Part of me still has the same little girl inside: The one that’s about five years old and loves to go romping about in fields, tumbling down hills and not giving a fuck what other people think of me. The one who’d jump into puddles, coat bare feet with mud, and track footprints caked with dirt onto the kitchen tiles at my mother’s dismay.
But another part of me realizes that the second I step into an elementary school classroom, people consider me the adult in the room. I’m no longer a girl but somehow a Woman.
Even then, a Woman cannot be Asian-American: not in the US, at least. A Woman is blonde and blue-eyed, pale-skinned, petite, assertive, with words that lilt like unanswered questions. A Woman cannot look like me, nor should she be expected to command the attention of a room. A Woman must work twice as hard to receive the same respect as men, to be heard, to be seen as someone with a brilliant mind, to be seen outside the contexts of youth and beauty.
An Asian Woman must be demure, passive, and compliant. She must embody all the stereotypes associated with femininity — nurturing, kind, emotional. Virginal yet sexually experienced. Commanding yet soft. A Tiger Mom who’s a Lotus Blossom, or perhaps a Butterfly. A firebreathing, manipulative seductress of a Dragon Lady. Anything outside of these, she has no place to call her own.
