, but as a case study, a cautionary tale, a system to be diagnosed, the ultimate antithesis of the American experiment. And it means my Chineseness, however quiet, is never just mine. It’s always the evidence of something.

There is a quiet assumption that being here is a privilege, and that this privilege comes with a tab. Be grateful. Be forthcoming. Be willing, at any moment, to explain, to defend, to account for where you come from. And I am grateful. I can afford a legal education on another continent, in a language my family doesn’t share, in a profession my parents have no connections for. I know exactly how unlikely all of this is. But knowing that doesn’t mean I owe anyone a simpler version of myself in return.

I spent my undergraduate years in COVID lockdowns. I watched my city become the most recognized name in the world for the worst possible reason. But I don’t regret staying in China, because those years gave me something I couldn’t have gotten anywhere else—the chance to observe the society I come from while still inside it, as a participant rather than a commentator. I grew up with two younger siblings under the one-child policy, with a quintessentially Asian struggle with family and responsibility. I grew up watching my parents navigate local business, learning firsthand how small businesses survive between market and regulatory forces. I learned English from the age of three, though neither of my parents speaks a word of it. I had resources, opportunities, the kind of education that kept doors open, while girls I knew quietly accepted domestic life before finishing high school. I wouldn’t trade any of it. I wouldn’t question this instinctively if I hadn’t lived through all of that.

But privilege is not a fixed quantity. It shifts the moment you cross a border. Everything I had back home, the language, the education, the context that made me legible, dissolved the minute I landed here.

This semester I’m taking constitutional law. In Bruen, the Court anchored gun regulation to a historical-tradition test. Elegant, internally consistent, easy to apply. In Dobbs, it used the same logic to return abortion to the states. Both decisions make convincing cases for the seductive appeal of formalism, in that they offer a framework clean enough to function without troubling judges to weigh competing values. But a test that only looks backward can never incorporate a modern consensus, however broadly held. No emerging agreement about bodily autonomy or public safety can become constitutional principle if the threshold is whether the Founders would have recognized it. The Court calls this deference to the democratic process. But the democratic process is volatile, uneven, and far less enduring than the rights it’s now entrusted with. To say the Court lacks the purview to protect those rights is not neutrality, but a choice to defer where the questions matter most. We look to law to represent our values. That’s a noble impulse. It also means the question of whose values is never really settled.

I came here with a sense of who I was, a sense built on everything those years had given me. Almost all of that had to be rebuilt and recalibrated here, for the evaluation system doesn’t know what to do with where I’ve been. I was advised to downplay my Chinese connections in job interviews; liabilities, apparently, not assets. I was told not to think about a career in litigation, because firms don’t hire internationals to do it. I graduated valedictorian from the best university in China, yet here, with all my twenty-two years summarized into a single page of resume, I had to spend weeks sitting in front of the laptop, trying to translate my life into language accepted in American meritocracy. Neither version represents the fuller picture of me, but earning a place and having it recognized are very different things. I’ve learned not to confuse the two.

But I’ve also found people here who didn’t need convincing. I’ve had conversations in late-night kitchens that have genuinely changed how I think. People who asked about Wuhan because they wanted to know what it looked like in spring. And there are parts of me that are more at home here than they ever were back there. The bluntness, the initiative, the instinct to push back, the willingness to test my own assumptions against everyone else’s. Those qualities weren’t always welcome where I grew up. Here, at least sometimes, they’re the point.

Fitting into this system doesn’t mean renouncing the person I was before I entered it. I have to remind myself of that more often than I’d like. But I won’t apologize for any of it. Not for the place I come from, not for the discomfort my presence introduces into a room. Not for choosing a future on my own terms. Not for being me.