Animosity

As a sort of piggy back off my last entry, later in the afternoon, while taking a drive with the same coworker to pick up supplies, we got into a serious conversation about racism.  You see, that same coworker has a little 6 year old sister adopted from China.  I can tell from the way he speaks about her that he loves her dearly.

My coworker and I both grew up in the same town, but very different areas.  Both are middle class neighborhoods; he grew up in lower middle class whereas I grew up in a very upper, borderline wealthy, middle class - my family is by no means wealthy, rather, my parents moved into the neighborhood relatively early on.

In the car, I was telling him about my aspirations to move to another place, whether it be a big city, or another country, just so I could feel more anonymous.  I told him how relieving it was to go to Hong Kong and to finally blend into a crowd, to be overlooked.

Since I was a child, I've dealt with racism.  Not as much as others, that's for sure, but either way, racism is not something that any child should be exposed to.  Like I said, I grew up in a wealthy neighborhood - my neighbors being primarily white suburbanites.  In elementary school, I had friends, strangers, you name it, pulling their eyes back and doing great impressions of Alexandra Wallace (rather she imitated elementary students very well).  This is something that I don't blame on the children themselves, but rather the parents.  I do not believe that children between the ages of 5 and 9 can exactly understand racism.  I also do not believe that they are able to construct their own beliefs and opinions at such an early age without learning by example.

At the time, I didn't understand it as racism.  All I knew was that the other kids didn't like the fact that I was Chinese.  I was cast as an outsider and I hated it.  I would go home from school crying and telling my mom that I didn't want to be Chinese - I wanted to be like the other kids.  I lashed out in school and became a bully; imagine, a little Chinese girl bullying others on the playground - I remember punching an older kid in the face for pulling his eyes and calling me ugly.

As I got older, the tough kid facade never really went away.  But I still did what was in my power to be like the other kids.  I tried to dress in the same expensive clothes, I started dying my hair at the age of 9 so it wouldn't be quite as black, I wore blue or grey colored contacts every day when I was 12 until I turned 16.

At 16, I made my first trip to Hong Kong.  I got to see my mother's old home and the place where she met my father.  There, I didn't get any weird glances.  I didn't really stand out so much.  I had finally started to become more comfortable in my skin.  This place was home to my parents, my grandparents.  It is my culture and my identity.

I began to become more in touch with my roots after that and even drastically improved my Chinese. When I went to university, I had found myself befriending other people like myself, not just Asian Americans, but also international students as well.  It took a while to find the right niche, but after 2 years of university, I had finally found a core group of friends who saw me for me, not just the token Asian (don't get me wrong, I do still love those initial people in high school who did accept me).  But bever before, had I felt like I actually truly belonged.  Having gone through the similar experiences, whether while growing up like me, or when they first came to the country, I finally felt myself begin to blossom.  Though that tough girl facade truly did become a part of me, I am slowly feeling it drift away.

It feels great to be told that my eyes are "kind" rather than "chinky".  And I am happy to see my hometown become more tolerant as the time goes by (thank god it's a university town with a large international student population).  But I still find that whenever I leave this place a venture into more rural areas with my friends, it's as if I'm back in elementary school.  Full grown people oggle my friends and I as we walk into restaurants.  They speak to us slowly as if we would not understand English (by the way, if we really didn't understand, speaking slowly would do absolutely nothing).  Sometimes they point and laugh from afar.  My question is, what is so funny about a group of Asian people hanging out?  Is it really so different from, say, a group of Caucasian people, or a group of African Americans?  Or what about a group of Hispanic and Latino people?

This is something that I've grown to live with, but it is not something that I will accept or feel comfortable with.  If I had a choice, I would choose to live anonymously.  And I truly hope that my coworker's little sister does not have to face what I faced for more than 20 years.