I Am Waiting for the Door to Break Down

2021 9th - 12th Grade Prose Winner

There are moments in my short life of fourteen years where I think upon a memory that
has suddenly decided to visit my brain. The uninvited guest introduces itself: have we met before?
Where are you from? When it has finished its quick entrance and walks into the messy room of
my mind, we continue conversing. Before it establishes its place to stay for the rest of the day, I
question the guest: How did you find your way here? Who let you in? Why are you here? Usually,
I let the memory stay for a bit before shoving it to the back of my brain, lest it decides to plant its
roots, and I would have to attend to it through the hours I am meant to sleep. Sometimes, though
rarely, the memory finds it hard to answer my interrogation, as I quicken my questions in an
attempt to fulfill my quest of the true meaning of the memory.

Often, the investigation is for a memory of racism, sitting calmly in my brain as I relive
the moment. Maybe it was in kindergarten: my classmate told me that some kids walked up to her,
pulled back their eyes, told her they “were Korean.” Finally I tell the enemy to leave, going back
to whatever unimportant work I had shoved aside. Or maybe I rush to invite a friend to distract my
brain instead. I always feel the memories should have made more of a ruckus in the mess of my
mind. Threw a lamp across the room, or screamed so loud a glass breaks. However, they exit
easily, perhaps with a teensy little SLAM of the door I barely notice. Life goes on.

I’ve only known a few learning environments. The earliest one was Saturday-morning
Chinese School from age five to eight, an extra-curricular my immigrant mother forced on me and
my sister in an attempt to understand her mother tongue. Every Saturday, at 8 am, the whole family
clamored into our royal-blue car, shining its unwanted reflection, and drove to Chinatown. The
journey seemed like hours as we escalated and dipped into highways, finally turning into the exit
with the Brooklyn Bridge hovering over it. My time there is vague and foggy now, but I remember
it was an almost fully Asian environment.

All the teachers were Chinese; almost all of my classmates were Chinese, some had a light
Chinese accent or used improper English words. We were children, oblivious to hardships we
would go through as Chinese-Americans. One of the scariest parts in Chinese School was
dismissal; a huge crowd of giants at the door, and a line of dwarves walking down the hallway
trying to catch a glimpse of their one familiar giant. The one time my dad was late, I started crying,
small tears streaming down like the racing droplets on a car window, leaving me embarrassed.

Still, going to Chinatown made up for any discomfort I had gone through. The school was
in the middle of a familiar neighborhood, with no sign of “classic” New York City present (as a
child, I didn't even know Chinatown was still in New York City). The perfect lunch time followed
dismissal, and the variation of Chinese restaurants was vast, from soup noodles to dim sum; I miss
going to those little hole-in-the-wall nooks every week.

My next opportunity to experience a distinctly different learning environment was years
later, at age thirteen. That summer, I went to a sleepaway camp for the first time; Rhode Island on
a college campus, three weeks with my two school friends, also Asian. We called the place “nerd
camp,” an academic camp where I learned the basics to Java (though there were a variety of other
classes). It was the kind of camp where you study and pass a test, have good grades, and have a
teacher recommendation for admission. The majority of the students who attended were, again,
Asian. Their parents probably forced them to apply. The only two non-Asian students in my class
were a white boy and a Black boy.

That isn’t to say that the camp wasn’t fun. The presence of a large number of Asians
allowed us to recognize some of the same “quirks” from the shared culture that nobody recognized
back at the elite private school I attend in New York City. They were small, the things we
recognized, like the little fluffy Totoro keychain dangling on my backpack, or the cheap cardboard
smell of instant ramen and fiery red tteokbokki rice cakes someone microwaved in the dorm. Many

students were from abroad, and I noticed the small things they did that I had seen when I visited
my grandparents in Hong Kong: constant wearing of medical masks in public, carrying umbrellas
to block out the sun, and little snippets of words in Mandarin or Cantonese that I knew. Still there
were differences between our cultures—being Asian didn’t mean we were exactly the same. Upon
hearing that my friends and I lived in New York City, Manhattan no less, that we attend a private
school, they were amazed, asking if we “went shopping for fun,” or assuming that we were “rich.”
It left a strange feeling in my stomach.

Here, I encountered my first experience of full-on racism. The campus also hosted a soccer
camp consisting of white high school boys, tall and towering. One day, while going to the cafeteria
with other Asian students, three soccer boys walked towards us from the other side of the small
street. At first I thought I had imagined the barely comprehensible words coming out of their
mouths. But when I saw a look of skepticism on all the students from our program, I realized that
the boys really had said the Chinese slurs, “ching chong.” We notified our residential assistant,
and she reacted more concerned than us, asking who it was that said this, so she could do something
about it. Nothing ever happened, as far as I know. I let it go quickly, like an unwanted piece of
trash that would just litter my brain.

The one private school I have attended and grown accustomed to was not exempt from
racism, though these incidents happen more subtly. Microaggressions, they termed it, in our
weekly advisory class. Not necessarily bad intentions, but inherently racist. Out of the above
learning environments, my school has the least Asians; I’d only ever had three Asian teachers who
weren’t teaching Mandarin.

Microaggressions can be so subtle, so small, so convenient to shoo away the first time. So
when it first happened, I didn’t make much of it—a quiz being handed back to me, an unfamiliar
name scribbled at the top, with handwriting too neat to be mine, curly and slanted. Across the

room, the sound of my other Asian classmate hesitantly saying, “I think you gave me the wrong
quiz...?” Immediately we knew—we laughed, switched papers, a quick apology, everything was
good. Until it happened several more times. When I spoke about this incident in advisory, another
classmate recognized the situation too. At the end of the period, after all the students dispersed out
the stuffy room, my advisor came up to me, asked me who this teacher was, and I told her. And I
waited. And nothing ever happened. I felt a dent, a scar, and everything wasn’t quite “good” like
it used to be: normal; unquestioning.

The challenge of being a minority has gone over my head for the majority of my short life,
and sometimes still does. Being a mixed Asian—Filipino and Chinese—never occupied my
thoughts until recently. Perhaps it is because I live in one of the most famous cities, diverse, rich
with cultures and identities that are natural to me. Within this Big Apple I had nibbled ever so
slightly, tasting only the sweet parts, until others carved it out a little more, and I could see the
hole-hidden worms, bruises rotting the fruit. Maybe it’s because I go to an elite private school that
it took me so long to start breaking down the wall, with others too, trying to figure out the
challenges that go on in the daily life of a minority, even though I am the minority. I am just
waiting for these intruders to start piling my room of a mind later on in life, filling the floor so I
can barely walk around my thoughts. When I tell them to leave, to exit, each intruder will still
SLAM the door lightly, but by the time all the intruders have left, the door is held steady by only
one screw. It may be awhile before this happens, as I continue to shoo away the intruders. For now
I am just waiting for the door to break down, because with all the environments I have experienced,
I have a strong, gut feeling. The door will truly be demolished, and the intruders will flood in.