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Moreover, I could not decipher the meaning of most of the racial slurs. I was called chicken chop suey. I imagined chicken chopping a girl named Suey, short for Suzanne. I couldn't figure out what this had to do with me. Some peers said, "Ah-soh" to me. I thought this was the Japanese version of asshole. I wondered where they learned to speak Japanese. They told me to "go home". I only lived a couple of blocks away. I had never been to China. The dictionary writes that a chink is a crack in the wall. Again, this confused me. But somehow I knew this jeering was related to my ethnicity. Why did I have to endure this? I felt isolated. Only my stuffed animal kingdom accepted me as a person. I despised my parents for preserving the culture that made me unworthy. I wanted to be American, not Chinese. New Chinese neighbors from Taiwan moved in next door. The children, a boy and a girl, were around my age. At first, my brother and I had difficulty learning their strange Chinese names but, we quickly became good friends. Although they were from Taiwan, they had been living in Chicago for quite a while and through them, I began to realize that people like me existed. Their mother could yell/ screech at least twice as loud and as long as my mother. I could hear her mother scolding all the way from my house. The whole entire block was notified in Chinese as to when the children were expected home to eat. |
The Wu family also ate strange and disgusting meals just like my family did.
The family eventually moved back to Taiwan.
I had developed a network of Taiwanese friends, the children of my parents' friends. My parents and my Asian girlfriends' parents inculcated us with a sense of obligation to marry Asian men. My girlfriends and I each made a list of characteristics for the dream boy. I wanted someone cute, intelligent, nice, wealthy, athletic, fashionable, taller-than-me and Asian. My parents and I shared the dream of me marrying a Chinese doctor. Giving me away to someone within the race became immutable family law. Chinese and Taiwanese summer camps were established to educate the second generation about their own culture and also, by implication, to foster relationships between the sexes that could potentially lead to marriage. In addition to sending me to these camps, my parents arranged by age the order in which me and my female cousins were to be betrothed to Asian husbands.
When my mother was pregnant with me,
she made an agreement with her pregnant Chinese girlfriend. If I turned out
to be a girl and if her baby turned out to be a boy, then we were to be
married. I kicked my mother's uterus hard with the heel of my foot for
giving my femaleness away so easily. Nevertheless, I accepted my future
with an Asian husband.
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