Currently listening to Yellow Rage. My blog name was taken from a line in this spoken word piece. I wish I could post a copy of "I'm A Woman, Not a Flava," but unfortunately, the copies on Youtube are not very good. I suppose I'm constantly searching for other people who can articulate some of the things that I feel or have felt as an Asian North American woman. You consistently occupy this weird, liminal space in which you are split between two places, two identities, but never feel whole or that you belong. I suppose this all sounds cliche (because, the living on the hyphen is a re-occuring them for diasporic folks of colour), but I don't know, I guess there's always been this part of me that has been inconsolably lonely and wonder if my life would have been different if I grew up in a more multicultural city where other folks of colour live. I suppose the multicultural metropolis has its fair share of own fair share of problems. But, even if folks were still as racist, I'd at least have other folks that I wouldn't have to explain everything to... Looks of sympathy and expressions of not knowing exactly what to say would be looks of empathy and understanding. I guess I just find myself listening to things like Yellow Rage and being like, "hell yeah, THIS, THIS is how I feel," and end up feeling both simultaneously validated and less alone, but at the same time extremely upset that I've spent my life being outside of these communities and  feeling isolated within communities where I'm the one person of colour that people interact with on a regular basis... And I'm not saying that I don't love and appreciate the white friends that I have and that they don't have my back or try their hardest to provide support and solidarity... it's just that some things cannot be articulated. At least, I haven't found best way to articulate these things to them (a la Yellow Rage).

Every time I see a person of colour (and especially an East Asian woman), I immediately want to know them. I want to know where they're from, their ethnicity, if they speak the same languages that were lost between my own generations. I wonder if I'm pulling the same exoticizing bullshit by being so fascinated with them, but then I realize that it's something else... It's not that I want to know them (in that weird colonizing way) and pigeonhold them into a category of "Other" (like white people do when they want to know "where you're from), it's that I'm looking for sameness. And then I feel shy and nine times out of ten, I'll look away.