Canwen Xu: I Am Not Your Asian Stereotype at TEDxBoise (Transcript)

Canwen Xu

Here is the full transcript of Canwen Xu’s TEDx Talk: I Am Not Your Asian Stereotype at TEDxBoise conference.

Canwen Xu: My name is Canwen, and I play both the piano and the violin. I aspire to some day be a doctor, and my favorite subject is calculus.

My mom and dad are tiger parents, who won’t let me go to sleepovers, but they make up for it by serving my favorite meal every single day: Rice.

And I’m a really bad driver. So my question for you now is: How long did it take you to figure out? I was joking.

As you’ve probably guessed, today I am going to talk about race and I’ll start off by sharing with you my story of growing up as Asian-American.

I moved to the United States when I was two years old, so almost my entire life has been a blend of two cultures.

I eat pasta with chopsticks. I’m addicted to orange chicken, and my childhood hero was Yao Ming. But having grown up in North Dakota, South Dakota, and Idaho, all states with incredible little racial diversity, it was difficult to reconcile my so-called exotic Chinese heritage with my mainstream American self. Used to being the only Asian in the room, I was self-conscious at the first thing people noticed about me was, that I wasn’t white. And as a child I quickly began to realize that I had two options in front of me.