Not all superheroes have powers

Julien Hannah B. Bea, Age 13
Alameda CA
Will C. Wood Middle School

Colors

Jamie Kim, Age 19
Cupertino CA
San Jose State University

It called to my grandmother quietly at first. She was only a child then, but me feeling was so intense that it could not be denied. It was a red and real as the blood running through her body. She asked her father if she could have a pad of paper and some pencils for drawing pictures. Her father laughed out loud, "Mee Chu Su?" "Are you crazy?" He blurted out in harsh Korean. He went on to say that girls were not to waste their time on such frivolous activities. There was much work to do and she was now old enough to help out in the kitchen. She should start thinking about her duties as a filial daughter and then her duties as a wife to her husband. That was it and nothing else would be said. He spoke so diplomatically the she almost believed him. All she wanted was to feel smooth charcoal in her fingers and to press them onto paper, so that the vivid images in her head could be recorded and soothed.

Her mother thought differently. She was very fond of her child and desired to give her all that she could to make her happy. She disobeyed the orders of her husband and bought the shiniest wax crayons and a pad of thin rice paper from the street peddler. Her daughter would be so pleased and she was. She spent many hours training her hand to follow the details that her eyes saw. She drew red strawberries, green leaves and white clouds.

Her father was not at all pleased when he found one of the drawing. She had run out of paper and had drawn on a piece of butcher paper that she asked from the man at the market. He dragged my grandmother and pulled her hair and loudly ripped the delicate paper into the angriest pieces. The echo of the ripping stayed inside of her and silenced the desire.

It called to her again later. This time more loudly. She had to wait until her father and the others were asleep, then she would steal into the kitchen and take small pieces of burnt firewood from the stove and hide them in her dress. She drew, with those sticks, on the walls of the barn. The deep, ashy remains of the wood rubbed smooth and velvety across the barren, clay walls of the barn. She was free to greet the calling inside of her now and she felt furious, as the fervor of bottled passion came out in waves across her fingertips and onto the walls. Her strong arm pushed hard with the sticks to deepen the darkest color and then varied the color into a lighter shade with gentle brushes. When she heard noises from the house, she quickly rubbed the images away with a rag, and they were gone as quickly as the came.

My grandmother got married later and had four daughters, but it was the third one born in January, that heard the calling. The genius that my grandmother held was not released completely since it was not allowed to breathe the air or to feel the orange sun. The calling was still strong and had been passed on to my mother.

It was obvious in my mother. My grandmother saw that her child had taken a small twig and carved out the shape of a beautit6i house in the soft earth. Despite what her husband said, my grandmother bought countless oil pastels and helped her daughter focus her energy on paper. My mother took the pastels like they were candy, and drew endless rainbows, clouds, and familiar faces that my grandmother knew too well. At every opportunity, my mother was given sticks of graphite, colored pencils, watercolor squares. Anything was given to her to satiate the calling that consumed her body.

The death of my grandfather shocked everything. It created a certain disaster inside my grandmother. She became very poor, very fast. There were far greater things to worry about since she could hardly sustain her family, as a widow without education and without money. Money for my mother's art supplies could not be made and the calling had to be silenced. My mother was grown by then, and she had wanted to go to college. It was a rare thing in Korea. Korean women were hardly found on university campuses, and never found there if they were poor. My mother wanted to pursue a career in art and to become a fashion designer. It was a silly dream for a poor girl and it broke my grandmother's heart when my mother got married instead. The calling slept and my grandmother died a few years after I was born.

We immigrated into America when I was five. My mother worked hard so that I would not be limited in opportunities. She wanted my life to be better than her life in Korea. America offered chances for things that were not be made available to her. She wanted me to become independent and to pursue my dreams in every way possible. The calling awoke from its hibernation sharply after we found ourselves in foreign land.

My mother tells me that it was evident that I had the calling when she saw the way I furiously held on to a pencil until my knuckles were white. The tight little fist scribbled on chairs and walls religiously, all over their new apartment. The calling wanted out, since it was tired of hiding. She had passed it down to me with such potency that my whole body shook as I pushed out the energy from my hands. My mother put me in art classes at an early age and was assured that my life would be different. This passion, as strong as opaque colors blended, would no longer be suppressed.

I am nineteen years old now and my mother still tells me the story of her mother. I am given opportunities that my grandmother desired so much for her daughter. I have made the most important choice by going to college to institutionalize my calling and to paint in classrooms, with the full support of both my mother and my father. This choice was important in determining not only my future, but in settling the anxieties of the Korean women of my previous generations who desired more.

Being Asian-American is an honor in which I receive cultivated passion from the struggles of my ancestors. My mother tells me the stories in soft Korean and they paint glorious murals that leave me inspired. Being an Asian- American, I am benefited with unlimited opportunities that I am lucky enough to encounter. I am able to hear the voices of my grandmother and the struggles of my mother in a language that is reminiscent of not only a distant land, but of experiences that mold the human spirit and my own personal history. It calls to me and I choose to answer proudly in school. My art speaks to me in the tongue that beckoned my grandmother years ago, to those barren, clay walls.

Growing Up With Grandpa

Christina Go, Age 15
San Jose CA
Lynbrook High School

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.

Superheroes: "Happy Girl" (She has the magical power to spread happiness to others)

Su Jin Lee, Age 5
Stanford CA
Escondido Elementary School

Count to Three

Feliz Z. Esguerra
Vallejo CA
Jesse Bethel High School

1. isa (ee-sah)

Friending is a fun activity. If you have a Livejoumal, you know what I mean. You log on your username for your online journal, click on Manage, and then click on Friends. Follow the Edit Friends link, and type in another person's username to add them to your Friends list. You could even choose a combination of two colors to represent their user icon on your Friends page. From there, every time you read your own journal, all you have to do is switch to the Friends view to read your Friend's latest journal entries.

Friending is fun. You get to see your own list of Friends in your public user info page, and watch it grow as you make more Friends. What's even better is when you see the list of people who have Friended you; the people who have listed you as their Friend.

Friending and being Friended is fun. I watch my friend doing this on the computer all the time. She has many Friends. She is also a Friend to many people. It's fun to watch. She tells me it's even more fun to do it. I wouldn't know. I don't have an online journal. "That must mean I have no Friends," I tell her all the time. Usually, she laughs it off and tells me I'm stupid. Lovingly, of course, because she is my friend. But lately, I'm not even sure she hears me when I say that. "That must mean I have no Friends," I repeat, with a shaky laugh; hopefully a laugh jovial enough to coax another laugh from her.

The silence that followed the last time I said it repeats itself.

But that is okay.

I know she is my friend, without having to be my Friend.

I tell myself that amidst the clacking of the keyboard as she adds another Friend to her list.

2. dalawa (dah-lah-wah)

I'm sick. I have the flu. It is very bad. I have been coughing, spitting, and regurgitating all my food. Very disgusting. I haven't been able to talk on the phone or go online to talk to my friend lately. The last time I contacted her was yesterday. I called her cell phone and left a voicemail warning her that I might be absent from school for a few days. She must have understood, because she didn't return my call. It was a self-explanatory message anyway. One that didn't need to be returned. Well, I'm sure she acknowledged it. I'm sure she's sitting in class right now hoping I'll get better.

I'm sure of it. Especially since we have a presentation due in our Biology class next week. She'll want me to be there, to explain to her before class starts what it is I did for the presentation. She's been very busy with other schoolwork, and I happen to be very quick when doing my homework. Of course I could help her with her part of the presentation. Of course I can shoulder the cost of materials. After all, she assures me for the umpteenth time, I am the Chinese half of our friendship, and therefore automatically received more brain cells than she did. I don't have the heart to tell her, again for the umpteenth time, that I am Filipino, and not Chinese.

She just forgets who I am sometimes.

3. tatlo (tat-loh)

It's a scare tactic, you see. When I was little, my mother would always say, "Isa. (One.) Dalawa. (Two.) Tatlo. (Three.)" If I didn't do what she wanted me to do by the time she reached the count of three, she would spank me. I knew whenever she would begin counting, she was fed up with my disobedience. I love my mother very much. I love her for teaching me these things. She always said that my early training in practical wisdom would accompany me wherever I would go.

I wish I had listened.

Here I am, waiting for my friend to pick me up so we can go to school together.

Wait, I can rephrase that:

Isa: Here I am waiting for a girl I've talked to for several years now, to pick me up so we can go to school.

Dalawa: Here I am waiting for her to drive by in her car so I can get in and get a ride to the school we go to.

Tatlo: Here I am, waiting. For my friend.