California

I came into my freshman year of college full of drive, excitement, and a yearning for a fresh start. Little did I know, the next four years would be the most excruciatingly difficult, uncomfortable, and hard working years of my life — that is, not all in the worst way though. College to me was leaving the small apple of Minneapolis and venturing out into a space of culture, diversity, nuance and abundance. The only thing is, in a space of so much diversity and cultural differences, there wasn’t much community or a space for coming together. Yes, there was such a wide spread of ethnic background, but in no physical environment was there a place for everyone to convene or build a space to share the similar experiences shared through the difference in identity.

This was made obvious when situated with my first group of college friends — a group of both similar ethnic backgrounds and different, but still sharing of the same stereotypical behaviors that apply to each individual’s background. There was a huge gap in understanding for everyone, and it carried in a multitude of ways, from sharing similar morals and ethics, to being completely dismissive of the experiences and backgrounds that came with each person.

I clearly remember the feeling different, a feeling of not belonging, primarily for the reason of being from Minnesota, never mind the fact that my two girlfriends at the time were also Filipina. I remember thinking I would feel so at home and safe with two girls that came from a similar background, familiar with the upbringing of an asian household, and that goes to the other friends in this group as well. Irvine already is known for being predominantly Asian, so I figured this was the place I would really feel at home being Minnesota does not have the same demographic when it comes to asians. But this is where I was wrong, and couldn’t have made a bigger misconception that carried throughout the rest of my time here.

That’s not to say I wasn’t still in a safe space. There was plenty of comfort in attending a school in one of the safest and most privileged cities in the country. But because there wasn’t any sort of collective consciousness — a place to really feel and experience our similarities and differences together — there still was a sense of strangeness. The sense that the cultural consciousness that seemed so obvious, was actually heavily lacking, if not devoid in Irvine altogether. You would think that such a so-called melting pot of culture and background would imply a sense of understanding and communal resonance. It did not, and this is not limited to just Irvine either.

California is one of the most heavily populated states, with a significant percentage of that population being immigrants. Along with that comes the generational traumas of imperialism, colonization, indoctrination into religion, language, practice, status, education — altogether producing a very universal, if unspoken, shared experience. Today, generation Z residing in California is subject to that inheritance. And yet the common effect of this breeding is almost directly deflected into a particular persona: one of privilege, convenience, access, social mobility, atmosphere and environment. These are not small things. They are real and they are not offered elsewhere. But they have curdled into something else — not a consciousness, but a closure. An entitlement not just to opportunity but to identity itself, to the experience of California as something possessed rather than something lived.

What strikes me most, though, is where this insularity becomes visible. Look at the public spaces, and I’ll give the example of soccer fields because it is what came most to my friends mind when having this exact conversation. Soccer fields are usually ones that go unused, the parks have no gatherings that aren’t strictly for family or selected friends, but each person here is threading through shared space as though alone and specific to themselves and only themselves. The architecture of community exists but the community does not. What fills the absence isn’t culture but its performance: a spectacle of identity assembled from association rather than experience, inherited rather than examined. There is a sheep-like quality to it — not entirely malicious, but unthinking — a following of generational patterns without ever pausing to ask what agency might look like, what it might cost, what it might require to actually reckon with where you come from rather than simply wear it.

This performance has a sound too. The flatness to the way people speak here — a particular rhetorical register, especially in Southern California, where languages have been smoothed of friction and edge. It isn’t merely casual; it is epistemically incurious. The affect projects confidence while foreclosing inquiry. Intellect has been traded for fluency in social legibility — knowing how to seem, how to belong, how to signal without actually mean anything, and even how to be perceived by the opposite sex. The voice becomes brand. And what gets lost in that transaction is precisely the thing that makes difference generative: the willingness to be genuinely troubled by someone else’s experience, to let it change you.

The performance of image is not merely aesthetic. It is acquisitive. The person who has organized their entire interiority around perception cannot afford genuine encounter — to truly see another person would require, even briefly a dissolution of self concern. And so what looks like social fluency is in fact a sophisticated form. of taking: using others as mirrors, as audience, as material for the ongoing project of the self. This is a selfishness so total it has lost the ability to recognize itself as such, and that blindness is precisely what makes it dangerous.

I know this not abstractly, but because I experiences what it produces. There is a particular kind of harm that becomes possible in an environment where accountability has been replaced by reputation management — where the question is never what did you do but how does this look. The harm I encountered was not extraordinary by California standards. That was the most clarifying thing about it. It was ordinary. Not loudly normalized, but structurally — in the way that certain behaviors passed without comment, in the way that harm was absorbed into the social fabric and reframed as personality conflict, as miscommunication, as something not quite worth the disruption of naming. It was the kind of thing that gets minimized, reframed, forgotten — not because it was small, but because the culture had no vocabulary for naming it except one that threatened the image of the person who caused it.

What I did have was a form. A Title IX process, an institutional procedure designed precisely to address this — sex-based harm, educational equity, the guarantee that a learning environment cannot be made unsafe. And there is something almost perfectly ironic about that, because the form itself is a California answer to a California problem. It is procedural where the wound is human. It is bureaucratic where what is needed is truth. It processes harm the way the culture processes identity — at the level of optics, of liability, of what can be documented and therefore managed. I do not say this to dismiss it. I say it because encountering that process taught me something about the limits of institutional justice: that it was built not to change the culture but to protect the institution from the culture it already is.

And this brought me back, full circle, to that first friend group. And not only the friend group, but the entirety of California. To the dismissiveness, the gaps in understanding, the inability to sit inside someone else's experience without deflecting back into yourself. I had thought that was a social failing, a personality failing, something particular to those individuals. But I came to understand it as something cultivated — by the schools, by the environment, by a system that teaches you to perform equity while insulating you from its actual demands. California did not fail me despite its promises of diversity and access. It failed me through them.