From a young age, my parents taught me to overlook the presence of racism in our crooked society. I was told to look at the world as if there was no race, as if people did not and could not judge me based on my Asian complexion.
I was American. Not Chinese; just American, just like the other kids at my predominantly White private school. I played soccer on a travel team with them, binge watched shows like “The Office” and “Parks and Recreation,” and loved eating pizza and fries. And because I was American, like the rest of them, I thought that I belonged with them. I saw myself as one of them—until I realized that they didn’t see me the same way. As I got older, I started hearing phrases like, “Chinaboy,” “yellowman,” and “dogeater,” and wondered what was different about me, why was I not like them?
Since then, I have come to terms with my Asian American identity. I have matured and accepted the harsh truth: my small eyes and my pale, yellow skin make me an alien, and even though I was born and raised in America, I will perpetually remain a foreigner to my homeland.
My parents were wrong—a world with judgment and racial prejudice simply cannot exist. Racism is engraved in every institution around us, perpetuated by Hollywood films, and even internalized by ourselves. It is a nefarious fire that looms in the shadows, one that burns the minds of millions of individuals around us—it cannot simply be extinguished with a hashtag merely stating #StopAsianHate.
I am a fifteen-year-old in high school only just exposed to the harsh reality of being Chinese in America. I am not writing to provide a solution to Asian hate crimes, nor to put up an angry front against older people that know better than me. Rather, I am writing to provide a perspective of how it feels to be a teenager in the midst of a pandemic that is blamed on my ethnicity, and to prove that not only do I, as an Asian American, have a voice, but also that I will not be submissive to the troubling and erroneous stereotypes of my people and I.
Being an Asian American, I am often asked the purportedly innocent question, “Where are you really from?” A microaggression like this unveils the concept of the perpetual foreigner, a nativist idea that Asian people, as well as Latinx people, are not “American.” While seemingly harmless, these microaggressions accumulate into a lesser sense of belonging, a lesser sense of being American—the same country that I was born and raised in. My ethnicity and my nationality are divided by a hyphen, as if my Asian ancestors must be a separate entity from my country, which has been forever stained by the blood of Asian Americans—Americans nonetheless.
When people think of what an American looks like, they may draw a figure with the peach-colored crayon, erect a face with sky blue eyes and brown hair. This is exactly the issue with American society—it fails to acknowledge and include the multitude of other colors and faces and rather view them as “others,” ones that do not belong and instead smears and contaminates the peach-colored persona that White America flaunts. But in a country whose kids are taught generosity by passing around the only crayon for skin color, peach, who teaches the achievements made by White men and not about the influential people of color in history, who actively seeks to cover up any wrongdoing to any community of color, how can people know any better than to ostracize the aliens of their country, and tell them to “go back where you came from” to “get out of my country?”
Posting on social media with the hashtag #StopAsianHate is simply not enough. Rather, what our community needs to heal from the wounds that have pierced through our hearts is a collective examination of prejudices one may have, as well as active allyship with marginalized communities. Our community needs love and support from others to ensure our own safety and to create a more inclusive future.
True change does not stem from a hashtag, it starts with you.