You can start in the beginning…
Our accents like a beautiful cadence,
Our accents like a difficult fence.
The color of our pure ink-black hair,
The color that pierces the thin air.
My mom calls to order a cake the color blue,
My mom gets ignored with “I don’t understand you”.
My friends want to try my food always,
BUT
My friends say my food smells awful in weird ways.
I pray to God for my mom’s job search,
The lady greets everyone but us at church.
I am a beautiful Korean,
I am a child of a difficult immigrant.
OR you can start at the end…
Growing up, I soon understood how heavy the world is on Asian immigrants like my South Korean family. As the constant discrimination we faced became a regular occurrence, I realized that this was the life of a minority group in America. The life I’m growing up experiencing.
The constant, “Sorry, what did you say?” and “Can you repeat that?” as they looked over to me, a nine-year-old who knew less about the English language than my mom with three master's degrees. I’d always repeat what my mom had said, like a translator for English to English. The constant stares when we spoke our native language, and seeing on the news an 84-year old Asian American man violently pushed to the ground and dying from being kicked in the head. I even pondered the term Asian American, the label given to the man, because my classmates constantly told me that I couldn’t be both Asian and American. Americans were white. Now I know better, but growing up hearing comments like that led to me not feeling like an American in the country I was born in. CNN states that his death shed light on the rise of anti-Asian hate. CNN was wrong. That light of anti-Asian hate was always shining, yet our discrimination is only recognized when an anti-Asian hate crime makes it on the news.
They don’t want to see our defined Asian features, hear our broken English, or feel a culture foreign to them. As the countless servers, workers, and strangers on the street never saw past the label of ASIAN, this light of our dreams, identity, and culture started to diffuse as we hid them to create a small beam that rose from wanting to be accepted. How do we let our light shine in a world where our light is not wanted? It’s time to stop dimming and ignite us with friendship, a smile, and understanding. The origins of the famous African American folk song “This Little Light of Mine” are unknown. Our stories and origins are just like that little folk song, unknown and unseen. So discover us so we can shine our message, that immigrants are just like everyone else. We are not a foreign item with “handle with caution” written. We are ordinary Americans.
Today, start at the end of the poem, as we bound over the hurdle that discrimination has laid out for us, and land on acceptance and appreciation.
Because in a life there’s always an OR that can change our plots around.
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