Banana

I was a banana and I didn't know it. This realization came to me when I was about twelve or thirteen. I was blithely living my life full of the usual pre-teen angst, pre-pubescent teen-idol crushes and general fuzzy-headedness of that age.For the most part, I thought I was just like my friends. But I wasn't.

I wrote the above for a prompt at First 50 Words. It got me thinking about how long it took me to realize my own banana-ness.

Banana: An Asian person who acts like they are white. Yellow on the outside, white on the inside.

I had never heard banana used this way until I was in university where, thankfully, I was exposed to a much broader experience. I was raised in a WASP community. In my graduating class of approximately five hundred, fewer than a dozen were non-white. I can probably name them now: Ellen, Nirmal, Linda, Bob, Bev, Doug, Ed, Chuck, Sonny, and another Ellen.

I always knew something was off – the snickered racial slurs, the outright snubbing by certain people, the condescension, surprise at my non-mathematical mind. But I could never quite figure it out. I never heard other non-white students speak of similar experiences. Mostly, I thought it was a flaw in myself. I naively felt I was like everyone else. I liked the same music, the same movies; I had the same crushes on the same teen idols of the day; I even dressed the same.

What I didn't realize was that I was viewing myself from the inside out and everyone else was looking at me from the outside in. What they saw was a little Asian girl. And of course, that's what they reacted to first.

It was one of those defining aha! moments when I heard the word banana used to describe Asians. I didn't think of the negative connotation – i.e. that I was denying my Asian-ness and pretending or acting white. It was more about validation of why I felt the way I did and how others reacted to me.

Later on, I thought about the negative implications of the term and, at first, hated it, then realized it was yet another misinterpretation of the inner me. My grandparents had instilled in me a tremendous pride of my heritage that a slangy definer wasn't about to change.

Over the years, I've come to terms with the fact that others, both Asian and non-Asian, are often startled by what they discover if they bother to scratch the surface.

But this holds true for anybody. It's a case of the old saying, "Don't judge a book by it's cover."


xxxx

What's so funny?

“Look at those bear feet! They’re bare!”

He's looking at me like I'm nuts. He doesn't get it. Not even a groan. He really doesn't get it. Maybe he'll never get it – my weird, off the wall, blurtings - what I think is funny.

But he's so nice! Nice guys don’t come around all that often; or if they do, the rest of the package ain’t so hot - the package with wife and two kids.

Let's see. He's kind. He's a gentleman. He's gainfully employed. He's single. But - and it's a big but - he has no sense of humour. At least not my kind of humour. I like to laugh. I need to laugh. What if we could never laugh together? What kind of relationship would that be?

Don't get me wrong, I don't spend my life thinking everything is full of yuks. I also happen to be a pretty big cry-baby. I cry over practically anything that moves me.

Now, that's another thing, he never knows what to do when I cry at a movie. He'll mumble an uncomfortable, are you okay, without looking me in the eye or ask in bewilderment, you think that's sad; what's sad about it? It doesn't seem to matter that I've told him it's just the way I am and there's nothing he can do, except maybe hand me a tissue.

No sense of humour. No empathy. This is doomed!

"Wait, that was a pun wasn't it? I get it. Bear feet. Bare feet. You're very funny, you know that?"



The First 50 Words of this began here.

Shadows

Shadows.
I'm not afraid
of dark and light
flickering on the walls
of black cats
and shadow people
poltergeists and ghosts
campfire, Halloween and Grimm's tales
unbidden from the mind and
things that go bump in the night.

I'm not afraid.
They disappear at first light

Don't they?

For First 50 Words

What are you doing?

“Nothing.”

“There’s no such thing as doing nothing.”

“I’m just reading.”

“There. You see? That’s not nothing. Reading is something.”

“Okay, okay. I’m not doing nothing. I’m doing something; and that something is reading. Happy now?”

“I only asked a simple question. Why can’t you just answer a simple question?”

Lately, all their arguments started like this.


For First 50 Words

If my life were a dance - First 50 Words

If my life were a dance it would be a free-form interpretative dance; a go with the flow, make it up as you go kind of dance. It would be adaptational and look a little like Isadora Duncan meets Twyla Tharp and American Ballet Theatre.

See more from First 50 Words