This summer, my boyfriend's family invited me to join them on their trip to China . I, of course, agreed in a heartbeat, because who wouldn't want to travel across the world and get to see it from a local's perspective as well? I guess all was well until boarding the plane, at which point I was looking around and realized I was probably the only Latina getting on — just a tad daunting.

It's not so much that I was expecting to see a town full of people of my own background halfway across the globe, but I guess New York always seems to have a way of blinding my point of view. Seeing curly hair had become the norm for me; I had my curly sisters everywhere and suddenly not seeing it around me felt like I was trapped in a box, and I couldn't get out.

My boyfriend's family is from a small city in mainland China, and it seems this particular small city didn't get too many tourists, and if they did they definitely were not curly headed Latinas. Everywhere I went the stares would follow, and they weren't stares at my clothes or more specifically the way I dressed, it was my hair.

On our first day we all went out for Dim Sum, and as I'm walking up the stairs with my boyfriend minding my own business he exclaims, "What's her problem," looking at a lady who was walking down. The lady quickly replied to him in Chinese, which he later translated for me, saying that she loved my hair.

This was actually the first of many instances in the following three weeks, where on occasion some people would actually stop and stare at me. Sometimes, the stares were followed with a quick question asking if my hair was real- yes, yes it is! They would then tell me how beautiful my hair was, something I was very unaccustomed to back home where my hair isn’t always viewed the same way.

Being in China was a breath of fresh of air in that perspective, because even though I was the odd one out in the sea of straight hair, people actually liked my hair. Going to China I was afraid of what people were going to think of my curly strands. Although I’ve grown out of the idea that straight hair is what is presentable, I was also very conscious of the fact that I would probably be the only one with a mix of 3a and 3b curls. So imagine my surprise when I was actually getting compliments on my wild mane.

Experiencing such a different culture from my own, and hearing how some people couldn’t even understand how I could be born with curly hair, was eye-opening as silly as it may seem. In seeing the differences in my own culture versus that of my boyfriend's and his family, China made me love my roots even more.