Being an Outsider
Being the Outsider Growing up as a child in Anaheim, wasn’t as imagined. The demographics of Anaheim was filled with a Hispanic population accounts for the majority of the community. As a result to the high number of Hispanics in elementary school. Children are very blissful and ignorant when knowing the difference and social standards of race, however my mind was not equipped for my first years of elementary school across my street. The first day of school, looking at my surroundings filled of different ethnicities, I already had noticed that I was the different one, the outcast, the Asian. Of course at that time, my realizations did not have much of an effect on my self-esteem or social status, but as time proceeded, I felt singled out. As time passed to the second and third year I started to feel the racial prejudice as the Hispanic kids referred to me as “china” even though I was not Chinese. At the time, I was even really sure what the word meant but it hurt me that the kids were calling me “China”. The word was muffled almost every corner I turned and the stares of ignorant kids would keep me from being myself. I later came to realization that children can be very nasty and mean but their obliviousness can be cured with knowledge and acceptance. As I walked into the room filled with eyes shooting my direction, I noticed that I was one of two Asians in my class. During the second week of school, a chubby Hispanic girl mumbled “ugh, china” as she passed the glue during our project. The feeling of anguish in one’s stomach and cold anger that I felt when she called me that was well, hard to stomach. They say that revenge is best served cold but at the time I did not know what the word china meant but I knew that it could not have been good because all the kids were laughing at me. The lone feeling of being in the middle and the laughingstock deeply scared my memory and made me a very cold and introverted person. Because of the clear segregation between