I guess this falls under Prompt 6: topic of your choice.
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It was a sweltering and humid mid-August day, or so I've been told, when my parents were in the customs line, eager yet apprehensive to see what lay awaiting them outside the airport. My mother was gently swaying a baby version of myself and my father was fanning cold air into the face of my then-six-year-old brother. We had just disembarked a fifteen hour flight from New Delhi, India, and the exhaustion took shape in sagging wrinkles and darkened faces. I was an eight-month-old, Indian, Muslim baby come from foreign land with an American visa - a fairly odd and rare combination, to say the least. Growing up in Grand Rapids and attending elementary school in the white, conservative suburbs of Michigan was a medley of quiet and awkward. At seven years old, I failed to understand why my parents had to pick for me the most challenging name in the baby book. I could not understand why I was the only kid in my entire school with dark brown skin and jet black hair. My family celebrates neither Christmas, nor Halloween, and we really don't do sleepovers either - all of which my friends were crazy about. I stuck out like a sore thumb and often found myself shoveling for excuses every time I had to miss a sleepover or Halloween party. At that young and naive age, I was stuck at the forefront of cultural assimilation and just wished I could be "normal".
Through the course of middle school, with maturity naturally came acceptance. It was not so much an acceptance of who I am as much as it was an acceptance of an obstinate problem. India was where I finally came to terms with my conflict. During the summer after ninth grade, I spent one month working in a hospital for the underprivileged in the heart of India. Because I had visited India dozens of times before that particular trip, I was not particularly appalled by the squalid sanitary conditions or the patients lying on the floor, or even the young homeless boy doing his business in the courtyard - I came to terms with all of those infrastructural shortcomings when I was young. What did change my outlook was the false perception that the rest of the world had of a country like India. Somewhere between visiting two patients and being inspired to better the conditions, I wondered if the rest of the world actually looked beyond the poor medical standards and took notice of the country's vibrant traditions and cultural diversity. Did the average American ever really take the time to admire the nose tingling aromas of a cuisine older than India itself? I was inundated with passion and became increasingly defensive for a culture that I had never truly embraced myself. Back in Michigan, I did not feel the need to assimilate. I realized that I had rejected my true self for so long and tried so hard to blend in that I tried to become a different person. Never once did it occur to me how beautiful and individual my name actually is, even if everyone says it wrong. I degraded myself and my culture by ever yearning to get rid of my uniqueness. Beauty - if I know anything about it - is about standing out and embracing the differences, of which I am now proud to have many. Even still, I am concerned to see family friends and neighbors of diverse ethnic backgrounds suppressing their true beauty every single day at school and with their friends. I do not blame them for shrinking in the face of an intimidating majority, but rather, I hope that it does not take them 15 years to come to the same conclusion that I did.
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It was a sweltering and humid mid-August day, or so I've been told, when my parents were in the customs line, eager yet apprehensive to see what lay awaiting them outside the airport. My mother was gently swaying a baby version of myself and my father was fanning cold air into the face of my then-six-year-old brother. We had just disembarked a fifteen hour flight from New Delhi, India, and the exhaustion took shape in sagging wrinkles and darkened faces. I was an eight-month-old, Indian, Muslim baby come from foreign land with an American visa - a fairly odd and rare combination, to say the least. Growing up in Grand Rapids and attending elementary school in the white, conservative suburbs of Michigan was a medley of quiet and awkward. At seven years old, I failed to understand why my parents had to pick for me the most challenging name in the baby book. I could not understand why I was the only kid in my entire school with dark brown skin and jet black hair. My family celebrates neither Christmas, nor Halloween, and we really don't do sleepovers either - all of which my friends were crazy about. I stuck out like a sore thumb and often found myself shoveling for excuses every time I had to miss a sleepover or Halloween party. At that young and naive age, I was stuck at the forefront of cultural assimilation and just wished I could be "normal".
Through the course of middle school, with maturity naturally came acceptance. It was not so much an acceptance of who I am as much as it was an acceptance of an obstinate problem. India was where I finally came to terms with my conflict. During the summer after ninth grade, I spent one month working in a hospital for the underprivileged in the heart of India. Because I had visited India dozens of times before that particular trip, I was not particularly appalled by the squalid sanitary conditions or the patients lying on the floor, or even the young homeless boy doing his business in the courtyard - I came to terms with all of those infrastructural shortcomings when I was young. What did change my outlook was the false perception that the rest of the world had of a country like India. Somewhere between visiting two patients and being inspired to better the conditions, I wondered if the rest of the world actually looked beyond the poor medical standards and took notice of the country's vibrant traditions and cultural diversity. Did the average American ever really take the time to admire the nose tingling aromas of a cuisine older than India itself? I was inundated with passion and became increasingly defensive for a culture that I had never truly embraced myself. Back in Michigan, I did not feel the need to assimilate. I realized that I had rejected my true self for so long and tried so hard to blend in that I tried to become a different person. Never once did it occur to me how beautiful and individual my name actually is, even if everyone says it wrong. I degraded myself and my culture by ever yearning to get rid of my uniqueness. Beauty - if I know anything about it - is about standing out and embracing the differences, of which I am now proud to have many. Even still, I am concerned to see family friends and neighbors of diverse ethnic backgrounds suppressing their true beauty every single day at school and with their friends. I do not blame them for shrinking in the face of an intimidating majority, but rather, I hope that it does not take them 15 years to come to the same conclusion that I did.