Symptoms of  a Poor Girl
I usually post stories about my parents here but this one is a little different. This one is more about the person my parents have help me become.Â
I’ve been waiting to write this because I’m still so mad about it. But it can’t wait.
A few weeks ago someone I considered a friend, not a close friend but a friend still, during one of his usual weekly alcoholic self-obliterations got very upset with me. It is not upsetting to me that he thinks these things about me so much as what he thinks proves to me how truly ignorant and oblivious he really is. We, he, whomever you like, can blame it on his drinking. Really though, we can blame his inability to filter himself on his drunkenness but we cannot use it as an excuse for his ignorance. It’d be too obvious to point out the ways he is ignorant about race and racism. That seems a given as most people are ignorant about race and racism. His ignorance about class and how it interplays with race and citizenship are what really bothered me though.
I won’t go into the details about what led up to this moment but it was about 2 am or later and He said, “I’m going to say the most terrible thing I’ll ever say.”
 “Then don’t say it.”
“This is the most terrible thing I’ll ever say…”
“You’re going to regret this in the morning. If you even remember it.”
“No I’m going to say it,” he closed his eyes and paused very dramatically, “Cindy, you are the most racist person I have ever met.”
I am livid, still. I proceeded to ask him what he might mean by this and what he thinks racism is if he thinks that I am the most racist person he’s ever met.
“The way you talk about white people…” he responded, “you’re so racist.” I asked him what it is that I say about white people that seems so racist to him. He had no real answer. His answer was, “You think you’re the biggest bleeding heart. What makes you think you know better than any of us?” He asked me, “What makes you think you know better than anyone else?” He was referring to my stances on race, racism, gender, class, etc.
I said something along the lines of, “well I have never said I knew better than anyone else but if it’s come off that way… maybe the fact that I’ve grown up different from everyone around me in ways that most others have not.” He then tried something I never thought one of my friends would ever try. He played that “one of my best friends is black” card; he said that he had brought his Asian American girlfriend (ex- now) to Northern Idaho once. He didn’t get a chance to elaborate because I already knew where he was going with it. “Getting to watch white people stare at your minority girlfriend is not the same thing as growing up a minority in an all white town,” I said very loudly. Mind you it was about 2:30 am. Sorry neighbors. “I didn’t grow up a white kid in Corvallis, Oregon, like you did,” I continued, when he cut me off; he was mad that I’d said he grew up a white kid in Corvallis—which he had.
He proceeded by saying what would be the last straw for me. It was a culmination of all the worse things he could misunderstand about me. He said, “When was the last time YOU had to worry about money, Cindy.”
I wonder if you remember everything that happened that night a few weeks ago. I wonder because you were so drunk that you almost got hit by a car and ended up passed out on the grass on the corner of Broadway and Lincoln where two cop cars, an ambulance, and a fire truck came to see if you were okay. I have thought a lot about that night and all the incredibly stupid things you said to me. I’m not mad at all that you feel the way you feel, and really I don’t blame you if this is how you really feel. But I am mad in general. I don’t know if you deny feeling those things now, but either way I don’t really think it matters. What matters is the fact that you were drunk enough to speak your mind to someone you considered a friend on some level. You were drunk enough to keep from filtering yourself the way normal social situations dictate. In that half hour, I learned what ignorance you have locked up in that head of yours—about racism, race, oppression, class, and about me. Do you remember what you said to me? Let me list some of the things you said:
“I am going to say the most terrible thing I could ever say.”
“Cindy, you are the most racist person I have ever met.”
“The way you talk about white people…”
“I took [his Vietnamese American ex-girlfriend] to Northern Idaho once…”
“What makes you think you know better than anyone else.”
“You think you’re the biggest bleeding heart.”
And the thing that pissed me off so bad that I had to leave before I socked you in the face because I was violently angry. I was so livid, J— and this is a feeling I can’t let go of. This is an anger I reserve for very few people in the world. This is a deep anger that I can only feel towards people I actually know and care about because it is so incredibly insulting to me that someone who actually knows me and talks to me can be this way. I don’t feel this type of anger towards people I don’t know because they don’t matter to me much. This terrible, violent, anger, I’m clenching my teeth just thinking about this right now.
You asked me, “When was the last time YOU had to worry about money, CINDY.”
Do you know what this question tells me? I’ve told people about this since and they think that the irony here is that you, yourself, grew up in a well-off home. But that doesn’t even matter in this situation, really because you weren’t saying that you knew better than I did. No you were trying to delegitimize my stance by saying that I wouldn’t know since I’ve never had to worry about money. You were not saying that you never had money, so this isn’t about hypocrisy. This is about what you think you know about me.
If you can ask me a question like this, you know nothing about my history, Vietnamese American history, or my family. You know nothing about the ways race, ethnicity, citizenship, and class are intertwined for someone like me. I don’t blame you for not knowing. You know nothing about it because you were lucky enough to be born into the family you were and into the town you were. Similarly, I don’t have to know or understand what it’s like to escape persecution and execution because I was lucky enough to be born in the USA. I’m not saying that your life has not been wrought full of sadness, hardship, or terribleness of all sorts. I don’t doubt that your life is very hard for you in ways my life has never been hard for me. I guarantee it, in fact. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t know what I’m talking about. I’m not trying to delegitimize YOU the way you were trying to delegitimize ME. Maybe you would know what you were talking about if you thought about it some more, but this doesn’t mean that you can question me on things you are so clearly ignorant of. Let’s not even go into the institutional ways that I “know better than anyone else.” (Okay let’s go into it a little… I have been studying race, class, and gender inequality for my entire adult life, does that give me at least one reason to think I know better than others who have not devoted their lives to understanding these things? Either way, the privilege of getting to devote myself to studying inequality, caring about it, and talking about it to the people I think will be supportive does not delegitimize my stance on these things in any way. Just because I have this privilege, does not mean I know nothing about oppression or am not allowed to talk about oppression and hardship.)
I want you to know, I don’t think “I’m the biggest bleeding heart” and I don’t feel SORRY for myself. In part this explains why you would never ever know it if I was ever worried about money. You know nothing about how poor my family was, how we were constantly moving, how innocently oblivious I was to the fact that the world thought my family was a piece of shit. You know nothing about the long ass hours my mother worked gutting fish and cleaning up people’s shit so I could go to school and be one of those “free lunch” kids. You know nothing about the 3 different third grades I went to because my parents had to move my siblings and I around and send us to our grandma’s because they were about to drown in our debts. You don’t know shit about shared bedrooms in someone else’s house, the old used clothes, the crappy, shared Christmas presents, the welfare, the shit health care (or lack of even that). You don’t know about the 9 shitty schools I went to and the ways kids looked at me and said, “ching chong chang,” and asked me where I was from, and asked me to say their name in Vietnamese. You know nothing about how my parents tried so hard to make sure I didn’t end up like the other children of refugees at my schools, with terrible grades, broke, working part-time jobs at shitty nail salons cleaning up after white women, pregnant, drinking, smoking, robo-trippin, hood rat etc. etc. etc. The summers spent selling nice bottles of wine to upper-middle class white folks who were so surprised that a lowly little, stupid, low class, brown ass (cuz I get hella brown in the summer), Vietnamese girl could possibly be ambitious enough to step beyond her means and beyond her place in society and strive for credentials that so few people in the US actually achieve, all while scolding her for not helping her parents work during the school year, all while NEVER once expecting their own kids to work with THEM during… EVER.
And you want to delegitimize me by asking when the last time I worried about money was? Worrying about money is the least of my problems right now. I am lucky enough to have parents who have devoted all their time and energy into making enough money to support me the ways they have. By no means does this mean that I am set for life. I get enough support and make enough to live well by the skin of my teeth but you have no idea the amount of debt I’m in. The ways I struggle every month to keep up appearances. My car, my clothes, my SHIT. They are all symptoms of a poor girl who finally has money to hold in her hands. Who finally has enough credit and credentials to convince people that she is just like them. You don’t understand that I buy nice looking things or buy nice beer or go out to eat or tip well or foot the bill or buy people presents because I don’t want to confirm the stereotype that I am poor and cheap and not as good as other people and this is something that a poor minority person worries about when she runs with the middle-class. This is why you don’t know the ways I worry about money or life. Worrying about money and looking cheap, I have learned, is a poor person thing to do and everyone spits on poor people. This is something my parents have learned, this is something I have learned and THIS is why you think I never worry about money. So I guess I did a damn good job of it.
The amount of sacrifice my parents go through to keep me afloat… They don’t even have health insurance. We prioritize differently than a lot of people do. And some people don’t think this is smart because it’s not how they do it. I guess I’ve never told you or most people these things because, FUCK YOU, I am no damn bleeding heart. I am smarter than you and more critical than you are. I am motivated in a way that you are not because of my past. But not everyone who has come from what I’ve come from (in fact most come from much much worse) has been able to get through it and be what I am today. So this is what makes me think I know better than some folks. And I tell people shit, and I point out shit because I care about the people who are treated like SHIT. And all this does not mean I don’t act like a shitty person myself sometimes. I’m not immune to it just because I see it. I am not a hypocrite because I still do things that oppress people. I’m a part of the system too and I can’t get out of it any better than others can but I haven’t resigned to it either.
janainaart
theartofmadeline
jacobvanloon
titsay
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gummygunk
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