Lately, I have been thinking a lot about how I look. I am about 5''5', maybe 5"6' on a good day. I have mid-length black hair with some lighter highlights, something I begged my parents to let me get. I am relatively tiny, about 115 pounds. But most of all when a person first sees me, I think what they see is: Asian.
That has never really bothered me, but in light of the hate crimes that have happened, I forced myself to think about how my race defines me as a citizen of this country. My conclusion is vague at best--my race and ethnicity are parts of who I am but don't have to be one in the same.
During my senior year of high school, I thought a lot about how race and ethnicity factor into my identity and how much they influence my life. I was lucky because I went to a school that supported this type of thought.
My school, The Northfield Mount Hermon School (NMH), is located in Gill, Massachusetts. The population of Gill is approximately 1,500. About 800 of the 1,500 are the students, faculty or staff that make up my boarding school. As you can probably imagine, the diversity of Gill is largely due to the international students that attend NMH.
The nearest town to my school is a twenty-minute drive down I-91. I always felt a little unsettled whenever we would go because I knew that I didn't look like anyone else except for the Asian family running the Thai Restaurant on Main Street.
This past winter, my friends and I decided to go visit our boarding school. We had lunch at a restaurant we often went to while we were still students. We drove into town. Parked the car. Walked to the T-crossing and waited for the light to change. Then out of the corner of my eye, I saw a car slowly pull up to the crosswalk.
At first, it looked like patterned tape on his wing mirrors. I remember thinking to myself, at least the driver broke both mirrors evenly and not just one. The car looked like one of those muscle cars. It was black but there was so much dirt on it the color looked dull. I squinted my eyes to get a clearer look at the tape, then I realized what it was.
Confederate flag stickers.
If I remember correctly, he had another larger sticker across his rear windshield that said something along the lines of, we need to take this country back. He had a couple of other larger flag stickers plastered on his windows as if to proudly show them off.
I know the driver was a man because I saw a long white beard when I raised my head to get a glimpse of him. As I looked up, I thought about what he would be seeing--an Asian girl peering at him from the pavement giving him a look of bewilderment mixed with judgment. But what he would have seen more than anything else was fear. In that moment, I thought, almost irrationally, that he would be angry and annoyed that someone like me was looking at him while he was sitting in his car. A small part of me thought he would do something drastic or dangerous.
In that moment, I was acutely aware that I looked different.
He made me feel, for the first time in four years, that I was unwelcome and unwanted in a country I have every right to be in.
As his car moved through the traffic light, I stared at the ground. I avoided looking up until I heard the rumble of his engine fade away. I wonder if he saw me at all. If he did, I wonder what thought ran through his mind. Did he pause to wonder whether I was an American citizen, or did he just see an Asian girl standing under the traffic light? In a country that is growing more divided day by day, will people like me who look different still have a place in it?
I don't know.
