Appearances

If you took a look at one of my students, could you tell that he comes from a broken family? Can you know just by looking at him that he has had too many painful experiences for what a 13 year old should be allowed to go through? Or can you just tell by looking at that girl, that she lived without both parents for several years and raised her two siblings on her own?

I was walking to school today, something that I've come to do alone. I don't need to walk with Lucky and Steven anymore, since everybody along the way recognizes me and I won't get lost. Right before I reached school, I walked into one of the boys from Standard 7. I always felt a special connection to this kid because his name is, Beck. Yeah, really close to mine.

"Hey Beck, where are you going?"
"Hi, I'm going home."
"Why? I've just gotten to school!"
"My mom died."

How do you freaking respond to that?

At first I thought he was joking because he's the type to kid me around. But one look at his pained eyes said enough. His mom was no longer. And he still had come to school to say hi to me. Sweet kid.

Later I found out that his mom had been sick for two years. I suppose you learn to live with it, to put it past the immediacy of your day. But I never would have guessed what was going on at home. It's just him and his 2 year old sister now. Luckily, his grandma will be there to help him out. I can't imagine the pain he's going through.

The whole incident got me thinking about the how I view myself in Kenya. When you spend even a short amount of time surrounded by a certain type of people, you almost expect to see that in the mirror. I'm so used to seeing dark skin, pearly white teeth, full lips, and the particular Kenyan nose, that I jump a little at my relfection in the mirror. I expect myself to look like them.

When you walk down the street, it's not like a movie, where you're the main character and you can see your life from all angles. No, you are the camera man. Even if you look differently or not, you will never see that until you look in the mirror.

When I was in preschool, I had a really hard time one afternoon. The kids kept making fun of me for being Chinese. They pulled their eyes back so that they couldn't even see out of them. They made noises that did not amount to any sort of familiar language. And I wasn't even Chinese. I got fed up with that treatment and I yelled at them because I couldn't understand why they were being so mean. Instead of seeing our different skin color, eye shape, and hair texture, I just saw that we all had skin, eyes, noes, hair, and all other normal parts of the body.

"We all look the same! Leave me alone!"

And instead of getting better, the taunting got worse.

"You don't look like us, ching chang chong!"

And so my mother found me crying in front of the mirror later that day. It was the first of many of my mother's "Korean pride pep talks", complete with the full history of the Korean War, and how we must stand tall as Korean Americans.

I have that memory replaying in my head as I walk down the streets and hear the same familiar chopped noises meant to be "my language". I keep my head strong as seemingly grown and mature men use their fingers to pull their eyes back as I pass their shop. All they see is that I'm Asian, do they bother to know if I really come from China or Japan or Korea? Do they ever wonder more than if I'm a bag of money or a prostitute? That I am full of experiences that they will never understand? No, and it's the same in reverse. I will never know their full life story, not by just looking at them. It's just that we all think we can do that.

I wonder what I'll start thinking of myself when I plop myself back into white suburbia. It's going to quite an interesting adjustment.

Anyways, I had a fun time with Standard 8 today. We went over problems and I realized that they really need to work on their basic prealgebra skills. They have no concept of working with integers! They kept saying that negative 7 minus six was negative 1. I still have yet to understand the Kenyan academic curriculum. It still boggles me.

You all should be waking up in a few hours, Good morning!

Becky