Maybe some people DO need an overly aggressive sarcastic person in their face

The other option is a punch to the face... but that doesn't cure racism either.

One of the problems as growing up as a token minority in a majority white area (out of many), is that I had no idea people were being racist towards me for the longest time. I would just constantly feel bad after certain interactions. Like, I wasn’t being outright bullied… but a comment here or there would suddenly make me tear up and I didn’t understand why. Why should someone asking me, “Where’s your pork fried rice?” make me so upset?

It wasn’t until I was in high school when I had my eventual awakening. I still remember the exact moment, sitting at my desk in my Western Civilization class. I looked up where this guy was sitting, one row over, two desks up, right in the front row, and thinking with such clarity, ‘I fucking hate that douche.’ And then I was like, ‘But why?’ I haven’t talked to him since we were on the same bus route in middle school, and that’s when he used to turn around in his seat to taunt me about fried rice- oh my god… That was racist! What a dick!

In 5th grade a friend gifted me a lunch box/cooler version of this stereotypical take out box, and even though I liked it, I never felt like I could never use it in public… This same friend also decided that my nickname would be Fortune Cookie, which I gladly accepted because I liked having a nickname because it meant acceptance. She stopped when the teacher overheard her calling me that and was horrified, telling her to stop that, while dumbass me was saying, “No, it’s okay…”

And it wasn’t just my peers either, that same Western Civ teacher once made a passing comment to me- I had stayed late after class to fix a group diorama of sorts (as the ‘artsy’ one of the group, this was somehow made into my problem). And as I nudged some things around, the teacher looped around to see what I was doing and then said something along the lines of, “I’m surprised you’re arranging it like that, I thought you’d be putting everything straight and aligned like a grid- because you’re Chinese.”

Like, I don’t even know what the fuck that was supposed to mean at the time, I remember doing this half hearted, ‘haha, okay,’ kind of laugh until he left me alone. That’s not what he said exactly, but the implication I got was that he thought I’d be doing things in a more… communist way? Like, orderly and structured? Because I’m Chinese?? Bitch, my Hong Kong pro-British mother (at the time), would’ve been insulted.

My sudden awareness about racism coincided with my unfiltered access to the internet- I was allowed a computer in my room (this was early 2000’s, by the way), and was online, on forums, on AIM, on xanga, on all the websites, and I was discovering there were proud and loud Asian Americans everywhere- though mostly on the west coast or NYC and Boston. And for some reason, all of our screen names were some variation of xXaZnBabyGurlzXx. They had the cutest phone charms, and had other aZn friends where it was implicitly known to take your shoes off when you walk inside a house, and ate foods that were deemed ‘weird’ and ‘exotic’ to the white man palette and didn’t feel bad or different about enjoying chicken feet. I wanted to be one of them so bad. So I tried to straighten my hair and wore a leather jacket, in hopes this would somehow attract some to me in some magnetic way, to my rural hometown.

That aside, the knowledge that there were identities I could possibly belong to instead of feeling awkward and small helped me a lot, at the time. Most of my teen angst got shoveled from, ‘being misunderstood because I’m weird and it’s a personal problem,’ to, ‘being misunderstood because I’m Asian and you’re all ignorant, racist fucks.’ I leaned a little hard into it, but I found the strength to stand up for myself, at least.

Like the time in yet another history class, where the teacher put on the movie Pearl Harbor (because it’s such an accurate and amazing movie and everything that needed to tell us about why the US joined WW2- I’m obviously being sarcastic here). We got to the part where it showed the Japanese pilots getting ready and this girl turned around in her seat and got my attention.

“Do you understand what they’re saying?” She asked.

“No, I’m Chinese, and-”

She cut me off, “So?”

“They’re Japanese. I’m Chinese.”

We stared at each other, her with a haughty gaze, and me, not hiding the fact that my face reflected that she outed herself as an idiot.

Even then, I tried to give her some grace. “They’re different countries?” I ventured to say.

She had the gall to look at me like I was the dumb one. “Yeah, so, do you understand what they’re saying?”

I raised my voice, because I could not be the only one hearing this shit, “Are you serious? They are different countries, with totally different cultures and languages. Japan and China are not the same at all-”

“Okay, you don’t need to yell,” she snapped, when people’s heads started turning.

“So no, I do not understand Japanese,” I finished, loudly.

I’ll give her one thing: clearly, since I was in a class that was showing Pearl Harbor as part of the curriculum, I was attending a pretty dumb school (the fact that I was an honors student who rarely studied is also a testament to this). The fact that this girl had apparently never seen a world map or a globe before and didn’t realize Asia was more than just Chinese people may be the fault of Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act, and showed that children were, in fact, getting left behind. Like way, way behind.

But yeah, this was the kind of shit I was putting up with. And this was the first time I kind of did something about it, which is why I remember this interaction with such clarity.

There was a period of time in my 20’s when I almost welcomed the microaggressions, when I’d get a legit bolt of excitement when a guy would be like, “So where are you from, like, where are you really from?” And I get to answer in ways that would increasingly frustrate him as he tried, harder and harder, to ask me what my ethnicity was without directly asking.

I had a guy on the subway mention that my grandparents must’ve had a hard time learning English. I was like, “Why would that be? Did your grandparents have trouble learning English?”

And he demurred with a, “Mine were born here.”

“Oh, that’s nice, my grandmother was born in Pittsburgh,” which is the truth. He never learned where I was from; I got off at the next stop. I wish I had pushed further, and came up with some mean things I could’ve followed up with while I was in the shower later that night.

Sometimes I’d get a chance to switch it around on them, “Oh, your English is really good, too! Where are you from? No, I mean, where are you from really?”

There were times where I felt a little bad because maybe they were truly wondering and were simply curious, and didn’t need an aggressively sarcastic person up in their face. But most times: zero regrets.