One day in second grade, my father had picked me up from school and I was walking home with him down the never ending sidewalk that bordered the forest across my home. One of my hands grasped onto my father’s, and the other onto a drawing that was supposed to be my self-portrait. I loved drawing as a kid, and whenever I drew something, I was excited to show either my mother or my father to seek some form of validation that I was indeed an artist. Waving the drawing to grab my father’s attention, I asked, “Do you like it? Dad, do you like it?”
“It’s me, Dad…,” I trailed off, baffled at how he could even ask such a silly question.
“You?!” His hands reached towards my drawing, beckoning me to hand it over. I obliged, and he held it closer to his face, asking, “Why did you color yourself pink?” Oh boy, what a silly, silly Dad.
“That’s not pink! That’s peach!” I exclaimed, even more baffled that my father thought the peach was pink.
“Peach? What color is that?”
“This!” We had stopped in our tracks by then. Other parents and children maneuvered around us as we started to debate why I colored myself peach. I jabbed at my wrist with my index finger in a hasty manner. “This is peach, Dad!”
“We are not peach! We are yellow! You’re supposed to color yourself yellow!” He replied with an amused smile, handing my drawing back to me. Yellow? I took a second look at my arm, looking for any hints of yellow. My skin didn’t look like the bright, vibrant yellow of a lemon. It didn’t look like the soft, humble yellow of butter. It didn’t look like the dull, dark yellow of mustard. What kind of yellow was he talking about?
“I’m not yellow. I’m peach. I always draw people peach,” I argued. I figured my father just lacked experience in drawing people. All my classmates always reached for the peach crayons or peach markers for coloring in the skin of people. As we crossed the road, the red hand on the traffic light blinked at us and my father explained, “We’re Chinese. People call us Chinese people yellow.”
That was the first time I learned how my race was perceived in society. It concluded with me being confused about what my father had told me. I realized I didn’t see labels about the color in people until I learned about it. To me, even those who had much darker skin than me were just another person I met in school. Yeah, they look kinda different, but so what? It wasn’t until I progressed through my school years that I realized how race was a bigger issue than I thought it was as a kid. I had to learn to realize white people were different from black people, black people from yellow people, yellow people from white people, white people from brown people and the list of diverse races goes on.
History classes introduced me to the unfairness and injustice caused by the simple color of someone’s skin that existed in the past, and social media introduced me to that which exists in the present. I came to know the words “privilege” and “underrepresentation” and what it meant to be more disadvantaged than someone else. I came to know the subtle barrier between white people and people of color that sometimes make class discussions about racial prejudice awkward.
While becoming more aware of the negativity “race” can bring about, I also came to learn we cannot ignore race to overcome racism because race-- or better, ethnicity-- is a major part of someone’s identity. I like to believe one of the reasons I’m blessed to live in NYC is the diversity of cultural backgrounds and the overall acceptance of someone who’s different. I’m no longer the small child that thought of myself and everyone else around me as simply Americans, because we’re all so much more than just Americans. And for me? I’m a proud Chinese American.
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