In a recent post, Scarred Discrimination, I touched on the topic of prejudice and difference. Prejudice and difference have appeared in my life in all sorts of forms, from living in low income neighborhoods and personally seeing distrust from race to race, to living in high income neighborhoods and seeing the dynamic between the have and have-nots.
Personally, in my eyes, my own greatest prejudice was imperfection.
In high school, I had a book assigned to me called The House on Mango Street. It’s written in the perspective of a young girl, who writes diary-like entries painting a picture of her life. Reflecting back on the themes of this book, it’s apparent why it resonated with me so much, as my parents were first generation immigrants from China and the book covers the life of immigrants.
I had an assignment to write in the style of the book. I wish I could find the essay I wrote, as even today I feel proud of what I wrote. The book captured a very whimsical, child-like wonder while being very observational, as any immigrant child would be. It’s easy to spot the differences when everyone claims to be normal and you are the one claimed to be different.
With a mix of prose and poetry, I wrote about grass in the sidewalks. When I was younger, I lived in a poor neighborhood with some unkempt yards, some poor sidewalks. I remember being so fond of lines and shapes as a kid, and I would always avoid cracks in the sidewalks. Before I even heard the child’s tale of cracking our mother’s back, I was skipping around sidewalks fast and slow and I always noticed the spaces between each block.
And that is how I always noticed grass in the sidewalks. I noticed cracks, breaks, spaces, and all the imperfections. I remember seeing adults weed whacking, mowing, and even hand removing undesirable landscaping. Wouldn’t it be in everyone’s interest if I helped remove all the grass in the sidewalks?
STOMP. STOMP. STOMP. I wrote. I remember even as a teenager I really tried capturing the author’s voice and her child-like perspective.
Surely just one child passionately stomping around sidewalks could not accomplish much in the name of decimation. Yet that was a true story. I would skip all spaces and cracks, but I would always walk on any vegetation growing out of the pavement. I had been taught by my parents and by my environment, that perfection and imperfection were blatant and obvious to all.
Now, were other kids obsessively destroying things that didn’t match up? No. Were my Asian parents particularly obsessed with perfectionism and othering? Yeah, kind of. This theme of perfection and othering would appear throughout my life, starting with my childhood all the way through my adulthood.
In a previous post, I covered the process and reasoning of subduing culture to assimilate. Is that not similar to stomping out grass to embrace conformity? The ability to blend in is an act of perfection.
There are a lot more themes I’ll cover in the future, such as prejudice towards ourselves and indifference to difference. And the actual, real topic of sidewalks and their design.
Leadership, Design, Writing 