As a Thai-Chinese American growing up in the suburbs of Seattle, I deal with a lot of people who are ignorant about minorities. They always assume that I am Chinese because Chinese are the only Asians that existed for them. People come up to my face and ask me if I speak English. My Caucasian American friends tell me I drive horribly even though they have received more driving tickets than my mother. Strangers on the street would stop me, and ask if I bought my jade necklace from "Chinatown". People make assumptions that I don't talk because I'm Asian, or that I don't have a voice because my parents "taught me better" than to speak-out. At school, where racial discrimination was supposedly less pervasive, I would get sudden urges to burst out and scream whenever a teacher asked me "where" I was from. I understood the question posed unintentional tension, but as if yo! Just being a teenager is hard enough, and then to get crap spat at you for where your parents are from, or in my case, where my grandparents' parents were from, is simply too much. Sometimes I have felt like walking on the street with a huge American flag draped over my shoulders and a sign hanging around my neck with the words "Born in the U.S.A." scribed in big bold letters and would flash a bright neon pink every now and then. Consciously or unconsciously, racism is alive and well in America. No matter how subtle, racism is racism, and well, being yellow in a black and white America is hard stuff.
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