Nothing made me feel worse than filling in the “Other” bubble during tests, because who was I, really?

Nothing made me feel worse than filling in the “Other” bubble during tests, because who was I, really?

The Tempest
2017-07-06

Meghan Lannoo

I don’t know why I felt a need to choose. I was only cutting myself in half.

My mom calls me hapa.

Everyone else would just call me half; half Asian and half white. Aside from the comments I sometimes receive from fascinated simpletons on how exotic I am (that’s an entirely separate issue), I get asked more often about what I am.

For the longest time, I struggled to answer that question. Whenever I took a scantron test, the questionnaire only specified to mark one ethnicity. This meant I belonged in the Other category.

Being the Other is more than an identity crisis, to me, it is my life…

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