Growing up in white America
I once had a high school teacher ask “Where are all the brown people today?” (the three Indian girls in the class were out sick that day). The class burst into laugher, and me with a nervous chuckle. I grew up in a town that is still over 90% white. For years, I awkwardly gleamed whenever someone referred to me as “their favorite Asian,” not much of a compliment considering I was one of two Asian girls in the school. Every once in a while I would feel spunky enough to shoot back, “You’re okay for a white person,” which didn’t result in the same elation their comment was supposed to give me.
To this day, I cannot think of one person of color I looked up to as a child. The people I was around, day in and day out, were all white. My peers, my teachers, my community members: white. My parents, of course, were successful Vietnamese immigrants I could admire, but even they were constantly trying to fit this mold of an American that conceded to whiteness.
Every teacher I had, from preschool to my senior year of high school was white. As a young Asian-American woman, I aspired to be white because that was all I knew and that’s all I was taught. I felt uncomfortable every time my identity was brought up because it made me different, it made me not white.
I was picked out for being not white, not only by my peers, but by my educators. And never in an empowering way, never celebrating my difference, always singling it out (see: “Where are all the brown people at today?”).
In the ninth grade, my world history class was given the assignment to find and write about their family shield from the age of knights and feudal lords. I was the only one in the class that couldn’t complete the assignment. I was frustrated and upset, but I didn’t have the words or knowledge to express what I was feeling. I didn’t know what I was feeling and I didn’t know why I couldn’t do the assignment (spoiler alert: It’s because the assignment was Eurocentric and I’m not of European descent).
I went years without ever saying my last name right. Whenever people ask, I use dumbed down variations so that my white peers don’t have to struggle and get frustrated when they don’t get the inflections right on the first or second try. I had a friend ask me how to pronounce my last name- really pronounce it. I was taken aback and when I did say it the right way, I realized I hadn’t actually said my last name in a long time.
I grew up repressing my identity as best as I could because no one around me understood it or even cared to understand it. I never publicly acknowledged my Asian-American culture or outed myself as a child of two immigrants. I stayed quiet and shy along with the other students of color in our majority white school. We allowed microaggressions, sometimes even encouraged them, because no one ever taught us what microaggressions were.
I don’t think my story is unique- I know my story isn’t unique. As a student at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor is the most diverse place I have lived. It is the first time in my life that I have been open and honest about who I am and have celebrated myself and identity. I have friends here that tell me of similar childhoods, in communities that not only lack diversity, but lack tolerance to diversity. For many of us this is the first time that we are comfortable with our minority status and have the words and knowledge to represent ourselves and teach others about our experiences. So this is what this is, me sharing my experience.