Sculptor Jacques Lipchitz once said, "Cubism is like standing at a certain point on a mountain and looking around. If you go higher, things will look different; if you go lower, again they will look different. It is a point of view." With this in mind, describe a moment when your perspective changed.
***Please not that I have removed the town and school names.
My hometown is one of those close-knit, rural towns where people would comment about how big I've grown or that they liked my family's yearly Thanksgiving card whenever I went to church or the grocery store. One of those towns where neighbors are extensions of family, and they always look out for one another. In my homogenous community of two thousand villagers, there were only a handful of minorities.
As I grew older, it dawned on me that I was different. I was not like the others, I was not white. I had darker hair, eyes, and skin than my peers, courtesy of my parents, who emigrated to the US from the Philippines when they were students. In my middle school of about one hundred students per grade, I was the only "Asian kid". Because of these differences, I thought that I was somehow "special". I wore my ethnicity with pride, espousing "Filipino pride" by celebrating historical and contemporary Filipino national heroes like Jose Rizal and Manny Pacquiao.
It was not until later that I realized I knew nothing about being Filipino.
When I moved to CT, I enrolled in the local high school for my sophomore year. I was impressed by its statistics - there were over two thousand students and many of them are ethnic minorities. It was such a stark contrast to Rouses Point and I excitedly anticipated meeting people of all different races, especially "fellow Asians".
I soon met some "Asian kids" in the first few weeks of school. I was shocked by how different they were to me. Most of them spoke another language at home. I could speak only one language: English. They ate ethnic foods at home. I hardly ever ate Filipino food.
Was I truly one of them? Did race and ethnicity decide my identity? Or was my identity determined by experiences, living situations, and upbringing? From what I experienced, the latter proved to be true. Even though I was ethnically "Asian", I was more similar to those of my hometown.
***Please not that I have removed the town and school names.
My hometown is one of those close-knit, rural towns where people would comment about how big I've grown or that they liked my family's yearly Thanksgiving card whenever I went to church or the grocery store. One of those towns where neighbors are extensions of family, and they always look out for one another. In my homogenous community of two thousand villagers, there were only a handful of minorities.
As I grew older, it dawned on me that I was different. I was not like the others, I was not white. I had darker hair, eyes, and skin than my peers, courtesy of my parents, who emigrated to the US from the Philippines when they were students. In my middle school of about one hundred students per grade, I was the only "Asian kid". Because of these differences, I thought that I was somehow "special". I wore my ethnicity with pride, espousing "Filipino pride" by celebrating historical and contemporary Filipino national heroes like Jose Rizal and Manny Pacquiao.
It was not until later that I realized I knew nothing about being Filipino.
When I moved to CT, I enrolled in the local high school for my sophomore year. I was impressed by its statistics - there were over two thousand students and many of them are ethnic minorities. It was such a stark contrast to Rouses Point and I excitedly anticipated meeting people of all different races, especially "fellow Asians".
I soon met some "Asian kids" in the first few weeks of school. I was shocked by how different they were to me. Most of them spoke another language at home. I could speak only one language: English. They ate ethnic foods at home. I hardly ever ate Filipino food.
Was I truly one of them? Did race and ethnicity decide my identity? Or was my identity determined by experiences, living situations, and upbringing? From what I experienced, the latter proved to be true. Even though I was ethnically "Asian", I was more similar to those of my hometown.
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