One of my earliest childhood memories was from after my first day at kindergarten. I came home and immediately asked my mom why I didn’t have blonde hair and blue eyes. Newly aware of the fact that I didn’t look like the girls in my class who were mostly white, I questioned myself and wanted to change myself so that I would. I was beginning to realize that I was Korean and that made me different and maybe that was a bad thing.
This facet of my identity became something that I wanted to throw away and replace so badly. I’ve learned to accept and even love this part of my identity throughout the fifteen years since kindergarten, but it still takes center-stage when thinking about who I am, despite my also being a heterosexual, healthy, able-bodied, upper-middle class female college student in her early twenties.
A great deal of my self-awareness of my Asian identity stemmed from the fact that the only Asian people that I was in regular contact with growing up in suburban central New Jersey was my mom, dad, younger brother, and the two other Asian kids in my grade. Even on TV, I rarely saw an Asian character on Disney Channel or Nickelodeon, with the exception of London Tipton from The Suite Life of Zack and Cody.
