The Color of Struggle

Here's the thing about wanting white friends and white shapes; white shirts, bleached lines, dust free walls. You are forever fighting to keep it the same, but it always keeps transforming. 

A few years ago when I was at a party, one asian girl said to me, I love how you sound white, like if I were on the phone with you, you wouldn't be able to tell that you're asian. 

I didn't like it then, but I did like having white friends. What did it mean to be white? In Chinese, my mom would wonder, is this because mei guo ren do this, is this because Americans do this, and we do that? But mother, I must be American, I must be a mei guo ren, because my Chinese is broken and when I took that DNA test recently, I was wondering, I was hoping, there might be some European descent in there. Some mark to describe how I feel even though what I really want is to be proud. I want to be proud of myself, I want confidence, self-esteem. The way that girl from Jericho, New York says whatever the fuck she wants, loudly, clearly. 

But I think that's the root of the problem, the very kernel of it; I don't want to want the other, I want to want me. And wanting the other makes me see the cliches and that disgusts me. A part of me is disgusted by what I love in the absence of loving myself. 

I recently went to a women of color event, and I realized I am not part of their definition of a woman of color. And when I look at my skin, I guess there isn't much color there, just the same brownish pink white. And it made me feel guilty because I get to be more white in pigment and in opportunities because my parents had money to send me to summer enrichment camp, summer overnight camp, summer magic land. Year after year, and this summer as it begins I look back a decade and a half and reflect on how it led me here, to a steady job at a health tech firm. So I didn't really have to face what it meant to be a person of color in the same way that a woman from South Central did, and that makes me ashamed. Because I have so much shame inside me for what I did not experience, and so little peace with what I did. 

But that is changing. Slowly, a new garden is growing over the secret garden that I daydreamed into. I had a conversation with some coworkers, what does it mean to be white? What if you bubble in white, but you are middle eastern, or you're an immigrant from Italy, or you're black but you've got a British accent? We are asking for who is white because that's how I grew up, in the 90's knowing that there were white people, yellow people, and black people. I hadn't met a lot of brown people at that age but that there were brown people too.

I suppose White was an American television show.

I watched a clip of Roseanne for the first time after Rosanne Barr tweeted and the show got canceled last week. I thought, this was my normal world growing up. And I was not part of that America but I inhabited a shared physical space with her. Did Obama become president 20 years too early like he pondered of late? 

I've stopped asking whether things could have happened at different times. Because I'm here now, and the new yogi in me honors right now. I used to get sad over the Benjamin Button meeting in the middle concept; that the two lovers could never hold onto their time together; that it slipped away just when they finally experienced the most joy. Joy is right now, in our state of mind, in what we focus on. Only went our cup runs over can we give to others. Someone said we always give more when we give from our saucers, not from the bottom of our cup so that there is no more for anyone after.     

We can trace isotopes in ancient bones to find out where they came from. In Atlas Of A Lost World Craig Childs describes how "In Dine tradition in northern Arizona and the Four Corners area, the people came up from the ground like corn." We didn't come from somewhere, we become right here in the present moment. We manifest who we are right now, for all time. So there's no need to fight to keep things the same.