i spent a lot of my childhood trying to figure out what i looked like.  i didn’t see myself in the media much, and as one of only a handful of people of color in an otherwise predominantly white lower-middle class town, i didn’t have much to compare myself with.  my features disqualified me from fitting into the spectrum of ugly to frumpy to cute to hot that was used to measure the white girls; i felt like an anomaly, something other and hard to place.

it’s shit for little girls out there, and i certainly don’t mean to imply it’s healthy or good for children to compare themselves with others, or for anyone to quantify beauty.  but it’s also easy to feel like an odd ghost when there’s almost no one around who looks like you.  to fixate on the features that make you a freak, to scrutinize what could be the problem with you—because there must be a problem, right?  

the thing was, when i looked in the mirror i liked my face!  i liked my hair, and i liked my teeth, and i even liked my chinky nose, which somehow i had learned i wasn’t supposed to like.  if i am honest, i thought i was pretty fucking gorgeous, but no one ever confirmed this.  sometimes white girls would sigh over my hair (extend greasy hands, try to pet it), tell me how lucky i was to be asian, which was naturally the only way to explain my small waist, little feet.  but this just made me feel gross, and condescended to, and hateful.  and i began to doubt, to wonder if maybe and i was seeing something no one else could see, or perhaps wasn’t there at all.