I Wanted to Be White

For as long as I can remember, I've wanted to be white.  I blame much of that on my own ignorance and assumptions based on watching TV and just the lack of Asians in the media.  I can recall the moment I watched Boy Meets World and an asian girl was on the show.  I'd later find out she was actually half, but even that was sufficient for me.  My best friends all felt the same.  She was the most beautiful Asian girl we had ever seen.  To this day, she's the only true celebrity I follow on Instagram and I still absolutely adore her (it's Lindsay Price for inquiring minds, she'd later go onto Beverly Hills 90210 also).

I think part of the desire to be white rang even louder for me because I was so Chinese in every sense.  I learned Chinese as my first language, we watched Chinese soap operas and sitcoms at home, and we ate Chinese food every single night.  My immigrant parents had moved us from St. Louis to the suburbs of Los Angeles in an effort to be with more like-minded, black hair, brown eyed, Chinese peoples.  Even when we ate out, it was mostly at a Chinese restaurant, where they cooked fancier stuff like lobster noodles, crabs, and fried dim sum or other delicacies that my own mom would not waste her time in the kitchen on.  Looking into the white person's world was so foreign to me.  The only taste I'd get was an occasional spaghetti from Bob's Big Boy or a hamburger from McDonald's.  It wouldn't be until I was older that we'd go to an American restaurant (or non-Chinese) every Friday as a family to venture out into the world of food from other cultures.

The other thing was white people seemed to do fun stuff like go to the beach or amusement parks or camping or cabins for the weekend with their families all the time.  My parents definitely took us out a lot on the weekends, but we did a lot of swap meets, malls, and a few parks here and there.  They took me to Disneyland when I was about 2, and we took my brother and cousins once when I was in the sixth grade.  I don't think my own kids can count the number of times we've taken them, but it's not because my parents didn't care, they just didn't find it as fun as we do now.  It was always kind of a drag for them, they still did it though, and later as we grew older, they'd always willingly chauffeur 45 minutes times four to shuttle us to Six Flags or Disneyland with our friends.  We ventured to the beach a few times with family growing up on vacation, but it wasn't a weekend thing, more like a special occasion thing.  The first time I went camping was with Andy after we were married.

I get it, it's expensive and a lot of work, and to be honest, none of it is truly associated with the fact that my parents weren't really American, it was probably more of a do we have enough money to do that or they didn't think it was as important as us doing piano, dance and taekwondo lessons, but as a kid, I just assumed it was because those were American past times that we weren't accustomed to.  It didn't help that my other immigrant children friends all had similar experiences.

Luckily, as I've grown up, matured, and gained new perspective on my childhood as an immigrant child, I've come to appreciate and be grateful for the different experiences.  Despite not loving Chinese school every weekend for 3 hours, I'm glad I speak pretty good basic Mandarin and can communicate in secrecy with other Mandarin speakers as I choose.  I'm grateful for my open and inviting palate and love for different textures, trained by weekends of odd dim sum delicacies like pig's blood, pig's ear, chicken's feet, and stomach lining.  I'm grateful for the way my parents pushed me to excel, even if it was by traditional Chinese means.  I wonder what it would have been like to do a sport growing up.  Or to not get grounded and spanked for getting a C in PE in the seventh grade.  Or to have parents who might say, "grades aren't everything."  But really, it's not so bad.

I still sometimes want blonde hair and blue eyes.  But there's hair dye and colored contacts that can solve that.  In the meantime, I'm grateful for my black eyes and brown hair, but moreover, for my Chinese culture and experiences.  And for my love of fried intestines.  I was a bit in shock when I realized they were actual intestines, growing up I always used the Chinese name and never really thought to translate to English.  I didn't know what actual intestines (in Chinese did), but when I connected the two.. I was a tad bit grossed out by it.  Really I was just sickened by the raw white ones we grilled at an AYCE BBQ with my Asian friends, the fried ones already cut thinly and eaten with salt?  Awesome still!!