We talked for a few minutes. She told me that she’d had a plan to join the Navy out of high school, but that fell apart because her knees were bad. She told me that she’d just finished working a 12 hour shift on a food truck. She told me that she’d moved to New York for no reason, just to get out of Kansas. “But I’m so glad I came,” she said.
I wish people wouldn’t just see me as the Asian girl who beats everyone up, or the Asian girl with no emotion. People see Julia Roberts and Sandra Bullock in a romantic comedy, but not me. You add race to it, and it became, ‘Well she’s too Asian’, or ‘She’s too American’. I kind of got pushed out of both categories. It’s a very strange place to be. You’re not Asian enough and then you’re not American enough.