Confessions of a Twinkie

I've asked God a million times why I was born Asian.  I hated growing up with my darker features in a sea of beautiful blond, blue-eyed friends.  My mom said that I used to sit in front of the mirror as a 5-year-old trying to stretch my eyes open to make them look like everyone else's.  Pitiful, I know.

Embracing my ethnicity meant that I had to embrace being different.  There was too much pain associated with my culture that I couldn't fully allow myself to celebrate who God created on the outside.  Through the years, I assimilated as best as I could, making lots of Caucasian friends, refusing to speak Korean, trying to avoid the older Asian folks that stare at you and follow you around wherever you are to see if you're related to them. (My Asian friends know EXACTLY what I'm talking about!)

When my oldest daughter started kindergarten, the school hosted a Multicultural Night to celebrate the diverse demographic of the school.  I told her we were not participating; what was there to celebrate?  But the more she asked me about it, the more I was confronted with my own strange self-hatred.  Why couldn't I celebrate being Korean?  Why was she so proud of it?  Would I let my painful memories of discrimination in the past keep my own children from embracing who they are?

I decided to put together a little display and participate in the Multicultural Night representing South Korea, just to appease my daughter.  She loved every minute of it, and there was true joy and pride in her eyes as she wore the traditional Korean han-bok that night in front of her teachers and friends.  As I watched her glowing with excitement, I realized that God was going to use my beautiful half-Korean, half-German daughter to finally change the way I saw myself.

This year I was asked to help our school celebrate its cultural diversity and come up with ideas on how to make our school more inclusive, representing its changing demographic.  My initial thought (which I kept to myself) was, "NO WAY!!  Don't you know I'm a white girl inside???"  But instead, I politely said I'd think about it.  And I did- I prayed hard about it too.  I really felt a struggle because I knew if I opened this door, I was going to have to deal with my own junk.  But you know what?  It's time.  I'm 36 years old; I need to stop shaking my fist at God asking Him why He made me the way He did, and start seeing myself as a beautiful creation, not in spite of my ethnicity, but because of it.

I attended my first PTA Leadership conference in Austin, TX last weekend and looked for another Asian in the crowd of hundreds of representatives from across the state.  Not one.  I realized that there is a huge lack of participation from the East Asians, South Asians, and Europeans in the PTA for various reasons discussed during break-out sessions.  What better way to encourage them to be an integral part of the school family than to volunteer as a representative myself?  I know how it feels to be the outsider, the one who doesn't fit in, whose broken English prohibits interaction with others.  And then it suddenly struck me- if it weren't for the way I looked, I might not have as much of an impact in this role!  It may be that my darker features make others like me feel more at ease to get connected, finding their unique place to serve in the school.  It's taken a long time to get to this place of being comfortable in my own skin, but I am grateful to have found a measure of acceptance that I never thought I'd have.  I'm still a twinkie:  white on the inside, but I no longer hate the yellow on the outside!