Just Because I am A girl

Yes, my consuming desire is to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, barroom regulars—to be a part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording—all this is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always supposedly in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yes, God, I want to talk to everybody as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night…

―Sylvia Plath

Skin

How I wish…

…that time is on my side

looking in the mirror or just old photographs 

How I wish…

…that I will stay the same

despite the illness and all the passing years…

I finger the lines that have appear suddenly, almost overnight on both sides of my mouth. Now I really look like my mother. And my eyes… my eyes lost its luster. They seem tired, disappearing in the folds of my skin. I have nothing to complain, I have heard it so many times. I look better than most people my age. Maybe true but it is me I have to convince.

My skin… has always been fair and smooth, still is. The color of coffee with a lot of milk with pink undertone instead of yellow. I have perpetual blushes on both cheeks. Unusual for my race.

My race… sometimes I wish to be white. Just to experience how it is to belong in something superior. Sometimes I am tired of being treated as a second class citizen. No matter how intelligent, hard working, creative, etc. I might be, I cannot be one of them. I cannot change the color of my skin…

It is who I am. There is nobody I rather be.

I mean it but for you it’s just another cliché

My color I am proud of at least most of the time

Except when treated badly just because__ 

I’m Asian.