THREAD: My law firm is publishing something I wrote to its internal webpage. Here it is in thread form:

I was four years old when I realized I was different.

My first day of school and I spoke the wrong language, wore the wrong clothes, and brought with me a sack lunch that had all the wrong food.

The other kids made fun of me for my strange looking outfit (from Korea) with words I only heard when my parents spoke only at the grocery store or when grandma and I watched Sesame Street.

I cried on the bus that day, while whispering words that felt like pebbles in my mouth: “apple,” “banana,” and “girl,” I whispered to the tear-stained face staring back at me in the windowpane.

At 9, the kids on the playground chanted, “Chinese, Japanese, dirty knees” while slanting their eyes up and then down, and all I could think to say was, “what rhymes with Korean?”

When I was 12 years old, the boy I liked called me a dumb “chink.” It wasn’t the first time that word had been thrown at me, nor the last, but it was the most memorable.

In college, I treated my entire creative writing class to a traditional Korean meal—kimbap (Korean rolls) and kimchi. One of the students put his hand to his nose, and whispered, “God, the smell.”

That day, I wrote a short story about the time I hurled, “I’m not Korean, I’m American!” to my mother, the look on her face of both resignation and shock, as if she always knew I’d disown her but perhaps not so soon.

Fifteen years later, while writing a brief really late at night at the office, a colleague strolled by to check in before she left. Holding her briefcase to her chest, she grinned when I told her I wouldn’t leave before sending her a draft,

then made a joke about some TV show, one I’d never heard of. She said, “You’ve never heard of it?” When I shook my head and smiled, she replied, “God, you’re so Korean.”

And I kept smiling.

I walk out the door of my apartment, turn to my left, turn to my right. I sit down on the backseat of the bus to get to work and wonder if the person who just got up and moved to another seat did so because

I look a bit too much like the Kung Flu and hate that this thought exists, that it is now something I need to consider.

When people say, “Well, your English is excellent,” I want to answer, “Of course it is. Not because I was born and raised in Chicago, Illinois, but because I spent half my life trying to erase the things that made me different. Because I learned that being different wasn’t safe.”

People have asked me repeatedly how I feel when I wake up to another photograph of another elderly Asian woman with a black eye, a broken lip, see footage of another Asian man with bruises flowering cross his face, a face that looks a lot like my father’s face.

They ask me how I felt when I learned the names of the women who died in Atlanta, the three-syllabled names that still rolled off my tongue as naturally as my mother’s name, my aunt’s name.

And I tell them that they’re asking the wrong question. They should ask me how I felt when all of it—the violence, the brutality, the fear—was described on television by a man in uniform as the culmination of “a bad day.”

I was reminded, being different isn’t safe.

But then, I thought of the time I was 9 years old and my father introduced me to his typewriter and dropped a sheaf of handwritten pages in my lap. “You type this,” he said tersely. That was the day I became my father’s typist, spellchecker, and translator.

Soon, I would graduate to being his advocate with the bank, the insurance company, or anyone else who thought it might be easy to pull one over on him because he had a thick accent.

As a young lawyer, when my next-door neighbor said, “you people are ruining the neighborhood,” I stood rooted to the pavement that joined our homes, and looked her squarely in the face as I said, “What a racist thing to say,” thinking of my father who lived just a few doors down.

I think of these things now and realize, it’s my differences that can make me powerful.