“What is that?” the boy sneers at the foreign-looking food during lunchtime.

Among American-born children of immigrants, there’s a common story about bringing a non-American lunch to school. The child at first would be proud of the food, but over time, as they realize that other kids, especially the popular ones, don’t approve, they may go home and beg for a replacement. The Lunchables, please! The PB&J sandwiches. Anything except the stinky tofu. Anything except the fish with its eyeballs and scaly skin. Anything but…

Tonight at my regular book club, the conversations had drifted into that territory. The majority of us were American-born children of immigrants. Stories of sneering boys. Stories of how a friend stood up for someone else. Laughter ensued. Despite being the American-born child of my Hong Kong raised parents and bringing regular Chinese food to school, my lips were thin. Yes, I did remember eating fried rice or other strange foods. And yet I hated sandwiches, because they often surfaced memories of gagging on the soggy dough. Instead, as I heard stories of being ostracized for having foreign food, all I felt was this overwhelming feeling of loneliness.

Because I remember sitting alone during lunchtime, because I lacked friends.

Yes, eventually, there were people that I surrounded myself with, but they weren’t friends at all, but rather people that proved that I wasn’t a loner, the outsider, the outcast. They were proof that I fit in, even thought I didn’t really fit in.

And because of that, nobody saw my lunch. Because nobody was there to see. Sometimes I must have just eaten quickly so that nobody would see that I was eating alone. Just enough to satisfy my hunger. Then I would watch all the other kids.

How did they fit in? How did they figure out how to eat lunch? How did they get so popular? How did they make friends?

All of these thoughts, those anxious moments tumbled through my mind as I watched my friends talk about their struggles. During a pause, I blurted, “I ate alone, so nobody ever saw what I ate.”

One person who had just joined the book club turned and said, “Oh I did too. Well I had one friend.”

To which I mumbled as everyone turned back to their laughter, letting the loneliness yank me to a place of sorrow, which sedated me for the rest of the hour, “I didn’t have any.”

During college, a friend observed (quite bluntly), “You have everything. Yet, it’s not enough.”

Beyond the fact that during that period I moped about everything—state of friendships, my natural non-exuberant personality, challenges of my major, etc., I never really quite appreciated the level of privilege I had.

Not only did I end up traditionally straight and cisgender, I grew up in a household with at least one college-educated parent in an upper middle class suburb with high-ranking public schools. I always had a bed and a roof with three meals and quiet environment. My parents had either shifted their work schedules and workload so that there was always a parent around (often to my displeasure as a teenager). Never did I ever had to seek shelter or suffer from hunger or feel unsafe. I had the privilege of declaring hunger strikes. To imagine, to read, and to write. Drugs and alcohol were wholly absent from my childhood. Friendships, despite the few that I had, were relatively of similar type. And in all that, I developed behaviors and motivations for resourcefulness, intellect, and diligence.

What if I had born in a household of divorce and alcoholism? Or learning from the models of laziness and disengagement? What if then? Perhaps I would have turned out the same, better or worse.

1. Because you believe that you’re invincible
2. Obviously the belief of #1 is temporal as you realize that your body is susceptible to many things in life—disease, car crashes, bad food, and heartache. Mortality is truly possible as you read about people who can’t reach their doctor because of the immigration ban. You read the likely ways of death and you worry that you’ll slip and fall, because that’s more likely than someone bombing up your building. You worry yourself (metaphorically) to death. But then suddenly one day, you reach for a helping hand and that lifts you up. Believe in community.
3. Protest. Write. Express. Tell your story. Stand up for you believe in. Attend those events and those town halls. Make the phone calls even though you hate talking on the phone. Communicate.
4. Start to find the light in life. Remember what you loved doing. Maybe it was cooking. Exploring the plethora of wines. Maybe it’s traveling to discover new sights. Maybe it’s the thrill of climbing mountains of America.
5. Realize that you love this country. Awhile ago, you had declared to your trusted circle that you were going to move to Canada, New Zealand, Finland. But today, you know that it’s not possible. Not because the logistics and the immigration would be difficult. But rather you don’t want to leave. There’s more to do. And you want to be part of it. And you want to stay here to fight for it. The country gave you opportunities that you can’t get elsewhere and you’re not just going to let it go.

“Did you know that there was a handicapped section?” I asked my mom, curious about whether she really wanted to be part of the women’s march.

To my surprise, and contrary to what my sister said, she said simply, “Oh I wasn’t planning to go. You were there for me.”

I became incensed. “Every voice matters!” I said. “Why didn’t you really go?”

“Because it wouldn’t have mattered. It won’t mean anything.”

And that’s when it struck me. The greatest problem in any society is apathy. Which is generally the great consensus. Whether it’s apathy, because of a loss of hope. Or apathy that we must accept things as they are (and cannot change). Or apathy, because we are resigned, defeated, and depressed. The danger is that, because the energy dissipates and then soon, we forget the joy of living.

Yesterday night in an insomniac moment caused by coughing, I scrolled through Facebook. Yet there were many intense posts about the immigration ban and the fight for the rights. But then there it was. I would have scrolled right by in my dazed 3 am state if the word Asian hadn’t caught my eye. A post about anti-Asian activity in Southern California.

Despite my incredible desire to be an insider, to be popular, to be like everyone else, I have never rejected my Asian American identity. Yes, I may have rejected the side of me that is too Chinese, embracing the non-Chinese food and speaking only English fluently. But yet, to reject how I look, has never crossed my mind.

When I look in the mirror, I see only me. But I know quite consciously that everyone else doesn’t see me that way. They know that I a not white. Some might even assume that I am not American and wasn’t born here.

And so then. I had this fear several months ago once the election was determined. “What about me?” I said. “Can I do my job? Can I do what I need to do? Can I still be effective despite being the person that I am? Can I still be me?”

They came for them. Now they may came for me.

I started this blog.

Amazingly, I can’t remember a life without it. To have this place where it captures my memories, my thoughts, and my desires. Technically, it was hosted elsewhere at a url formerly know as positively.chargedparticle.com and in a moment of emotional retaliation about 14 years ago, I moved it to this url.

But the concept of this blog started first at scribble.nu way back in 2000. There, I captured everything that was going on. Interestingly, I didn’t believe in diaries for most of my childhood, especially as a teenager. It was for those lovelorn girls who carried around pens with dainty pink feathers of puffs who wrote glittery pink sparkle fluff. I certainly would not do that.

But as a suppressed writer, I was seduced by the words that came out of my fingers through the keyboard. I had barely written for years, sporadically in the purple diary that an aunt gifted to me as a teenager. But with the advent of the boom of online journaling that I could share with others, I found myself writing and writing.

Yes, there were the growing pains—I realized that I couldn’t write about people (negatively) nor could I write about emotional turmoil (people would get too fussy about it—nowadays you may even expect shaming).

I miss the naivete of that era. Where we would embody ourselves with empathy and sympathy. We deeply tried to understand each other. Our comments were personalized. Truly self-centered of course. But we were figuring it all out. All we wanted to do was be heard. And crazy enough, it worked.

In college, a former boy interest said that he was too busy to call me.

“What do you mean by that?” I said, feeling anger cursing through my veins and tears squeezing through my eyes.

Thousands of thoughts went through my head, but the most prominent one was: He’s at a third-rate college. How can he possibly be more busy than I am? Yes, I had an elitist streak then—I was a top public university in the nation in my senior year. I was not only working part-time as a research assistant, I was also working as a residential computing consultant. I was taking the GRE for graduate school. I was an officer for a club. I had tons of projects then. Intense classwork. And he…I don’t even remember now what major he studied. But it was certainly not comparable to anything I was doing. How could he possibly be busy?

Obviously, he was finding an excuse for being unable to end things so explicitly.

And yet, in the midst of all of it, I still made time. Because I found it that important.