Teen Vogue is celebrating Pride by highlighting the stories that matter to the LGBTQ community. See all our coverage here. In this op-ed, Traci Lee explores how cultural expectations have shaped her identity as a bisexual, Asian-American woman.

When I visit my grandfather at his nursing home, he almost always asks me the exact same questions in the exact same order:

“When did you get into town?”

“Did you eat lunch yet?”

“Do you have a boyfriend?”

Like clockwork, my answers follow: “Yesterday. Not yet. No.”

Except on the most recent visit, when I responded, “What if I had a girlfriend?”

He laughed and nudged me gently. “No,” he said, smiling.

It isn’t malicious, but I also know he doesn’t take the suggestion seriously. At 97 and with Chinese being his primary language, his perspective has been shaped by the media he was limited to understanding when he and my family arrived in the United States in the mid-60s, when the face of La Choy was a Muppet and there was one very clear definition of an American family on TV.

At least that’s the explanation I’ve given myself for shutting out my family when it comes to discussing my identity as a bisexual woman, especially because that identity is still something fairly new to me — not the act of being attracted to or falling in love with a woman, but the ability to see myself as part of the LGBTQ community. That struggle was formed, in part, by a decade of Catholic school (where a date of the opposite gender was required if you wanted to attend the prom) and a lifetime of hearing whispers about single family members once they reached a certain age.

The excuses I’ve heard given on my behalf range from, “She’s focusing on her career,” to “Her boyfriend is out of town.” It all comes from a well-meaning place, I think, but it’s still painful. At 30, just as I started to feel like a new chapter was beginning in my life, the shame others associate with my unmarried status felt like the only thing my family could see. With every Chinese New Year lunch and holiday gathering that passed, I felt the concern around me grow that my life had yet to truly begin because the chair next to me wasn’t occupied by my future husband.

There’s a term in Chinese for it: sheng nu. “Leftover women.” It refers to women in their late 20s and older who are not married, and is primarily used in China, where two companies made international headlines earlier this year for offering additional holiday leave to single female employees over 30 to “go home and date.”

While there have been efforts to end the stigma in China around being an unmarried woman in her late 20s and early 30s, I wonder how much of that messaging can help me in California as I navigate what it means to be a queer Asian American woman. Similar to my family’s experience, my own perceptions were also limited by the media available to me growing up, where I already didn’t see faces that looked like mine on TV or in films.

As much as it shames me to admit it, it’s been fear that has stopped me from even trying to openly discuss it with my family: fear that if I dated a woman, their shame would be worse than if I were single; fear that if I dated a man, they would express open relief that being bi was just a “phase”; and fear that, at the end of the day, I haven’t lived up to the expectations of the generations that came before me who sacrificed everything to give me what they saw as a “normal, happy life.”

But I’ve realized that hiding behind my insecurities of being considered a “leftover” is easier than facing any of those fears. With public figures like Elle Mills and Kathy Tu and Katie Heaney creating art that have helped me understand the thoughts and feelings passing through my mind, I feel like I’m in a better place today to understand that being bi isn’t about meeting the expectations of others.

And now with people in my life who I’ve been able to open up to, I know that being part of this community means there’s truly no such thing as being “leftover.”

At the end of the day, it all comes down to how I choose to identify and how I choose to embrace who I am – and this year, I’m determined to do it with pride.