Emily Tran

I don’t think there has ever been a moment in time since I moved to Georgia in 2007 that I haven’t had my physical appearance on my mind. I grew up in New Jersey, where my family was the only Asian family in the town, surrounded by white people, and I never realized this until I grew up and understood race. As a child, I didn’t think there was anything that made me different because my face and skin were different from my friends, and I didn’t think it would make a difference until I finally moved to Cumming, Georgia, where I again went to another majority white school, only this time, in a more conservative atmosphere. Sure, I had learned about slavery in schools in New Jersey, but I never heard the “n-word” or even heard of the slur until then. I hadn’t realized how much people cared about race until the year later, when Barack Obama was elected president. In the north, I never experienced or witnessed any acts of racism, I was all but aware of society’s stereotypes, but in Georgia, I was consistently battered with some form of the question “what are you?” within the first 30 minutes of meeting someone new, which I found insulting because that very question implies that I am something other than normal because of my ancestry, it had a demeaning, dehumanizing tone to it. My appearance serves as my first impression, and my first impression already sets me as “different” than normal.