Self-Assigned Labels - Anyi Sun
Anyi Sun is a sophomore on Bowdoin’s Women’s hockey team originally from St. Louis, Missouri.
It my be surprising but I’d be lying if I said I faced a lot of adversity from people due to my race and background. I was pretty lucky to have grown up in a fairly accepting community. I rarely dealt with discrimination but I have definitely noticed(or assumed) implicit bias in many of my day to day interactions. Honestly, the most difficulty I have ever faced, came from my own thoughts. Through the way Asians are portrayed in the media, I tended to assume the worst and constantly braced myself in any and all conversations. The scenarios I came up with were worse than anything that has happened to me in real life. These thoughts constantly swam around in my head and had made me become internally racist towards myself and even other Asians. I would get embarrassed by my parents’ broken English and avoid squinting my eyes too much when smiling for a picture. I had never experienced feedback in my everyday life that would reasonably cause me to worry about these things. Instead, these fears came from movies and shows that would tell me I’m exotic, unattractive, nerdy, and unathletic.
Ice hockey was my opportunity to prove people otherwise. I was proud to be playing a predominantly white sport and stand out because I was good at it. In high school, I was THE Asian girl on a hockey team full of boys. It made me proud to prove that Asian Americans could be just as athletic as anyone else. But in actuality, my peers had believed in me from the start. The only person I really had to prove this to was myself. It shouldn’t have taken years of positive feedback and validation for me to realize I had any value. I clung to the clout that ice hockey gave me. I was a girl AND a POC overcoming ‘adversity’ to play a predominantly male and white sport. I mean, I loved the sport too and that’s why I first started playing and continued to play it. However, this had become another motivation that stayed in the back of my mind. My sport started to feel like a crutch in conversations. I didn’t really know what else I could talk about. All people would ask me about was ice hockey because this was my token thing. All I had to offer was my experience being this super unique, female, Asian American ice hockey player. I internalized this feeling and hockey became the only thing I felt like I could talk about.
Leaving the midwest and going to play hockey in an east-coast college was one of the most eye opening experiences. Even now, I’m still learning from my time here. For one, there are a lot more Asians and they are far from the stereotypical reflections portrayed in the media. I noticed that simply by being authentic, they could effortlessly distinguish themselves as individual people instead of another type of token POC. While I spent my childhood comparing myself to my white peers at home, the Asian Americans here have grown up expressing their own, unique, selves among a more diverse crowd. There are several other POCs on our women’s team so I no longer had ice hockey as the thing that made me the special Asian girl. I began to have an identity crisis here. Who had I been all these years if the one thing I thought made me stand out wasn’t actually that unique? While my demographic is hard to find in the sport, I realized then that I couldn’t just let the sport define me. I play hockey because I love it and I love to get better at it. No amount of advertising or reminding myself how unique I was because of hockey would really mean anything here. It shouldn’t have had so much weight on me in the first place.
This new situation forced me to discover who I was as a person. I wasn’t just the token asian athlete or token girl hockey player or both anymore. I discovered I was pretty good at programming, took some art classes, and joined the student government here. Some of these subjects were things I had originally shied away from either because they lined up with Asian stereotypes that I didn’t want to reinforce or they personally felt like a challenge that I didn’t want to take. Exploring these endeavors didn’t make me lose my identity as an Asian American female ice hockey player though. In fact, tapping into new things just because I wanted to helped me to understand who I am beyond the label I assigned myself. Since I first started here at Bowdoin, I’ve grown from the label and no longer need external validation to believe I am more than just the Asian American girl who can play hockey.
