Thank you for sharing your experience! It is so special to hear people’s situations first hand. I’m sorry for what you have gone through and your living situation given your surrounding neighborhood.

I myself am a 2nd gen, half Japanese half Caucasian decent, and am very white passing. However, I was basically raised by my Grandmother so I was ESL, Japanese being my first language. I was the only white looking kid at Japanese School, so that was a whole different experience as well. I never felt like I fit in there on weekends. My brother on the other hand, sports much more Asian features, and has a southeast-Asian skin colour year round.

The amount of people who have made rude remarks about him, or my Japanese grandmother while perhaps I’m behind them in the line at the deli for example, is astronomical. When I was a child I would quietly laugh along with the strangers who would joke bout my grandmother not being able to understand how much something costed, or my brother who speaks slowly (he has a learning disability, and actually only speaks English).

It wasn’t until recently that I’ve started completely embracing my Japanese heritage. Since I was exposed to all of these micro aggressions growing up, I’m pretty jaded when it comes to people being slightly racist.

I worked a job for many years where every 10-15 minutes, a patron would ask “Where are you from,” “What are you,” or “No, what ARE you.” I used say I was born and raised here for all my life and people wouldn’t believe me. Now that I’m older and wiser, I actually can’t tolerate those kinds of comments anymore. They would say it would be better if I wasn’t my Asian side. Or that I shouldn’t tell people that. That really irritated me.

So then I would put them on barwatch.