APRIL 2014
72
I stepped into the elevator of my boyfriend’s dorm, on my way to visit him before he left for spring break. I found myself riding up to the the fifth floor with a dorm custodian. I said hello with a polite smile and nod, and assumed my socialized elevator position of standing while facing the door and watching the numbers light up.
Then she spoke up with a “Where are you from?” which startled me and to which I stammered a confused response: “You mean my hometown?” The custodian exhaled a laugh and ‘clarified’: “No, I mean, where are you FROM?” At this point in my life, I’ve read about enough microaggressions and everyday racist remarks made in passing to know what that question means. When the emphasis on ‘from’ is so strong, it makes you want to go to the place you’re supposedly ‘from’ just to get as far away from the asker as possible.
This woman looked at me, studied my eye shape, nose shape, hair color, skin tone. They were all telling of one thing: other. I have dark brown eyes of some telling shape; a flat, wide nose; long black hair; tan, yellow-toned skin. With the exception of in my home, around family, and with my current Asian friend group, I have always been other. Despite the increasing diversity in America and my expectation that the American population of 2014 is open and understanding of race, my otherness is perceived to equate to foreign, not from here, ultimately unbelonging. My appearance translates to ‘not American.’
This is the first microaggression I’ve personally experienced that hurt. I’ve had elementary school classmates ‘ching chong’ at me. Middle school classmates asked me to do their math homework “because you’re used to this stuff, aren’t you?” I suppose I was invisible enough in high school to go microaggression-free for four years. And college was the first time in my life I’ve had an Asian community with which to feel at home, until that elevator ride.
I responded to her second question confidently: “I was born here, but my PARENTS are from the Philippines.” I am a US citizen, born in a hospital in New Brunswick, NJ. I’ve lived the 19 years, five months, and 20 days of my life in the America. (Though, I spent one month in my PARENTS’ country of origin years ago.) To ask me so pressingly “No, I mean, where are you FROM?” is to mistakenly and ignorantly label me un-American. It’s wrong.
"NO,
where are you from?"
by Alicia Lalicon