I never thought to realize that my face was a different hue than my best friend Makenzie’s. As we grew older, her green eyes (and their speckled luminosity in comparison to my brown ones) and rosy cheeks remained the same, much like my hooded eyes and stick-straight, shiny hair. I didn’t realize that my golden-toned fair complexion rendered me one of the majority—especially in a school where eight out of ten students shared my Japanese heritage. I took this fact for granted. “Haole” means “foreigner” in Hawaiian. It is almost completely synonymous with “White” on the islands. In Hawaii, I am the majority. I am the insider. My skin keeps me safe at home.
I am a woman of color, and I had no idea of that fact until I was transplanted into a body of students whose blood type is incongruous to that of mine.
There is a difference between being a minority and being a woman of color. Every person in this world is a human being of a color. White is every bit as much of a color as black is. It is the difference in numbers, this disparity in the statistical likelihood of our presence at a school such as Kenyon, that differentiates the strata of majority from the people who make up what is often carelessly referred to as the minority—a label for those of us who, despite the odds, made it. This fluidity of the majority versus the minority is the problem many of us encounter when wondering what defines us as what category—especially in a collegiate or workplace setting. I went from being the undisputed majority to the rare and hard-to-find-even-when-looking-for-it minority, all within a twelve-hour plane ride.
The last thing I want this piece to do is to belittle the struggles of others—in particular, the struggles of communities whose causes I have been open to and actively worked for, and those who openly identify as people of color. But, I will not stand for using that label as an excuse to diminish others of a different hue.
I recently attended the GLCA students of color leadership conference in 2017 at Allegheny College. I was so excited to learn more about minorities—people who look like me and face the same struggles I face. Maybe someone who could tell me how to feel when a white football player at my own college, my own home, carelessly throws around the word “chink” as if that word and everything it stands for is not that of years of pain and utter ignorance.
At this college, this conference, they defined people of color for me. They defined black and brown.
But what about yellow?
I had the honor of hearing Jason Hernandez, a former life-sentence incarcerated felon with a non-violent drug offense who was pardoned (and quite rightfully so) by former president Barack Obama, speak twice at this conference. His eyes skipped over me. Brothers, sisters, he implored—let us make a difference. A difference in Black people. In Brown people. It stops there.
Not wanting to belittle the very real struggles of hundreds of thousands of individuals stuck in the cyclical and utterly unfair perpetuation of school to prison systems, I stayed quiet.
Junot Diaz, an award-winning author, came to our school and gave a talk. He proctored a question and answer section, and only allowed black women to ask questions. They joked about not knowing what to do with this privilege, and I saw their pain. And I felt it. And I respect their struggle. And I related to it. I wanted to say something. But I was not allowed to talk that night, so I continued on as I normally do—muted.
Because I am the color yellow, not black.
Upon the commencement of the school year, after seeing the “Faces of America” soliloquy performed for us, I tried to opine that perhaps I was a bit frustrated by the overly sexualized depictions of Asian women shown on the slides.
It was suggested to me that perhaps if we Asian women just stopped sexualizing ourselves and being so concerned about our appearances, these standards would not exist today.
I wouldn’t know what to do with that privilege, either.
Above are a few of the suggestions on Google images when I typed in “Asian Women.”
Have we forgotten what it means to be a person of color?
When did this label become limited to Black and Brown individuals?
When did it become more acceptable to say “chink” than “n****r?” (I, personally, cannot even write that word down. But why did I feel okay writing the first one?)
When did it become a problem to have Asians become a racial majority at a university, but having white/Caucasian as the majority is simply an accepted norm?
Above are a few of the suggestions on Google images when I typed in “White Women.”
Nobody really wants to talk about the countless internment camps set up in Hawaii and the west coast of the U.S. during WWII, only for people of Japanese descent. There were none for those of German or Italian descent. Everybody seems to have forgotten that, within the last century, Asian men were seen as “monkeys” while Asian women were flagrantly raped and fetishized by the very people of the country they sacrificed everything to immigrate to in order to provide a better future for their children.
It is problematic in itself that the two majority English classes that are required in most high schools are American and British literature; contributing to the incorrect picture that African literature, Asian literature, Central-American literature, and other ethnic literary genres are secondary or even unimportant in nature. It is another realm of discourse, however, that is necessary to address the lack of transparency concerning the treatment of Asian-American and Asian individuals throughout the rather occluded history of the States. These mistreatments are perpetuated even today, in ways that even affected the process through which I was accepted to Kenyon and the other universities I applied to.
When did the government and authoritative systems become about pitting people of different colors against each other in an endless see-saw of if the Asian population goes up, the Latinos must go—or if we need more Black people to fulfill this quota, a Hispanic person cannot be hired? Why are these strictures put in place? Why does it try to pit me against my loved ones and close friends? Why are we not coming together and instead are being ripped apart by mysterious, faceless governing figures who make rules to keep it so?
When, and where, and why, did we go so awry?
We are hurting, all of us. It is time somebody listened to our cries.
My flat profile and slightly slanted eyes were, I thought, what set me apart from this mysterious “majority” that I lacked to have much contact with until I arrived at Kenyon College. However, what with my daily ritual of “drawing on” my eyebrows, contouring my cheekbones to make them appear more prominent and, therefore, Eurocentric, can I really say I am proud of these differences? It appears, at first, as if I am wishing these distinctive features away in favor of some mask which fits me in better to this place. Is it a game plan that we, Asian American women, have hatched? Are we imitating the leading majority of White women in our appearance and therefore, in our educational and career advances? It is, I believe, not in spite of this face I inhabit but because of the individual I am, and the individuals that my majority and minority peers are, that we are here, enrolled at this school, penning these articles with the lexicon we have amalgamated throughout the years today. Our faces tell stories of our biological origins and of how we choose to present ourselves (should I wear a bold lip color today?). Pressures, perhaps not exactly societal or personal directly, cause us to feel a need to live up to the front our faces give us. It is fortunate, I have thought in the past, that I understand Japanese. I live up to the expectations utter strangers place upon me. I make jokes of being “fresh off the boat” because in the past, I have been the subject of ridicule for my mother’s ethnic cooking and my father’s barely noticeable (at least to me) accent. I’m not allowed to be a substantially intelligent being because I choose to wear winged eyeliner or fake eyelashes. I am vapid and choose to sexualize myself because I care about my outward appearance. I am a straight-A-student because I am Asian. These are all things that have been directly told to me.
People are bold and meek with their judgments, but all have them.
Because my mother grew up in the city of Kamakura, Japan, and because my father was born in Seoul, Korea, I am to join others of my heritage in making up approximately the 58 percent of all Asian Americans in holding a college degree. That, statistically, should make me the majority in my ethnicity, which is a minority. A minority in a place where the majority is a color, yes, but not mine. Do I deserve to be here any less? Does my face make me simply one among the many Asian-Americans to “make it?” There is no line here to draw. I am a first-generation immigrant and yet I am an ethnic majority in achieving a secondary degree of education. But do these labels define who I am and with whom I choose to keep company? Technically, statistically, I should not have made it. I represent one of the underrepresented populations in this continental U.S.—socioeconomically, racially, and generationally. And yet, here I am.
Recognizing and celebrating my suffered and fought-for culture—the very origins of my family—is so important. But I refuse to let my ethnicity become my identity. And I refuse to demonize or victimize myself or others based on the color of our skin alone. Can my race encompass my love of cooking (and eating)? Can my skin tone convey that I am a nationally ranked rifleist? Can my status as a child of immigrants reveal to you my love of art? My race is not to be what categorizes me as better or worse, higher or lower, less likely or more likely to.
My face tells a part of my story. It represents hints of my parents and where they come from. It maybe tells the story of how my father and his family fled from the socio-economic ruin of South Korea after a horrendous war. It perhaps speaks of how, as a young woman, my mother came to Hawaii not knowing her future tomorrow or the day after. It does not tell their love story or the morally-conscientious way in which my sister and I were raised. It does not reveal to others how my father has two siblings I have never met and who I am now technically older than they had the chance to be, thanks to a simple stomach bug that is so preventable—but was not during the Korean War. It does not tell of how my sister, one year and eleven months older than me, wants to be a Special Education teacher. It does not tell of my eleven odd years of piano lessons. It doesn’t tell the story of my uncle, who was arrested for an addiction to something he cannot control. Pain is invisible. It cannot explain why I am studying law, partially because I love to argue, but wholly because I want to help others. My face, this half-Japanese, half-Korean mask that limits some in their address of me, does not tell my whole story. Avoiding the categorization of my peers is nearly impossible. Assuming facts and drawing conclusions from the exteriors people present is naturally occurring. Remembering, however, that their exteriors do not tell all is the most important and only thing that I, that we, can do.
Being in ignorance to the stories that accumulate to make up a personality and past does not allow for one to realize and account for anything at all. Rather than being small sections or parts of a bigger whole, our faces can sometimes be a part that hinders rather than aids us. Our faces can be beautiful, yes. But they can also be the mask of a deeper pain or the inaccurate telling of a cultural and personal background unassociated with the being within. I wish to make mine something that expresses me but does not hold me back from being a character with more to say than the limits or confines of an exterior.
My right eye is smaller than my left. My left eyebrow is noticeably more hirsute than my right. I like that asymmetry. I have come to appreciate the way my nose curves down, much like my mother’s. I learned to love how my jawline protrudes by a few more degrees on the left—here is my face. Here is my face with my cheekbones from my mother and her mother before her. Here is my face with my grandmother’s fair skin and my grandfather’s smattering of freckles. Here is my face with my father’s square-ish head and my mother’s petite nose. Here is my skin on my face that speaks of my Korean heritage, my Japanese, and all those that have come before me. My face, this face, is here to stay.
Image Credits: Feature, Google Search, Google Search, 3, 4