Performing Yellowness

July kicked itself into August, and afternoon tailgated into evening. My skin was so covered with sand you could press a handprint on my back and the whole thing felt slightly bleached and dry. I left the beach and went from JFK Street to the Square to meet a friend I hadn’t seen for a while. We were cliché and grabbed boba and headed over to the Charles. I told him about this girl I saw in a fiction reading once who started reciting something about a boba shop. The shop was the center of this neighborhood because all the kids congregated there and the owner would hire the kids and the kids would leave the town and when they got older they would still remember the shop. She killed it, I said. He said, what about all the Asian kids who don’t like boba? What are they gonna like, I said, coffee?

But truth was that not all yellow kids liked boba, and truth was that not all yellow kids wanted yellow the way I wanted it. And truth was if I looked a little more into my life, I hadn’t always been so explicit either. In my town, you knew how to line your monolids and play Ninja while waiting for the bus, but that wasn’t every town, and by tenth grade I was still justifying why all the characters I wrote about were white and ate mac and cheese for dinner and went to football games. I still didn’t know about the other side of the railroad tracks, the sugar plantations. Once, a friend told me that he didn’t choose to be yellow so he didn’t have to do much to put a stake in it, and that for him, it was a simple switch, you were either yellow inside or you were not, and he was not and I was. He suggested that maybe his apathy had to do with his white-as-cream town and the fact I read history books, and maybe it had to do with his non-immigrant parents and my freshly planed ones. He felt his motherland forced herself on him. At that time I could agree and now I can’t. At that time I thought color was what you did. Now I know it’s what you are.

How could you not feel your yellowness was imposed on you? And how could you not see the performance of it? Because you noticed that yellow people were different from the you under your skin. Because there were questions on yellowness, on how to be yellow and smart, yellow and beautiful, yellow and proud, that performances couldn’t answer. There were voids you could not un-see. You wanted to know about the anomalies. What happened to yellow artists, to yellow kids that only spoke English and liked McDonald’s, to yellow people without food or Chinese school or motherlands to back them up? How yellow were you if you didn’t care about the vapid yellow man on the TV screen, if you were not an immigrant or a child of one, if you were not angry? What if your soul was not made of the East, Confucianism, Buddhism?

One day you saw your father, who was smaller, quieter than everyone else’s father, and did not see the man that loved you more than his own home, that chose you over his own comfort, but instead, something yellow, something timid. And you believed, though you did not admit, that his timidity was his yellowness, that his smallness was his yellowness, and you promised not to be small or timid. One day you learned words your mother could not pronounce and did not see the woman who both gave you life and gave her life to you. You saw, instead, her ineloquence, her inability, and believed that her ineloquence was her yellowness, her inability was her yellowness. One day you dreamt your eyes blue and your hair curled but woke up instead with eyes still brown and hair still straight. You deemed your features uninteresting, your appearance unbeautiful. You stood at the mirror and observed that the person in front of you was timid, small, ineloquent, unable, uninteresting, unbeautiful, because the person in front of you was yellow, but still, you refused to believe that you were this. Because even if you thought yellowness was unworthy, you refused to believe you were unworthy.

So here, you separated yourself from your yellowness, claiming that yellowness was an imposition, a social construct, clinging onto this supposition for your worthiness. You defined yourself based on what you were not. Your energy was spent determining what others thought of you and countering each imagined blow with your real mind, your physical body. You attempted to love yourself, but loving yourself depended directly on negating the slant of your eyes, the curve of your skin. You claimed China over yellowness, Vietnam over yellowness, places you had been to once or twice, but sometimes you did not even do that. You were anything but yellow in any place but this place. And this was forgivable until it wasn’t.

Because here was the heart. Your yellowness was not what you believed it was. It was not and had never been timidity or ineloquence, inability or servitude. Instead, it was your own unwillingness to look at yourself. It lay in that constructed disconnect between the inside and outside of your skin, the one that you believed was so essential to understanding yourself. You had forgotten that the schism was not real, that it was something you made to combat your imagined affliction—your yellowness. You had forgotten that you were yellow the way other people were white or black. You forgot that yellow was not yours to disown, but yours to claim. You were yellow not by accident but by conception.

My boss this summer talked about Dean Nohria’s pledge to double the amount of HBS case studies featuring women protagonists, ten percent to twenty. Think about it, she said. Eighty percent of classes are taught via case studies, and forty percent of our students our females. You could go through an entire class without discussing a single woman in business, she said. That must do something to the way you imagine yourself, she said, going into a profession and believing no one looks like you. I must have looked skeptical because she stopped talking, but really, I was thinking about how small you could feel if you had to make your own rules. You had to cut off a forest with an axe.

What if you went into life believing no one else looked like you? My yellow friends were artists-turned-pre-med and pre-med-but-not-that-kind and sorority girls and woke social justice warriors and computer science geeks and writers-but-not-really, so I knew it was hard to trail blaze, to be yourself if every model that looked like you had a qualification. So I told her yes. Yes, stories made an impact. Yes, life has an interesting way of imitating exactly what it sees.

Christina M. Qiu '19 lives in Mather House. Her column appears on alternate Wednesdays.