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blindspotzine-blog · 8 years ago

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About Blindspot

I never really truly became aware of my race until high school. Up until that, I just didn’t see it play out as clearly as I do now. However, there were definitely some moments as a kid that made me aware of where I stood in that grand scheme. Like I remember watching Fairly Odd Parents, and wondering why Timmy’s mom was white like his dad (which... I didn’t find relatable at all? Haha). And also listening to my mom tell me about how the kids in my class (she was one of those moms who volunteered for everything) would criticize her for her English.

High school being the turning point of how I saw myself racially, came about because it was also the point where I realized how culturally dominant my mom made our house, and I’m grateful for that. Being a halfie, I always felt like I was the physical embodiment of every “Do I choose my Asian culture at home, or the American mainstream I see everyday when I when I head to school?”. Luckily, growing up in Irvine, there wasn’t any shortage of halfies around me, so I felt relatively average on that front. Conversely, every time my mom would take me to weekly Quran readings with our little enclave of Indo Muslims (we’re the global majority of Muslims, but oh, so rare here in the states FYI), I always felt like the white one out. Never having a complete grasp on the language, always more bookish than the other boys my age.

So during my senior year of high school, my Ladybird moment of threatening my mom with the prospect of going to school in New York, as well as falling in love and out of favor with my JCL chapter’s president, I had an inkling to do SOMETHING to express how much I embraced my masculinity and my sense of self as Southeast Asian. I was entering into that phase every student of color goes through. That Beneatha Younger phase where you want to do SOMETHING for your heritage community at large, and you end up using the word “motherland” more often than you did before.

Flash forward to now, 3 years later, I’ve changed. I’ve visited my brothers and sisters at Muktamar, and I became the honorary Muslim ambassador for my Study Abroad in Italy this past summer. Both of these experiences has given me the insight I needed to help grow that inkling I had in high school into a full-fledged love letter to those facets of myself that I’ve grown to love in the past few years.

#asian american #aapi #southeast asian #indonesian american #indo am #filipino american

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