For ten long, irritating years, my husband begged me to move to the Duluth area. Before last summer when I had finally given in (at which point, it was my idea – not his – so it was okay), I had two major objections to the move:
- “It’s too COLD!” (To which I follow up post-move with… I was right; it is SO MUCH COLDER here than I could have imagined.)
- “It’s not diverse enough.” (Well, it’s not, and there’s not much I can do about that.)
Winter has never been my favorite season, and wanting me to move to a place where winter lasts half the year, well, he must have thought me to be crazy (I wasn’t, at least at that point). However, the cold wasn’t my biggest chip to play in the game of move or not move to Duluth. Diversity – now that piece has no equal, no logical defense… check and mate. Diversity, or the lack thereof, is my biggest hot button issue in life. Why? I was adopted from Korea to a small town in Wisconsin when I was the ripe old age of one-and-a-half. While I could not have chosen for myself better adoptive parents, I would probably have chosen a more diverse community in which to grow up in.
Imagine being one of two non-white kids growing up in an overly bleached town. Did bad things happen? They didn’t… until they did – in high school when the older boys racially taunted my adopted Korean friend and me… daily… relentlessly and without remorse. When it was time for college, I fled to the city and the racial anonymity it offered… and I held fast to the colorful ground.
Because I had been forever traumatized as a child, when I had my own racially unique children, I became even more sensitive to the emotional triggers that could lead to the pain that I swore to protect them from – at all costs.
It wasn’t just high school, racially ignorant comments have followed me my whole life. All I ever wanted to be was blonde haired with blue eyes… just like everyone else. To blend in to normalcy was a dream I would never realize. Any visit to a small or rural town would result in staring or strange comments like, “Look dad, a Chinese girl!” or “You should speak English if you live in this country!” (Yes, that old lady scolded me for I’m not sure what reason! I don’t even speak Korean, and I have zero accent – not even a Minnesotan one, ya sure you betcha!) Each one of these comments is like a shard of shrapnel that can never be removed… they hurt then, and they hurt now.
While it is not easy for me to write about my struggles, I feel a responsibility to my children to speak out about race issues in smaller communities… and the underlying fear that I hold for my innocent babies.
In trying to quell my rational or irrational fears about moving here, people would tell me, “No one will pick on your kids for being half Asian… people aren’t like that anymore; it’s 2017.” Yes, they are. And it only takes one person to scar you for life.
I thought I had my mindset and my fears in check when we made the move. My kids were adjusting well, and weeks went by without any racially-charged encounters. People seemed to accept me and my children just like we were like any other family. Then one day, a repairman came to our new home and made a comment that brought it all racing back… enter severe anxiety and nausea-filled panic attacks that woke me at 3am and forced me to seek professional medical help.
So… I guess I was still worried for my children. Did I make the wrong choice in moving here? What would happen to them? Would they tell me if someone teased them for being different? How bad would it or could it get? Would they grow up to blame me for their childhood trauma? It was these questions that started to drive me to actual insanity. What had I done?
For a mother, seeing your child in pain is the absolute worst torture on the planet… and all I could envision was their faces after it would inevitably happen… and it would be my fault for moving them here. I knew one day I would make a decision that would screw them up somehow – and this was it.
Summer went by all too quickly, but the panic lingered on into the fall. When school started, and it was time to meet the teacher and tour the school, I approached the event with trepidation… Unable to concentrate, I tried to breathe my way through the anxiety-filled hours. When we got back home, my husband pointed out to me that there were at least three other children of color in my son’s first grade class, and I was shocked. I didn’t remember seeing any, but I didn’t remember much other than trying to hold back the nausea while pretending to look normal and keep my kids from destroying the classroom.
Once I was able to process my oldest son’s newest environment, I started to feel better. My anxiety was caused by the terror I felt for my children, and I knew I couldn’t protect them forever from every hurt, but maybe there was a greater chance that the hurt wouldn’t be from racial bullying.
Because bullying is such a major issue these days, my hope is that there are processes in place to prevent or stop it before it could get to the point that still haunts me. The potential for this issue to become reality makes me want to enroll my sons in the most aggressive form of martial arts or to encase them in giant bubbles for the remainder of their lives, but that’s not reality… that’s not living.
It took me over 20 years to come to appreciate the beauty in my differences, to love and to embrace who I was and not who I thought I should be. My philosophy now is that if I’m going to stick out, I’m going to stick out big time – Go Big, or Go Home! (Thus the amount of flamboyant in my wardrobe). Bullies can’t hurt me now because I’m a strong person who is confident in who she is (and I’m no longer the quiet, mousy wallflower I used to be)… but they can still hurt my boys.
The more people I meet here, however, the more I’ve begun to think that overall the people here are the nicest I’ve ever met (which I contribute to the fact that people who live here WANT to live here; they don’t HAVE to live here). And ironically, I have more racially colorful friends (well, more friends in general even) here in the Duluth area than I did back in the cities, a fact that I am beyond thrilled about. Each of these mothers that I can bond with over this rare commonality helps me to create a strong support system should any racial hardship ever materialize.
Being a mother is such an enormous responsibility with feelings of guilt and hesitation behind every decision made with the very best of intentions. Now that I’m back to being my normal confident (and sane) self, I understand that I will not be able to protect my children from every bully or every life lesson they will learn the hard way, but I will always be there to encourage them to be proud of who they are, to embrace the way they look, and to love them unconditionally… no matter what life throws their way.
