n the first day of the year of the fire horse, the white girl sitting next to me asked if it was okay to wash her hair that night.

I was on the Amtrak Northeast Regional back to Boston, returning to campus after spending Chinese New Year’s Eve with my family. She and I were sitting next to each other on the crowded train, puffer coats pressed against each other. She was wearing a scarlet sweater, ostensibly for good luck. I was in black, an unlucky color.

I blinked at her. I had washed my own hair that morning before getting on the train. In fact, I had shampooed twice and deep-conditioned it, the way I always do before heading back to school.

“I saw on TikTok,” she continued. “You’re not supposed to wash your hair on the first day of the Lunar New Year, right?” Her eyes were brown and wide; her hair looked like unspooled silk rope. She was genuinely curious, beaming expectantly at me.

According to tradition, you are not supposed to wash your hair on the first day of the new year. This is because the character fa for “hair” is the same as the fa in fa cai, or “to get rich” — if you wash your hair, you are washing away the wealth the new year promises to bring. I don’t put much stock in this — perhaps evidenced by the fact that I had to Google the specifics of this reasoning to write them down here. I never have all that much money in my bank account anyway, and I’ve always figured that if I really, truly wanted to get rich, I would launch a startup rather than let oil build on my scalp.

I didn’t explain any of this to the girl on the train. I said something to the effect of “you’re probably fine” and let her go back to scrolling, where she became immersed in what I assumed was a recipe for jujube tea.

***

Many have written at length about Chinamaxxing, where non-Chinese people on the internet declare that they are in a “very Chinese time in their lives,” or that they’re becoming “Chinese baddies.” Some drink hot water instead of iced, wear house slippers, and avoid getting haircuts on the new year. Others post videos of Shanghai and Chongqing, gleaming neon metropolises with high-speed monorails that make Amtrak Northeast Regional look like it’s crawling through squat brick towns and grimy cities. And, when the United States threatened to ban TikTok last year, American users thronged to Xiaohongshu, the Chinese equivalent. A quick Google of “Chinamaxxing” reveals a veritable tome of thinkpieces, articles, video essays, and interviews, many of which interpret the trend as a signal for Beijing’s rising cultural influence, or soft power, around the world.

I do not pretend to offer a new take on the geopolitical implications of Tristan from LA unlocking his Chinese Uncle Persona (smoking cigarettes, standing with hands behind the back, squatting to watch a game of xiangqi in a park). People far more learned in US-China relations will have more to say about this than me, for the simple fact that my knowledge of China starts with the New York Times’ front page and ends with my inability to read the Chinese-language menu at Happy Lamb.

Even so, the girl on the train has stuck with me for almost two months now.

***

Growing up, I would probably have been thrilled to be asked whether or not you should wash your hair on the first day of the new year. I remember being the only full Chinese kid in my kindergarten class and begging my parents to let me wear a qipao to school on the new year. We did a parade under one of those lion costumes to ring in the year of the dragon, and I got to stand up front in my embroidered red silk.

Then I went home and had spaghetti and meatballs for dinner.

Growing up, I was always most attached to the pieces of Chineseness that fit well in the palm of my hand — the things I could point to quickly in a conversation, the things that identified me clearly, obviously, as Chinese. I liked when my parents would serve dumplings to my friends when they came over for dinner, and I liked when I could tell people my Chinese name and listen to them try to pronounce the tones just right.

I liked being the broker of Chineseness. I remember once in third grade, we were put in pairs to do a project about different countries. The team who got assigned China came to me for advice, and I lent them a qipao and taught them how to say ni hao. I was Chinamaxxing before it was cool — carving out fifteen-second soundbites and serving them up to my peers.

By the time I got to high school, there were more Chinese kids in my class and I started realizing just how performative all this felt. I clearly remember talking to one of my classmates when I was fifteen, and learning that she’d been brought up by real tiger parents: test prep, Kumon, violin and piano, Chinese school. She never had free time, she said. Surely, I must have had the same experience?

I thought back to my most recent weekend. I had practiced piano, but spent most of the session trying to plunk out a Taylor Swift song. I had gone to weekend math tutoring, but I’d spent half the time chatting with a friend in the back corner, and I’d read Percy Jackson in my bedroom rather than go to Chinese classes. If her parents were tigers, mine growing up were more like housecats. They have claws, but they don’t use them much. We have our moments of tenderness, and most of the time we coexist in peace.

I didn’t say any of that to her. I told her “oh my gosh, me too,” and the interaction sat heavy in my stomach for days after.

***

When I read “Yellowface” by R. F. Kuang during my senior year of high school, I came to a troubling realization: I related more to June — the white writer who steals her Chinese friend’s manuscript about Chinese laborers during World War I, passes it off as her own, and publishes it under an ethnically ambiguous name — than I did to Athena, the Chinese author.

Oftentimes, when I talk about being Chinese, I feel like I’m putting on a mask — yellowface, if you will. Like June, I am not truly steeped in Chinese culture: I speak Mandarin but don’t read or write it, I would be hard-pressed to name one Mando-pop song, and I couldn’t tell you the cultural or symbolic significance of a single traditional new year’s dish no matter how delicious. But when opportunity arises, I feel I seize upon Asianness largely for my own benefit: to relate to someone in conversation the way I did with the girl with the tiger parents, or to make a point about how capital-D-Diverse I am.

I have written about being Chinese in personal statements, spoken about it in job interviews, drawn upon it for research projects in school. I never lied about any of the stories I told — but it did feel like I was exploiting them, contextualizing them implicitly, reaching for some broad overarching trope of Asianness that would make them socially legible. When I talk to my Chinese peers, I can tell that when I invoke common tropes — WeChat groups and aunties trying to set me up with their too-old sons — I am tapping into something communal. And when people talk about having tiger parents who force them to go to Chinese school or apply to Ivy League schools or become a doctor, I smile and nod and don’t say a thing about how my parents would have been fine with me going to any college I wanted, or deciding to become a professional puppeteer.

It’s discomforting that I can’t pinpoint the last time I existed as Chinese without performing it.

In “Yellowface,” Athena, the Asian author, is no angel either — she profits off stories that aren’t hers, and she refuses to offer advice to up-and-coming Asian writers. But even though I liked brokering out pieces of my identity as a child, the thing that separates me from Athena is that Athena feels like she has some right over the stories she claims to tell. She thinks of herself as a mouthpiece for a culture. I have no such delusions, so it is easier for me to align myself with the white woman who performs tropes of Asianness than it is for me to tie myself to the Asian one who claims it all for herself.

Even in writing this piece, I am tempted to change the lens and go back to the thinkpieces about how Chinamaxxing is evidence of Beijing’s growing cultural influence. I want badly to take myself out of the whole thing, to smile and nod and “oh my gosh, me too” my way out of things. It is easier for me to tap into the innate authority I am afforded when talking about Chinese issues on the whole than it is for me to speak about my own experiences — even though, ironically, I know a lot about myself and no more about US-China relations than the average college student.

***

English professor Tina Chen theorizes in her 2005 book “Double Agency” that Asian American literary identities are performances, masks, or impersonations that are not always of the actor’s own choosing. She argues that in a world where “Asian” and “American” are descriptors that seem to be at odds with each other, impersonation is inevitable and you might as well find some way to make it your own. Maybe she would say that we are Chinamaxxing, or Americamaxxing, or somewhere in between — all the time.

The upshot is that I keep looking to unlock some non-performative level of Chineseness. If Chen is right, and if her theory of literature is applicable to real life, there is really no version of identity that is not performance. June is white and performs being Chinese. Athena is Asian and does the very same. There is no moment where you take the yellow mask off and find that you were never hiding anything in the first place. All it is is that sometimes the mask feels like it fits, and other times it doesn’t.

I think about the girl on the train, and I wonder what she would have said if I told her that I’d washed my own hair that morning, that I didn’t quite know the rule for whether or not you were supposed to anyway, that whatever Chineseness I can claim — a name I never use, a qipao I’ve outgrown — is something that I am constantly reassembling depending on who’s asking.

Maybe if she asked me again, I would tell her that I had washed my hair that morning — deep conditioned it, even. I would tell her that I don’t know the rules, let alone which ones actually matter to me. I would tell her that culture isn’t something that you inherit from your parents or learn about on TikTok — it’s something that you live, and impersonate.

But even if I’d said that, I imagine that I would still be thinking about her today. After all, I’m not Chinese enough — or maybe just not certain enough — to tell anyone how to feel about anything.

—Magazine Editor-At-Large Sophie Gao can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her on X @sophiegao22.