As a teenager, I was convinced that I was politically aware, or at least aware enough.
Beyond growing up in Mainland China and attending a K-12 international institution that followed the same regulations as local schools, I also carried the foundation of my family’s Taiwanese roots and the teachings of an American curriculum. Coupled with my early habit of using VPNs to slip past the Great Firewall, I felt as though I could see infinitely more than the world around me offered.
But it seemed that I mistook access for understanding and perspective for breadth.
The issues I thought made me aware were simply the ones that raised me. I learned about misogyny from the whispered rumors of a shared file where male classmates ranked girls by attractiveness. I learned more from a statistics teacher who casually dropped pedophilic, sexist comments. My understanding was reinforced when queer classmates were openly discriminated against — especially when the student council unanimously banned same-sex couples from formals.
By the time I moved to the United States alone, stepping onto the crumbly LAX pavement, I thought I carried a suitcase full of nuance. I believed my identities — Taiwanese, Chinese, queer and female — intersected into a worldview I assumed was broad enough on its own.
And in some ways, at Scripps College, that felt true. I spent my first few semesters translating my life to peers who had no frame of reference for where I came from. Once again, my activism took the shape of survival — realizing what it meant to be Asian in America and noticing how it was to be an international student within a predominantly white institution. My queerness seemed to conform at my women’s college — but was accentuated by its intersection with my race.
But now, closing in on the end of my third semester, I’m beginning to feel the contours of my own political and cultural ignorance — sharp, surprising and often embarrassing.
“ At the Claremont Colleges, people talk about global affairs between bites of dining hall pasta with a fluency I can’t fake. ”
Maybe it’s because America calls itself a melting pot while China is monoethnic. Maybe it’s because the news here spills from every surface and screen without the kind of censorship that exists at home. Whatever the reason, I find myself chewing slower whenever the conversation moves beyond my lived experience. I fall silent out of the sudden awareness of how little I know.
These moments arrive everywhere.
When I watch people across this country — young and old alike — take to the streets to protest immigration systems that decide whether a family stays together or gets torn apart, my own frustrations suddenly feel both comparable and impossibly different. The recent and ongoing attempts to reshape international students’ statuses for nonsensical reasons made my own life feel precarious in ways I had never imagined before. I wanted to join the people whose futures were also being held hostage by commanding decisions, but I couldn’t, feelings of powerlessness paralyzing my resolve.
When mixed-race friends describe feeling pulled between cultures, I feel my privilege of being able to live comfortably in my own skin. Or when students of faith share the exhaustion of constantly negotiating identity, belief and community — the dietary restrictions and the holidays that go unacknowledged — I feel my privilege of being free from religious obligations as an atheist, with my upbringing giving me space for this freedom. There’s also when Indigenous professors speak about the land beneath our feet, delivering histories I only learned after arriving here. I repeatedly feel dull aches at how much I had never been taught to see.
Even within the international student community, I recognize that being part of a large Chinese population gives me a kind of cultural safety — the comfort of hearing my language in the streets on my way to class or not having to explain every traditional festival or food — that students from less-represented countries don’t always get.
All of these moments trace the peripheries of my understanding. There are so many more stories I won’t name explicitly, for my own safety and others’. But they exist, and they drift through classrooms, friendships, sidewalks, shaping the air we breathe, whether it’s spoken aloud or not.
Naming my ignorance feels only like a beginning.
I’m learning that caring about the world means actively holding myself open, resisting the instinct to speak first and recognizing that there’s so much more to learn away from home. Being politically and culturally aware is about having the humility to sit in the quiet, to expand the borders of what you know slowly, thoughtfully. I’m hoping to stretch beyond the safety of my own experiences, to learn from histories that never touched my childhood, to understand issues that don’t map neatly onto my identity.
So I’m offering an invitation to the students carrying stories I’ve never lived and feelings too heavy or too dangerous to say out loud. To those navigating identities I don’t yet understand:
Speak your truth. Our campuses need your voice.
And I want to learn from you, even if I’m still figuring out where the first page of that learning begins.
Rochelle Lu SC ’28 is from Kaohsiung, Taiwan and Shanghai, China. She would like to attend more teach-in events and ones hosted by affinity groups next semester.