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Rainbow-Loom Bracelets
Tamanaha, Kim, and Wang. One Japanese, one Korean, and one Chinese. We were all
good friends in elementary school, the only three Asian girls in our grade. We did not need
to share the same interests in sports or hobbies or tastes in rainbow-loom bracelets
because we had the biggest thing in common: appearance. What more reason was there to
be friends other than the fact that we looked the same? Others certainly seemed to think so.
“Are you three triplets?” A boy with his pointer finger two knuckles deep in his nose
had asked us one time.
“No, why?”
“Well, cause like…you guys look like triplets,” he told us matter-of-factly. His hand
rotated as to wiggle around the finger in his nostril. I stared at him. He stared at me. I
shrugged and walked off.
Another time, during recess, a first grader came up to me and Kim and pointed at us.
“Sisters?”
“Nope,” we replied in unison.
At the time, it seemed comical to us because both of our first names were Elise.
“What kind of parents would give their kids the same name!” we would laugh. That laughter
faded off quickly.
Sometimes I wished that I had grabbed the booger-picking boy and shook him,
screaming, “We. Don’t. Look. The. Same!” Maybe I should have cornered him when he was
playing soccer with his two other Caucasian friends and asked, “So, are y’all related or
something?” But then, would that have been hypocritical? Would that have been, in a sense,
cruel?
Perhaps Kim, Wang, and I should have leaned into the joke more and been Thing 1,
2, and 3 for Halloween instead of Disney princesses. Maybe that would have been funny.
Maybe that would have won us first place at our school Halloween costume contest.
But, why should we have to conform to other’s beliefs? Why should we have to laugh
along with their jokes and accommodate their lack of ability to tell our races apart? We are
all so uniquely different inside and out, genetically and spiritually, in ways that no one may
ever be able to tell. This, is our truth.
I never saw Wang again after elementary school, and I never saw Kim after 6th. But, I
had noticed that the older we got, the more we had started to drift apart.
Some might consider it to be a sad thing, to have had tight-knit friends who were
once so close suddenly not be close anymore. That would mean that one day, us three Asian
girls had our last lunch together, our last conversation, and our last “goodbye” to each other
without even knowing it. Eventually, there was the last time we saw each other’s faces.
I do not consider it sad. It may have been unfortunate or impromptu, but never sad.
Because as we grew up, we began to associate ourselves with different interests and
hobbies and tastes in rainbow-loom bracelets. As we grew up, we detached ourselves from
how we looked in other’s eyes and flourished into our own persons. We may have looked
the same to others, but at heart, we were always different.
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Rainbow-Loom Bracelets is a creative nonfiction piece about my experience growing up being one of the three Asian girls in my grade. It shares how no matter how similar we may look to others, everybody is their own unique person.