Alain Uy
On his personal journey of awakening
—
This is my reality
But in actuality
Whether fact or fiction
Vice or Addiction
Addition
Subtraction
But see math is but a fraction of my life
I’m more of a “Feel the Breeze” human
I’m more of a “Chill with Ease” human
I’m a human proud of my heritage eating suman. But some say who you foolin’
You’re trying to act Black
Wack, not attack with reality
With this hip-hop mentality
Not dressing like your own ethnicity
But I say haven’t we
Had enough of conformity
Conformed by society
Conformed by trying to be
Financially stable
It’s more than a fable
That I’m willing and able
To let my cards down on the table
You try to label me
But the next thing you know
I metamorphosize into a butterfly
And knowing all y'all
You won’t be asking how but why
Stop trying to analyze whether
I’m this or that type of human
Because deep down inside
What does it mean to be Asian-American? And why the fuck should anyone care. I know there was a time in my life where I didn’t give two shits about my heritage. I’m half Filipino and half Chinese, but So. Fucking. What. That’s exactly why I ran away from that question. I felt like no one cared, and I can pinpoint the exact moment in my life where this played out.
I was a nine-year-old immigrant boy, just three years removed from being fresh off the proverbial boat. It took some time, but I finally started to make some friends. One of those friends was a Filipino kid named Michael. In our elementary school, he was one of a few Filipino kids there. So, of course, I gravitated towards him. He gave me a sense of familiarity. He was a reminder of the previous world in which I came from. He gave me a sense of home. But he wasn’t anything like me. He didn’t dress like me. He never got ridiculed for bringing baon to school. And he most certainly didn’t have an accent like me. If it weren’t for his olive skin tone and his pandesal nose, you could say he was as American as apple pie. I looked up to him. I admired him. I envied him.