The beauty of being mixed race: How I learned to love my hapa eyes |
The beauty of being mixed race: How I learned to love my hapa eyes
Today Show
2015-08-12
Samantha Okazaki, Multimedia Producer
“Chinese eyes, Chinese eyes,” the whole table mocked me with their stupid song, pulling at the corners of their eyelids until they were tiny slits; a gross exaggeration of my actual eye shape.
They weren’t being very nice … or creative. I’m not even Chinese.
But 8-year-old me didn’t know how to say that or how to put them in their place. How to tell them that I was born in Japan, but was just as much an American as they were. And that my eyes weren’t a caricature: they were real, they were mine and they were welling with tears.
Instead I wished I could bury myself in my cubby with my baseball cap and glitter pens and never come out. I blamed myself for giving them reason to taunt me. I hated my stupid eyes! I hated how small they were and how skinny. I hated the tic I had developed, a hard deliberate blink that got worse when I was nervous or self-conscious. I hated my dad for giving me my eyes. And I hated being half-Japanese because it meant I looked different than everyone else.
Fast-forward 10 years later. Aside from the tic, which followed me wherever I went, I had pretty much buried all memories of the bullying my eyes had inspired. Then, I moved to the East Coast for college.
I moved away from my hometown that was surprisingly diverse and my friend group that was predominantly mixed race. I unpacked my bags in upstate New York and was greeted with a level of racism I had thought to be extinct…
Read the entire article here.
Tags: Samantha Okazaki, Today Show