Sam Lai

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The Difference

For colored kids
Who wonder why they hate themselves
In the most basic way there is just one difference
between white boy and asian boy growing up in america
They both have colorblind childhoods
A flurry of white and white

They are both raised on saturday afternoons when they drink in saturday mornings for breakfast
like something warm or homemade
they are both fascinated with space
And the naming of dinosaurs
and the imagining of superheroes
this particular saturday morning
they watch the X-Men and cheer when iceman comes on
he's their favorite they love pretending they're him

After that it's jackie chan adventures
and they laugh neither of them imagines being jackie chan
And so this goes
30,000 saturdays come and go
Cartoons and play dates become saturday night movies and afternoons at the mall
Week after week they watch blue eyed white faced heroes with guns
and abercrombie models without shirts
ivory armani men with women on their arms
A grace gal photograph with just two brilliant eyes in bright blue
they both say I want to be that
I want to be just like that someday
The difference is
One of them can't

Both of them think man and see captain america
Both of them think asian and see wispy beards
and buck teeth, eyes shaped like coin slots and greasy bowl cuts
Both of them think and want and love
both of them imagine a white man standing over them in heaven
both of them imagine a white boy kissing whoever they want to kiss
Both of them imagine a white boy and everything in marble and oil and pixels and prints
And both of them see the asian face peering out of a dark corner
With jaundiced skin and burnt hair
The difference, the difference is asian boy is that face
that boy peering out of the dark
and he hates it just as much as anyone else
White boy can escape
he can look away
but asian boy sees in the mirror every morning of reflections of the store windows in malls
where he watches the ghost of him
Superimposed over pictures of people who look so much more like people

He remembers in ninth grade geometry when white boy flicks him in the ear
Tells him work for me my asian slave boy
How he laughed
How he laughed and swallowed shame
How he wondered how he could do both
Because the difference is asian boy is both
He is mocker and mocked
Oppressor and oppressed
Heal and crush
Cockroach he's the piece of rot in his own teeth
He is always disgusted
There is always a piece of him
Telling him who to hate
It Says it's you
You hate you
You hate
You

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