Skin Deep

I grew up nurtured by carpets of pine and soft drizzle, cradled by mountains with snowmelt bubbled through by activism I walked streets murmuring with the vintage days of Japanese-Americans stowing baggage in the Panama Hotel, hoping to return one day from concentration camps Streets filled with such thick aromas of dimsum, hot pot, and barbequed pork hanging up in windows that I almost had to swim through them. The Pacific Northwest. So I assumed everybody would be like us, all infused with cultures from the broth of the Great Melting Pot. But then I headed down south to the land of the pines and I Thumbed my way into North Caroline Where milkshakes come in fifty-five different flavors Where salmon and mint were no longer expensive appetizers but shades in a wardrobe vineyard vines not redundantly named plants but a dress code And cabs are filled with the stench of Saturday Shooters and students priced at two dollars a head, packed almost as tightly as a subway in my parent’s homeland at rush hour But unlike in my homeland, I became a novelty. Because even though they said, “You are surrounded by diversity” As defined in the dictionary dictated by mission statements Welcome to college where we pride ourselves on Peers of different backgrounds, where we are committed Remember those glamorous pamphlets with glossy promises? But diversity is more than just a bureaucratic stamp of approval Because even though one out of five people you walk by every day Has eyes the shape of almonds, skin the color of olives, and hair the shade of some dark exotic food that you can’t pronounce And I am part of that one slice in the demographic pie chart Diversity does not exclude segregation So, I became the token, the subject of patronizing asides, They say, “Asians always…well, not you, but them, don’t worry, you’re not like them” I became whitewashed, as they say, washed clean of my heritage character by character, Finding myself losing a word for every day I didn’t eat out of the family rice cooker, for every time I didn’t hear my grandmother talking on the phone in the only way she knows, shouting into the speaker, for every time I didn’t teach my grandfather a phrase in English, Washed until I almost believed I was not like them. Washed until I was reduced to a fun icebreaker fact: “Hi, my name is Angela and I’ve eaten every organ of an animal” A statement filled with promises of the heady streets of Beijing and Shanghai Yi kuai yi kuai, kuai mai kuai mai le! China in a sizzling savoring of scorpions sautéed alive A statement stripped of context and turned into a did-you-know But I will not be penned into a hole that is made for fowl And I am more than just a yellow slice of the diversity pie I want to be a doctor for the med after the pre Not for torque on tops and the tops of water curving into meniscus smiles Or for the reactions between carbons and chlorines but for The reactions of my future patients as I try to change, not the world, but the people in mine I play the violin Not to be another single-syllable last name on the program But because I can’t kick my addiction to the sweet sting of muscle memories in my fingers urged until the strings are imprinted on my skin for hours buoyed by staccatos, pizzicatos, and pianissimos to the hushed silence between the echoes of the final note and the collective inhale of the audience after they forgot to breathe. They say the glass ceiling still exists but at least we can chip Away at the glass until it’s brittle enough one day to shatter. And I yearn to do the same to the bamboo ceiling Snap it right in half but damn that plant pushes right back so resilient that no matter how hard I try to repay my parents who lived off of 400 dollars a month Whose feet ached from standing at Kinko’s photocopying every page of their textbooks because buying them would cost ten pennies more Who clutched each other during Christmas and cried because they felt so Alone in a city of millions Bamboo bends so much that no matter how much my grandfather tells me that I’m the first person in the family to come so far That he waits for the day to inscribe me into the family scrolls In some village that I will never visit I still have to score two hundred points higher on the SAT To be given an equal chance. I pursued higher education. The word here is “higher”, as in Assume higher of me than the color of my skin. They say beauty is only skin deep But what about identity?