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"Yin and Yang"
by
William H. Chang
---
I find myself sitting at a desk, a paper and number-two pencil sitting in front of me. I pick up the pencil, which is rather dull and unsharpened and has no eraser. Apparently no mistakes are allowed, no errors that would otherwise need to be corrected. I glance down at the paper. One question, two possible answers. The question: "What is your ethnicity?" The possible answers: "Caucasian/White" and "Asian/Pacific Islander". I happen to be both, as a matter of fact. Unfortunately there's also a catch: "Please check one only." So there I sit, wondering which bubble to fill in, with ethnicity to align myself with. It used to be easy to make that decision, but I've changed my answer many times in the past, using up what little of the eraser there had been before this moment. 'Who am I exactly?'
Being half Caucasian (infamously known to the rest of the world as "white") and half Asian - Chinese to be exact - was something I never thought about much when I was younger. I grew up around peoples of many cultures and ethnic groups; the schools that my parents sent me to were always diverse, though I knew nothing of the terms "diversity" or "multiculturalism" back then. After all, California, especially San Francisco, is known for its cultural diversity. We didn't know who or what "minorities" were (a mathematical term, perhaps?), nor could we imagine that our families came from different cultures, and the only definition for "race" we knew of was to see who could run around the playground the fastest. The first decade of my life contained carefree days where the color of skin didn't matter to me and my friends, where a person's origins was irrelevant, and we didn't know anything about cultures that differed from our own.
As we grew older though, we began to realize that there were differences between us. We realized that we weren't the same, that we came from different backgrounds and believed in completely different things. Our happy, ignorant childhood was ending. The world was no longer black and white, but contained a multitude of colors that painted a much more realistic picture. It was a harsh transition, and one of the first lessons we learned as we began to drift apart was that in the big city, the color of your skin means a lot.
Fast forward a few years. Let's imagine a large school, larger than any of the schools I attended earlier in my life. There is a large concrete courtyard outside the school, incredibly flat and filled with a few hundred children that are just starting to edge into puberty. A track field is painted in white on one side of the courtyard, while on the other side, against high concrete walls that seperate the school from a series of apartment buildings, are the basketball hoops - popular lunchtime locations. In the center of these lie the four-square boxes, where the Asian kids are, every day, without fail (except on weekends, though I could be wrong). They were one of the biggest "cliques" in the entire school.
The games of four-square were fun, competitive, and for the most part fair until a stranger came along. The stranger was different from the others, taller and paler than anyone else in the group. "Who is that?" someone would ask quietly. "It's the white boy," another would reply, "Let's get rid of him fast." So a new strategy was devised: eliminate the outsider, drive him out, and make sure he doesn't come back. Unknown to the clique, the stranger was not so different. The real difference was only skin deep, though it seems as though apperances are all that matter to a lot of people. On the outside the stranger had the appearances of a Caucasian, but in his veins flowed Chinese blood, the same Chinese blood that flowed through the veins of clique (though not literally, for their parents were from different families that came from different areas of China). The plan to cast the outsider away succeeded, and as he walked away he wondered why he had been cast aside by his peers. Because of how he looked? The color of his skin? He did not understand then, but during the next few years he learned the so-called "laws of the playground" that stated that you should always stick with you "own kind". He was pushed to the other side of the railroad tracks, just stepping out of the way before the train came roaring past.
That was middle school. High school was essentially the same. The cliques in high school were larger and fiercely territorial, occupying certain spots on campus on a daily basis and picking fights with those who imposed upon them. The outsider found himself without a clique of his own, since Caucasians were (and still are) the minority in many of San Francisco's public schools; his group consisted of other outcasts, those who did not choose to stick with their own kind as the laws of the playground had stated. They were the rule-breakers, and for that they were the ones sitting off to the sidelines.
There was one day when the outsider found himself on a bus, on his way to a meeting dealing with the student government (it should be known as well that he was the only student in the student government that was not a full-blooded Asian). It was late afternoon, only an hour or so after school had been let out. The back of the bus was not somewhere that one should sit unless there are many other people on the bus, for it's common sense in San Francisco that no one will start anything in the middle of a crowd. Unfortunately, there were only two others in the back of the bus at that particular time; two large men that were of a specific ethnicity. One sat in front of the outsider, the other sat behind him. They demanded money and anything else he had on him, but he gave him none. He had sat through similar instances in the past few years, and had learned not to be intimidated or afraid of people like these two men. They were targeting him specifically because he was Caucasian. After a short explanation about his actual ethnicity - that he was in fact half Asian - the two men went away. To the outsider, that encounter, though one of many similar ones, was the nail in the coffin when it came to the question of his identity.
Since then he began to embrace his Caucasian side, despite the horrendously obvious fact that he was part Asian: his last name. Whenever there was a form that asked what ethnicity he was, he checked the box next to 'Caucasian' instead of 'Asian'. He ignored the "white jokes" and the numerous racial slanders that minorities had invented in the last few years as they began to become the majority in public schools and run-down neighborhoods. After all, when looking back on history one would think it's their right to persecute, now that they've got their equality.
Now we have come full-circle, back to where we began. I am still seated before the desk, holding the pencil in my hand as I look down at the sheet of paper with the single question and the two possible answers. I finally come to a decision about which answer to choose, but before I can fill in one of the two bubbles the lead of the pencil snaps. And wouldn't you know it, there's no pencil sharpener to be found. I get up and leave without bothering to answer the question.
Perhaps it is better that the question remains without a real answer. There will never be a "colorblind" world, a world in which the issues of race, ethnicity, and culture have no meaning or impact on society. There will always be someone in the world who will always resent you, will always hate and loathe you, simply because of who and what you are. You can't change who you are no more than you can stop the sun from setting, and even if you could (by some strange occurence), it wouldn't make much of a difference. Not in San Francisco anyway.
