This all sounds good. Twenty years and a few years ago, I also wore a skirt — like a regular dancer to a nightclub in San Francisco. My friends thought I had the confidence to dance in the barn once a week, but it was different. After years of being called a narcissist and a “half-tribe” at school because of my mixed-race experience, walking dancing was a way for me to rebel and improve the way other people viewed me, as Ann changed.
In what may have been a vicious joke of the late 1980s, my blonde father, Midwestern, married my mother, a bridesmaid from the Philippines. The two families were culturally and politically divided, and both my parents were struggling financially. For this reason, my grandfather took care of me when I was 6 years old, and I spent half of my childhood in Kansas until he died when I was 14 years old.
After my mother died, my father’s side of the family came to an end. Like Ann. I moved to New York City as an adult and had not heard from them for over a decade. My first noise in town, I went to a restaurant and, carrying a cranberry tea, I wanted someone to call me. As if on cue, I received a phone call from my elderly aunt who was on my father’s side. He said he was thinking about life and heard from my mother that I had moved to New York without knowing a single person there. He said he had spent days thinking about how the couple had not spoken to me for so long and regretted that I was living alone in the Big Apple, and that he wanted me to come back to meet him again. Needless to say prejudice, he apologized for “the way the brothers treated me.”
It was not a good apology, but it meant a lot to me that a person about a hundred years old could humbly admit their mistakes. I picked up my trip to Kansas, curious to know what it would be like when I saw the white side of my family. Soon I was boarding a cabin from the airport, heading to another hotel in Overland Park.
When I entered the hotel, my white brothers happily shook my hand. To my surprise he began to talk to me slowly, with an open mouth, as if he were talking to a deaf stranger.
“Do. You. Care. Because. One. Think. Quickly? He asked his cousin, who had long since been lost. I felt confused. I was born in America. I had never been abroad or knew any other language all the time English. That’s probably what Ann felt when other students saw her as an American, while she was also from Japan.
“Oh, I don’t like chaos,” I said, laughing politely. “I remember from my grandparents’ house that the best hamburgers and butter came from the Midwest. Then I want a burger and all the fixins. ”I longed to add to the sadness of the local languages, and they understood that I was an American and not a stranger at all.
We ended up going to the bar and grill, which is exactly what I wanted. When we eat together, I answer questions such as “Do you live near other Filipinos?” and I felt I had been robbed, I did not know how to respond.
I finally got my answer at the end of dinner when my cousin suddenly said nothing, loudly, “I feel sorry for people of other races, they should not be born. They will never know who they really are or are not really known, because their parents decided to have only one night in love. . ”
The whole table was silent. I thought about how I could live on my own in New York without any help and little contact with my family, how I could get out at a young age and survive all this without their help.
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