How it is to be Asian - All Alone

Jolene Won, Age 10
Oakland CA
Crocker Highlands Elementary School

My family is the only completely Asian family in the neighborhood. There is a girl named Jessica, who is my age, and her family, who live about two blocks down from our house, but Jessica is half Caucasian. She can speak fluent Thai, but that does not make her completely Thai. My family would like for more Asian families to move in, so we would not be alone in being Asian, as we are now.

I am proud to be Asian, as I should, but it is hard to sell armbands printed with the words Asian Pride, or put up Chinese New Year flyers around the school when there is no one to buy the bands; no Asians to help put up the flyers, or to even read them and actually care. There are no other Asians to stand tall and proud with (well, sorry to say, most of us Asians aren't actually very tall) and that is a very, very difficult prospect to have to live with.

Some people think there is not a thought about racism in the younger generation such as my friends, schoolmates, and I, but those people are very foolish, very confused, or simply wrong. Kids at my school expect me to speak fluent Chinese, and for me to speak it in front of them. Why should I be obligated to, especially when I know that they will mock it until the end of time? (I, unfortunately, know this from experience)They do not speak Swahili, or Irish, or whatever the language of their culture happens to be. Not all the kids do this, thank goodness, but the kids who are racist are intolerably so. It is very common for a kid in my grade to come up to me and say, "Hey, I can speak Chinese," and let out a stream of solid gibberish. I have learned to say, "Yeah. Right. Whatever," and walk away, but it is infuriating, and painful to hear.

I do not have any different ideas about my neighborhood just because I am Chinese. Maybe my neighbors do -mind you, they are either African-American or Caucasian- but they have shown no sign of it.

It is possible that some unusual occurrences around our house have been linked to racism. My mom has gone outside to get the newspaper, only to find that it is gone, or that someone has stolen the newspaper and used the bag to scoop their dog's poop, and have left the bag on the lawn. Dog-walkers never seem to pick up their dogs' poop from our lawn, as they do everyone else's. This could just be my imagination, though.

People have also broken eggs on the sidewalk, thrown trash on our lawn, and stolen or cracked the decorative stepping-stones in front of the house.

I have no way to prove that these are hate crimes, and I actually do not think they are. I really hope there will be no more discrimination than there already is around the neighborhood, possibly none at all . . . but it is not like that, not yet.

It hasIt been a long time since this "racism" issue started up, just because some silly man or woman thought that if you were different, it made you awful, impure, or unclean in some way. Then people acted out of ignorance. Now it has created a mass of crevasses like dried desert soil, separating us all from what we could do, could be. Now man acts out of spite and envy and still ignorance, and a born-in comfort with people like us, with yellow, white or black skin; brown or blue, big or small eyes; black or blond, wavy or straight hair. That comfort, in some, makes other people, people who simply aren't like them, seem, "bad."

It has been so long since racism was born, that it would be all but impossible to destroy or wipe it out. We can still fight, though. Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, and many of the other fighters who might help are gone. But, this very moment, the next great Asian leader might be being born, or playing with Legos, or studying for a math test. Our equality is in the small hands of the younger generations.