Traversing Social Distance

I’ve travelled between East and West perpetually with a rigidity of gait born of insecurity. At times accepted and at others rejected in both worlds, the cultures of my Chinese forefathers and my Mid-Western existence, I’ve been conditioned to tread hesitantly, feet shod in uncertainty. Memory flickers like a candle that illumines incidences in the dark archives of my history. As I examine the pages, I am made to relive events from my childhood.

One memory stands out from the few I have of kindergarten. I recall that a play-time was among the first activities, probably to get us used to each other. I spoke to the other kids at least partially in Mandarin; there was a slight gap in communication for a bit, and the world seemed to convulse. I think all of us, only recently removed from the womb, grappled to express and receive meaning however we could, so we recovered admirably—my peers picked up on what I meant and I adopted full use of English. I didn’t realize it then, but this event would be the first of the contractions that would deliver me from one world into the other.

The next contraction would occur a year later, in the first grade. I drew a self-portrait and chose peach for my hue. I considered peach “the” color of skin, and thought nothing of it until a classmate asked me, “Why are you using peach?” I must have given him an expression that showed I did not understand why he’d asked that question, so he persisted, saying, “Your skin color isn’t peach.” I was flabbergasted by this revelation—my eyes had been opened to race as a construct based on physical characteristics. Disappointment followed shock when I failed to find in the 24-color Crayola crayon set a color that better matched my hue than the color one of my peers had disallowed for me, the color I no longer was, the color he still was.

I was born, then, and like a babe, I came kicking and screaming. Over the next few years, each day of school was like travelling to hell and back—especially the third grade, when I had Mrs. D., who was a veritable witch. I knew, unarticulated, that I was ‘other’ to her: she’d often mix up me and my south Indian friend, Kushal. She’d call me “Kushal” and him “Ezra.” How one could fail to distinguish between East and South Asians, I’ll never know. That she did let me know that we were consigned to the out-group, lumped into a faceless group of the pigmented, and I felt that, deep down. I can’t ever remember a time she was happy with us or anything we did. The other children picked up on this general disapproval, and we were made pariahs. My kicks were feeble steps, and my screams miserable whimpers that died in my throat as I lay in my disheveled bed on lonely nights.

I was convinced then that I could never arrive. Every member of a minority group born in this country is born dangerously close to stillbirth, near death. To the extent his or her birth into wider society is handled with care, he or she will accept or “buy into” the ethos of this nation. In that era of my life, alienation characterized my social existence, and I marinated for years in a sorrowful rage that turned into a twisted ambivalence between a hunger to prove my worth and a thirst to avenge my wounds.

The words of my father rang ever in my ear, that I must work twice as hard to compensate for my ethnicity, yet the fruit of my labor weighed never sufficiently—by society’s standards or his. I shuffled about in limbo, unable to see any way to advance or to retreat. A part of me died then, and what was left was a shell of the boy I had been.