She is five-years-old and in kindergarten. Her hair is in two tails, exactly how she likes it, and she’s wearing a beige and orange ringer tee from The Children’s Place with jeans that can actually sparkle under the sun. She originally wanted to wear her Mary Janes to school but her mom says she’s only supposed to wear them to church and on special occasions, so she’s wearing sneakers.
She’s also not allowed to wear nail polish yet because her mom says it’s too grown-up. She can wear it if it’s clear, though, and she’s already shown anyone on the playground willing to look at her stubby little fingers. She claims that if she folds her fingers inward and tilts her hand just right, you can tell there’s nail polish on by how it glimmers against the light. She does this over and over until she is bored. And because being five-years-old means that you can say things without having a reason, she suddenly has a random thought and feels the need to inform her teacher. She sprints over with an excited urgency.
Amidst the overwhelming volume of screeches and laughter around them, she tells her teacher very matter-of-factly:
I’m Filipino.
She announces it as if it is brand new information, but she’s known this about herself for a long time.
Not quite hearing correctly, her teacher asks: What’s that? You like jalapeño?
No, I’m Filipino! She says it louder this time, ensuring this fact about her is known.
Her teacher was confused as to why she was being told this, but smiled warmly and said, That’s great, sweetie.
She beams with accomplishment and pride, having successfully delivered her message.
Then suddenly, a boy dashes past her. She doesn’t remember his name but knows it starts with a J. He’s running from something, and she whips her head around, curious as to what from. She doesn’t see anything at first, so she catches up so that she can ask. He’s at the top of the slide now, gripping the metal rail above them, which smells a lot like the old pennies she collects from the cup holders in her parents’ minivan. He swings himself forward and back a few times, then notices she’s there, warranting a perplexed look.
Before she can even open her mouth to ask him what he was running from, he blurts: Do you want to be my girlfriend?
He’s not even looking her directly in the eye, but instead, straight ahead, already planning on going down the slide once the conversation is over.
She is five-years-old and in kindergarten. She has no idea what girlfriend means. She uses her deduction skills and guesses that it means he just wants to be her friend—but since she is a girl, that would make her a girlfriend. She tells him yes, and they begin to chase each other around, because in kindergarten, that’s what having a boyfriend means.
Later that same day, during their last recess, she will find him running around with another girl. When she asks why they’re doing that, the other girl will say: Because we’re boyfriend-girlfriend.
And even though she is too young to understand what a relationship entails, let alone grasp the concept of infidelity, she is old enough to know how betrayal feels.
She is tall for her age. Always has been. She likes this about herself. When she gets older, she will be convinced it’s one of the reasons that boys don’t think she’s beautiful.
She has long limbs and no clue what to do with them. Her parents figure she’ll be good at sports because of it, so they try putting her in everything from soccer, basketball, to swimming, but they ultimately learn she is not fit for athletic stardom. She could probably do better if she had more interest, but that’s just not the case. Although, later, she’ll discover she’s not terrible at volleyball. But that’s not until middle school. For now, she’s stuck figuring out how to get from point A to point B without making a complete fool of herself. She’s tried on several occasions. They didn’t go well.
She is smart for her age, too. She is in the gifted and talented program and gets honor roll every year. She has her times tables memorized. Her teachers love her. And she’s creative, writing stories and songs for fun. She capitalizes on these abilities because she knows she is not what the world deems pretty.
Yes, you are, you’ll tell the girl. She’ll shake her head. No, I’m not.
And you can’t blame her for thinking so. No one on her favorite TV shows or movies look like her. For the most part, they are all fair-skinned and blonde-haired, skinny and petite. She is none of those things. She is tan, but not quite the color that people strive to gain after a day at the beach, dark-haired, has never known life without love handles and a bit of a muffin top, and too tall for her own good.
And when there does happen to be someone on TV who looks even a little bit like her or shares even a sliver of her heritage, they’re typecasted as the too-smart, too-weird, comic relief character who occasionally blurts out unrelated fun facts. Or not necessarily smart, but some other social reject archetype. They are always annoying. They are always nerds who don’t understand social cues. They are never the pretty girl. If the character is male, they are never the cool guy. Unless it’s a movie centered around martial arts. Regardless, the stereotypes make her feel embarrassed of where she comes from, instead of being proud of it.
Some of her classmates would pass by her desk and pull their eyes back in an unserious manner, or back away from her in mock horror when she walked by, out of fear that she would “start doing karate” on them. While it’s true that she did take karate lessons, the joke had started long before anybody even knew. She was also accused of eating dogs, which was a racial insult that she didn’t get. She loved dogs. She had one. And she would never eat him.
And sometimes, when she played princesses with other girls, she would call dibs on Rapunzel, but got outvoted on who got to be who, and was eventually told she had to be either Mulan or Pocahontas. The same went for playing house: they always cast her as the family dog, when she would rather be the mom or the daughter.
She wasn’t even aware that most of these were offensive at this age. She just thought the other kids were being weird and stubborn for not letting her be the characters she picked. Sure, she loved Mulan and took karate lessons—but that wasn’t all there was to her. As she got older, she realized that she didn’t necessarily have to be the butt of their jokes. And the people like her on TV or in movies didn’t have to be, either.
That’s why she loved High School Musical so much when it came out. The actress who plays the female lead, Gabriella, is Filipino-American, just like her. It was the first time she’d seen someone with her same exact ethnicity on American television, and even better, she was simultaneously the genius character and the pretty girl. In the young girl’s mind, Gabriella’s mere existence broke barriers, and helped pave the way for her to learn to trust the words of her parents and grandparents again when they told her she was beautiful, and to look in the mirror and truly believe it.
And then arrives the era of middle school, and subsequently, adolescence. The second she stepped foot into the halls of middle school, any confidence she had built up became quickly crushed beneath its shiny, brand new pair of Converse.
She couldn’t look at any other girl without finding at least one thing she was jealous of them for. She noticed something she lacked within each person she passed. It was a personal nightmare; the epitome of an internal and external hell for an insecure, pubescent tween girl who already stuck out like a sore thumb in a town with a staggering white population in the first place. The words she once held onto about her being beautiful, had now gone in one ear and out the other and began floating around in some liminal space, waiting patiently to be reclaimed.
The boys that she likes also never seem to like her back—or any boys, for that matter. Right when she feels like she’s gotten close enough and has a chance, they end up confiding in her to say they like one of her friends. It’s usually always one of the Caucasian ones, and some of them go as far as asking if she can find out if the friend in question likes him back.
She wasn’t sure exactly why they never liked her, but she figured that some of it might have to do with her either being not-white or not-skinny. Or both factors combined. Either way, those were both things that she couldn’t immediately change, or even change at all. She wasn’t sure what to do with that. It just made her sad, and wish they could see what her parents and grandparents see when they say she’s pretty.
At her core, she believes that she is beautiful. Well, sometimes. But she also believes that her own opinion is not enough. She’s wrong. But it’s almost primal; the urge to be liked.
Whenever she finds dandelions and is prompted to make a wish, more often than not, she’ll wish to wake up pretty the next morning. Either that or her own iPhone, with service and everything. But she hates how black her hair is, how it doesn’t frame her face quite right, how her new shoulder-length haircut doesn’t look the same on her the way it does on Selena Gomez, and the way her eyes aren’t an interesting enough color, just brown. Dirt-colored, she’ll say they are. Ugly.
Don’t say that, you’re so pretty.
You’re just saying that because you’re my mom.
If I wasn’t your mom, I would say the same thing.
She wears glasses but takes them off for pictures, claiming it’s because of the glare, but really, she just hates the way she looks in them. When she turns twelve, she’ll be asked to sing at her uncle’s wedding and be excited about it, but dreading the fact that hundreds of people will have to see her in those horrendous glasses. She’ll beg her parents to let her wear contacts for the one event and just the one event only, and she will say yes.
But her parents will notice that ever since the glasses came off, and the contacts went in: little by little, their loud, goofy, girl is coming back. Not that she ever left, but she does seem a little more confident now. They will order her enough boxes to last her through the year, and she will grow up to be a high-schooler (and later, an adult) who wears lenses most of the time.
She will also start begging her mother to sign her up for hot lunch at school, because she has grown embarrassed of the reaction her classmates have toward her favorite Filipino foods she brings from dinner’s leftovers. She used to be excited to bring leftovers to school for lunch for two reasons: it was delicious, and miles better than peanut butter sandwiches, and because it meant she got to take the little pink Thermos bowl to school—the kind with a tiny spoon that folds into the cap for easy storage. But the kids who surrounded her at lunch often judged the ethnic foods she’d bring. Sinigang smelled too weird, kare-kare looked too gross, and lumpia got too soggy by lunchtime, so they thought that looked questionable, too.
Wait, I thought you were Asian, the other kids would accuse.
I am!
Then how come you don’t bring chow mein or something?
I’m Filipino, she’d respond, and a hush would fall over the table, no one knowing what to say.
There are a few other girls like her in her grade, and by like her, she just means Asian—but they are paler and thinner. They also do not have thick, frizzy hair. Instead, their hair is shiny and straight. She tries to be their friend, but can’t help but feel like she stands out, literally: the girl is in middle school and stands at a whopping five foot six and a half.
Once, she even went out of her way and asked one of them what shampoo and conditioner they used. Some time later, she hunted it down at the Asian market while out grocery shopping with her grandparents. She couldn’t wait to get home and wash her hair. She made sure to follow all the directions on the back of the bottle once she did. But when her hair dried, it just looked the same. It did, however, get the slightest bit shinier, but it wasn’t any straighter or silkier. The frizz had yet prevailed. She was then introduced to the wonders that a hair straightener could provide, but later on, she would straighten her hair so much that it would take years for it to recover from the damage.
The other girls also don’t toast over the summer the way her already-tan skin does from being under the sun for just five minutes. They don’t seem to bloat like she does after a meal, and they don’t have any peach fuzz or hairy arms and legs. She wonders how they got so lucky. She eventually concludes that beauty was just something you were either born with or had to grow into. She crosses her fingers and hopes she’s the latter. And she asks herself all the time why being different looks good on them, but weird on her.
I want to tell her that trying to fit in will inevitably make her look more ridiculous than just being herself and standing out in the process. I want to tell her that I’ve seen all of the pictures where she’s tried. But I also understand it’s not that simple. I know how it feels to want to be different, in a way that warrants admiration and influence. Not judgment, or even disgust. But I wish that she’d known that being herself would inevitably attract the kind of people into her life that love her for who she is without trying.
I want to prepare her for that unavoidable sting of jealousy and betrayal that comes with growing up and reaching a place where she knows better, but I also want to make sure she knows that she’ll become stronger because of it. That her character has to be challenged in order to grow, and to trust the process, because she will. I want her to nurture her thirst for knowledge and creativity, because these are core qualities that will stick with her throughout any of her phases.
I would tell that funny little girl that she will metamorphosize into the kind of person who loves and embraces her individuality—so much, that she maybe likes it a little too much sometimes. I want to tell her that forcibly shrinking into a digestible version of who she is will only make her feel like half a person around anyone else. Which will make her grouchy and fight with her mom for no reason when she gets home. I want her to know a lot of things. These are just a few of them.
She still exists inside of me somewhere. I hope she can hear me.
oh god this means so much to me 😭 ty, Ate ❤️🩹