Yellow Girl Trauma
By: Rebecca Pu
Tags: Racism, Belonging, The South, Asian American, Discrimination

“Why do you contextualize everything in terms of race?”

Fuck. I do?

“Who do you live with?”

“ Four white girls from Facebook.”

“Who gave you that bracelet?”

“Oh, my black friend Nicole.”

“Are you going to BearWalk home?”

“I may be a small asian female, but I can handle it.”

Fuck. I do.

Catch me on any given day, and you will find me donning the standard Bay Area uniform of an acid washed denim jacket paired with black, artificially ripped skinny jeans followed by slightly dirtied white converse. I may even be drinking from a Boba Guys Horchata using my environmentally friendly bamboo straw, babbling about the newest social impact startup I came across. Little does anyone know that my brain still identifies boba as bubble tea and that I am the farthest from a Californian native as you can get.

Until college, I spent my whole existence in the jungles of white America, specifically in Colorado and North Carolina.

Recently, a new friend asked me over coffee, “ what was it like growing up in North Carolina as a Chinese American?”

Usually my answers fall somewhere along the lines of something about good fried chicken, a snarky comment about Southern Hospitality, and a quick belittling of my experiences with white men with yellow fever.

But this time, I blurted out a word new to my vocabulary: traumatic.

Trauma: severe mental or physical pain

Traumatic: harrowing, frightening, nightmarish

Wow, never used that word before.

“Traumatic? How so?”

As memories flooded in, I internally hissed at the anger and shame that immediately surfaced.

I remember taking a wrong turn on the way to a church retreat in the Boone Mountains and pulling into a seemingly innocuous driveway to reconfigure the GPS directions. Out came a man armed with a rifle followed by two growling pit bulls.

“Do you fucking speak English? Get off my fucking lawn. I am going to shoot you. Do you fucking speak English? Speak some English will ya? I am going to shoot you.”

“Sir, we are just trying to pull out of your drive way.”

“Fucking speak English before I shoot you”

“Sir, you need to calm down. I am literally speaking English.”

“Get the hell out of my driveway. I am going to shoot your ass”

‘Sir — ”

“I’m going to shoot.”

The morning following Trump’s election, I remember sitting in the Chick-fil-A drive thru waiting for my chicken minis. My heart was already incredibly distressed and anxious due to the previous nights events. The future seemed grey and hopeless and pointless. When the window opened, I reached out for my breakfast only to be assaulted in the face by balls of chicken. The drive thru worker had thrown my order at me.

“Go back to China!”

I had finally gotten my braces off after four years of dental glue, wires, and rubber bands. I dressed up in my newest black blouse and favorite bubble necklace ( if you were a gross preppy Southerner, then you know what I’m talking about). I was so excited to finally show my friends my liberated whites. Maybe people will finally find me beautiful.

I remember walking into my beginners theatre class.

“Wow, look! Rebecca got her braces off!”

“She looks so good!”

I was beaming.

“I mean yeah, she’s cute for an asian.”

I didn’t even have the words to explain why I felt so traumatized, so I didn’t say anything. I made some sort of joke about ethnic trauma and the conversation quickly moved on.

Those three experiences that came to mind weren’t even the worse. I can’t change society’s overt racism towards me. Hate speech, harassment, and dehumanization are unavoidable.

What makes me so sad and what has taken me years to admit is that I succumbed to all the racism and hate and ignorance. I made fun of my parents’ immigrant accent, wrinkled my nose at my favorite xiao long bao, de-masculinized Asian men, and attributed climate change as a hoax to China in hopes of gaining acceptance. Because internalized racism was funny. It drew social clout and attention, things I longed for. I rejected Chinese culture for years, refusing to engage in its rich heritage and history.

I am an American. Fuck Mao Ze Dong. No stupid lunar new year festivals for me.

I believed for so long and I still believe to some extent that I will never be attractive because I am Chinese. That my Chinese features could not possibly be anything of value or worth. That I am inherently relegated to “cute,” but only for Asians who cannot possibly compete with white beauty.

I committed myself in high school to do white things because white equated with power, advancement, progress, and acceptance. I played years of lacrosse and field hockey. I avoided science and math extracurriculars, opting for DECA, literally the whitest club ever. I spoke like a white girl, ate like a white girl, and dressed like a white girl. My closet in North Carolina still holds hundreds of dollars worth of bubble necklaces, housewife cardigans, Lilly Pulitzer, sheersucker skirts, and weird monogrammed shit.

I saw that being Asian held no future in White America. So, I stopped being Asian.

I hate myself for that.

I stopped being me. I destroyed, obliterated, and let go of aspects of my identity that will take years to reclaim.

That is my trauma: the harrowing, frightening nightmare of ceaseless pain over what has been lost of which I do not know if I will find again.

I contextualize everything in terms of race because my human experience is inseparable from race more so than that of my counterparts in California. My experience with race as a Chinese American in predominantly white spaces has affected every single crevice in my understanding of self. So, I contextualize in terms of race because race is how I make sense of who I am, how I am, how I interact with others, and why the world is the way it is. I’m sorry if that makes you uncomfortable. I’m working on it.

Yesterday, I made my first Chinese playlist on Spotify.

There’s slow healing for trauma after-all.

Let’s revisit this in a few years.