# 5 ..

++ 5. When i was younger (as compared to littler or smaller?) i used to wish i were 'white'.
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i can remember looking through yearbooks hen i was in second and third grade and looking at everybody and wishing i looked more like them. i don't think i understood that i was different from everyone else before then. it hadn't occurred to me that i was asian and 'they' were white. quite a shock let me tell you. all of a sudden i wasn't just the smart kid or the kid with glasses. nope, i was the smart asian kid with glasses. interesting. so, i pretty much tried to make myself look like everyone else. which i found out its hard to change your genetics. go figure. so then i tried to just to get everyone to like me. which is also pretty hard when you're genetically shy. the other way to solve this problem is to just be better at everything than everyone else. if you are the best, then people want you on their team. so between trying to be the best and trying to get everyone to like, it still doesn't hide the fact that you are the only asian in a class of 200 elementary kids all in the same grade and all the same ag as you. and it doesn't help that your name is jay, which just so happens to rhyme with many other three letter words that end in -ay .. you know like lay and may and say and ray. right, so back to the yearbook. oh wait, had i talked about hte yearbook yet? hm. ok, well i had a yearbook and it had everybody's picture in it (and this doesn't have anything to do with me not being 'white'.) so i went through the year book and i can remember using a marker and marking the people i liked and the people i didn't like. and i think there were a few people in there where i had no idea if i liked them or not. those people didn't get a marker color. one of hte colors was orange and other was green. i don't know why. i don't even know why i remembered that. but thats the colors i remember using. i think i only did it for 2nd and 3rd grade. i remember my 2nd grade teacher was named mrs. morrison. she was a nice teacher. my 3rd grade teacher was mrs. haddux..i think. she was old. one time we hada spelling test and she had all the words up on a piece of paper that the entire class could see, but she had forgot to change it. someone finally told her and most of us groaned at the kid who told her. oh, i remember being in 3rd grade and watching the challenger spaceship blow up in mid-air. that wasn't cool. oh and reading rainbow. with lavaar burton. oh right, so not being 'white'. that stigma stuck with me all the way through middle-school i think and it kind of stopped being an issue once i got to high school and one i changed school systems. it helped to be the soccer captain and president of the choir and pushed a grade ahead of everyone in math. sometimes i still look in the mirror and realize i'm asian. it slips my mind sometimes. ++