the black sheep

"Where are you from?" he asked.

Not a single "hello," or "good morning!" or even the politely attempted preface, "can I ask you a question?"  I was en route, making my mile-long walk to work when I was interrupted by another hotel employee.  It was a little after 5am in Nashville and I was headed to Cocoa Bean, a small coffee shop in the city-like hotel resort, Opryland.  Employees had to park in satellite lots and take an elevator underground to access lockers before dispersing into various tunnels like tiny ants prepping for a hard day's work.  The tunnels led to every stairwell of the hotel and employees would quickly mutate from ants to gophers, popping up to their designated areas to report for duty.  Most days I'd walk these tunnels slowly while half-asleep, mustering apathetic smiles to everyone I'd pass and exchange conversation with no one.  I was perfectly content to spend my morning walk looking at my no-slip shoes, counting my paces in blessed silence.  We were told during orientation that in the 2010 flood, employees frantically ushered hotel guests down to the underground tunnels so they could escape the high-rising water rushing into the ballrooms and lobbies above.  You wouldn't think to move underground when it's flooding, but the tunnels provided a dry, safe place for everyone to make a quick exit.  In this moment though, this abrupt, uninvited invasion of information, this inconvenient in-ter-rup-tion between paces forty-three and forty-four, I felt the water pouring in from all sides and I knew this tunnel wasn't my haven but rather my trap.  Before I could gracefully complete my own mutation from ant to gopher, I had been trapped.  I was neither an ant nor a gopher.  I was a rabbit...a trapped rabbit with a question lingering in the air waiting for my response.

"Where are you from?" he asked.

"Oh, uh...Maryland," I responded, with a slight twitch in my face.  

"No, like...where are you really from?"  Before me stood a boy who couldn't have been more than twenty years old judging by his doll-like skin and shaggy, black hair.  He was skinny and had a nervous way about him.  Did he know he was asking me a question I'd been asked my entire life?  Why did he want to know?  Why did anyone ever want to know?  I don't care if you have a friend who is also Chinese, or Korean, or Filipino, or Vietnamese.  I don't care if you love Chinese food or Korean BBQ more, or if you think those people are really beautiful.  You don't know anything about me, I thought in defense.

I reluctantly replied, "I'm from Carroll County.  It's about 45 minutes Northwest of Baltimore."  I felt a small satisfaction in knowing that I didn't grant him any satisfaction of his own.  I'd played this game before.  Disgruntled, he waved his arms in the air and his skinny fingers wiggled like a frenzied after-thought.

He began again, "No, I mean -" then paused as he looked away to gather his thoughts.  "What languages do you speak?"  

Well, that's a new one, I thought, slightly impressed with his creative side-step.  Usually by this point people shift into questions like, "where are your parents from?  What's your ethnicity?" Or my personal favorite..."what are you?"

The nervous boy was looking at me, eyebrows raised, waiting to hear something other than, "...uh, English?" I quizzically replied.  He sighed heavily with disappointment and looked down at the ground.  It was clear that I had succeeded in annoying him, but still he desperately gave one last attempt, this time with more fervor and intensity.  

"No, like...other than English, what other languages do you speak?" he asked with a ridiculous sincerity that made me feel like the gushing floodwater might as well sweep me away for good.  As I fantasized about water welling up in the very same hallway where we stood, soaking through my no-slip shoes and our clothes, I felt the anger welling up inside of me, crashing through my ribs, burning my lungs with a piercing heaviness, filling up my chest with no sign of reprieve, rising higher, higher, higher...until BURST!

"I speak English!  English is the only language I speak, okay?!" the rabbit cried out from within its cage.

The nervous boy cocked his head and took a small breath in as if preparing to say something else.  Just as quickly he furrowed his eyebrows which made a small dent in his doll-like forehead.  Then, lips pursed, he turned and walked away without another word.

Dumbfounded and annoyed by the exchange, I stood in the tunnel hallway for a moment trying to make sense of it as I waited in stillness for the water to dissipate.  My thoughts swirled like the bubbles trying to escape from the floodwater.  Why do people need to know where I'm from?  And why is Maryland, the state I've spent the majority of my life, never good enough?  Why do people want to know whether I'm Chinese, or Korean, or Japanese?  And when they find out I'm Korean, why do they try to offer some awkward story about so-and-so who is also Korean.  Why does any of it matter?  I don't ask other people where they're from then get mad when they say Virginia.  Or follow it up with, "No way!  My friend Sam is from Virginia!"  Who the hell cares?  Why does any of this matter?  They don't know who I am.  The water continued to drain, and drain, and drain...

When I realized that making sense of the insensible was a waste of time, I took a deep breath clearing out the last bits of water droplets in my lungs and continued to make my way through the tunnel counting my paces.  Forty-five, forty-six...

________

"I just...I don't really feel comfortable around other Asians," I admitted to Carolyn, simultaneously afraid and interested to hear her response.

Carolyn put her pen down.  "You don't feel comfortable around other Asians?" she asked, validating in the most careful way.

"...no, not really.  I mean, now it's a little better, but when I was younger, it was really uncomfortable.  I'm just always aware of other Asians near me.  If I walk into a coffee shop and there's an Asian girl sitting at a table, I notice her, like - she stands out to me.  When I was little, I always felt more comfortable having Caucasian friends," I explained with a slight hesitation in my voice, afraid of what she might think of me for saying that.

The thing about being a different race than your peers and your family and your entire hometown is this: you are undeniably, unmistakably, unequivocally different.  You simply just don't look like them.  Your skin is a different color, your hair is a different thickness or color or texture, your eyes a different shape, your nose a different length.  What I knew though, was that the people who looked different than me were the same people whom I loved and who loved me.  They were people I could trust and I was taught to feel safe around them.  They were my parents, my brothers, my school teachers, my music teachers.  From a young age, I learned that my place of belonging was with people who looked like that - white skin, round eyes, and pronounced noses.  It didn't matter that they looked different than me.  They were safe.  It was love.  It was family.  I was a black sheep, but I was accepted and protected by a herd of humans I could call my own so nothing else mattered.

Carolyn shifted in her chair as she looked over her notes from the rim of her reading glasses.  "Nikia, can you remember the first time you felt uncomfortable being around another Asian?" she pressed on.  I could tell she had seen a flicker of a shadow and caught a scent on the trail to follow.

I thought about it for a moment then remembered a specific encounter and began to share.  "Well, I do remember this one weird thing from kindergarten.  We'd have to line up single-file anytime we left the classroom.  And there was another Korean boy in my class who was also adopted, but I never wanted to stand directly in front or behind him.  I think it was partly because I was afraid he had a crush on me, you know, me being the only Asian girl in class.  It made sense considering my five-year-old logic," I laughed casually as I circled back to my train of thought.  "...but, I mostly remember just feeling...yeah, I felt uncomfortable being close to him."  

"Hm," Carolyn responded as she disappeared in deep thought for a moment.  She looked up from her glasses again and continued on, "Can you describe, specifically...what you felt?  What other types of feelings did you experience?"  

What did five-year-old self feel in a moment that's barely hanging on as a memory?  Carolyn, you're asking too much of me, I thought.

"I don't...I don't know," I quietly offered.  Carolyn nodded as if to encourage me to take my time in thought.  I tried to picture five-year-old Nikia.  I saw a giant, bright looking bow on top of her head, no doubt wearing a velvet or plaid dress that she picked out earlier that day.  Straight-across bangs swept the top of her little round face like chalet curtains in a kitchen window.  I watched her desperately scrambling to find a place in line between the other children, the line wiggling like a snake in the sand with kids tripping over themselves and falling out of it just as quickly as they were falling into it.  

If she could be far enough from the Korean boy, I thought as I watched a younger me play out this distant memory, she wouldn't feel...she wouldn't feel...she would not feel...

Nothing.  The feeling was still out of reach.  But I pressed on.

She didn't want to hurt his feelings or make a big deal about it.  She was worried other kids would see her avoiding him.  I was getting closer.  She didn't want anyone to notice.  Didn't want to be noticed.  Ah...that's it!  I thought as I glanced up at Carolyn who still appeared to be nodding in my direction.  

"I felt exposed.  When I'm around other Asians...I feel extremely exposed and vulnerable." I could feel the seams beginning to tear. 

"Hm," Carolyn said again.  "...why do you think you felt exposed and vulnerable in that situation?" 

"I guess...I felt like if I stood next to him, it would be more obvious that I looked like him and less like everybody else.  I would stand out and everyone would know I was different.  That I wasn't like them," I admitted in embarrassment, tears starting to sting the inner corners of my eyes.  I grabbed a tissue and held it by my side for safekeeping as I began to pick at a clumped piece of thread on the sofa.

"And, as a child, the last thing you want to feel is...different, isn't it?" Carolyn pointed out with simple clarity.

I picked some more at the thread then looked up at Carolyn.  "Yeah.  I guess so," I answered and slowly lowered my head back down, looking at the clumped piece of thread next to me while wondering how many minutes were left in our session and what other feelings I had felt throughout my life that seemed uncomfortable but were really something more shattering, more devastating, more...heartbreaking.  I felt sadness watching the replay of kindergarten Nikia desperately trying to find her place in line.  I wanted to so badly reach back in time and slip her a note that said, "you are loved," or, "you don't need to hide," or, "it's okay."

It's been a few months since Carolyn and I talked about the Korean boy in kindergarten, and a few years since I ran into that nervous boy in the tunnel.  But one of the most enlightening things I've learned throughout this process is that clarity seems to show itself when sought after.  Sometimes in the moment and sometimes after long hours of contemplating these events and memories.  Sometimes after years of forgetting about it.  Sometimes on that sofa with the clumped piece of thread and Carolyn there, helping to guide the way.  And sometimes in privacy behind closed doors, or in the car, or while I'm cooking dinner, or when I'm reading a book late at night.  My sharing and speculating has helped me connect the dots between cause and effect more than I ever thought possible.  There are reasons why I don't like to be asked certain questions.  There are reasons why I don't feel comfortable around other Asians.  

I looked like a black sheep when I stood among Caucasians, but I felt like a black sheep when I stood among Asians.  And it took me recounting this dusty memory from kindergarten to realize that between these two groups of people, these two herds of humans of which I could belong, should belong...I ultimately belonged to neither.  I was neither white nor Asian just like I was neither ant nor gopher.  And for the first time in my life I realized that maybe it did matter that I didn't look like everyone else I grew up with, everyone that I loved, and everyone who loved me.  I was a black sheep lost between two herds and the water was rising.