Kelly
I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago. At age 5, I decided that my name was too foreign. After unsuccessfully experimenting with a diminutive, I settled on “Kelly” which seemed completely harmless in a city that annually dyed its river green in honor of St. Patrick’s Day. I made it for about one week because although my name allowed me to assimilate in school, I still remember the fricative sounds my father would make while trying to exaggerate my new moniker in an attempt to show me how silly it was to change it.
“Okay, Kelly Kim. What should we do now, Kelly Kim? What do you want for dinner, Kelly Kim?” By the end of the week, I was so tired of hearing the dissonance, that I said I was going back to Mina. My father, feeling as though he had been heard, said nothing more.
Looking back at this episode, I see how nuanced it was. Behind this seemingly playful episode of a young girl asserting her independence, I see a quiet Asian girl struggling to feel accepted in a predominantly white suburb. I remember the anxiety of roll call, wondering if the teacher would get my name right. “Tina? Nina? Dina? Rina?” Yet somehow when they got to my name, they would butcher it by calling me MY-na or MINN-a. I couldn’t bear it. The sting of going to the sticker stand of bright sparkling name stickers and seeing the names jump from Michelle to Mindy broke my heart in ways it did not yet understand.
The playground taunts were worse. “Chinese! Japanese! Dirty knees! Look at these!” [The “these” were boys holding their shirts out at the nipples to imitate breasts.] When I would assert that I was Korean, I just got puzzled looks. “What is that?!” That was usually when I went running home because the thought of conducting a recreational geography lesson was too much.
Asian-American solidarity wasn’t really a thing either. I still remember that my biggest enemy in 2nd grade was Anna Huang. I’m not sure if it was because she felt competition, but it seemed ludicrous to me that the only two Asian girls in the class were so diametrically opposed. To this day, I still never understood why she hated me. And her bullying was of the elite kind. She organized a ‘zine team at lunch complete with copy editors and illustrators. She used a typewriter to type out pages about my wrongdoings and then distributed them at lunchtime for her illustrators to color in. I can’t tell if the magazine ended up going into mass distribution because she ripped it to pieces when my friends caught wind of it. My one friend managed to grab one sheet before it was completely destroyed. It read:
“Mina borrows your crayons and then breaks them in half.” Accompanying it was an illustration of a maniacal me breaking crayons over her knee. I found this to be completely hilarious because that exact act was a HUGE pet peeve of mine, so I often would very reluctantly lend out my crayons, preferring to hesitate in hopes the borrowee would ask someone else.
All this to say that I find this moment of Asian-American solidarity completely and existentially puzzling. For one, it’s making me reel back into my own trove of memories to find those deeply shameful moments that I had written off as “childish” things, and to try to construct them in a deeper narrative of othering and racism. And I’m also battling against years of not feeling a particular kinship with Asian-Americans because I don’t particularly feel that we’ve had each other’s backs in the past. In fact, I find it baffling that our solidarity is artificially patched together because non-Asians cannot tell us apart, so in their minds, we should all go “back to China,” a country to which I’ve never been.
And yet, I find myself at the forefront of pushing for this exact solidarity that I do not quite yet get. I am appalled and alarmed by any act of aggression against Asians of all sorts, even if there is particularly deeper grief when I learn that the victim is Korean. I’ve been frustrated by the slowness of our solidarity, but even as I sort this out in my own mind, I am starting to understand why. Somehow the persecution is forcing us to define ourselves as a cohesive whole. So, Anna Huang, if you’re out there, it’s time for us to put our crayon complaints aside. We’ve got work to do!
