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10 ABC for Life Katie Leung Katie Leung is a girl with long, black, straight hair and slanted eyes. She is short, petite, and has small feet. She loves to play volleyball and enjoys being active, although she has never learned karate like everyone assumes she has. Nor has she eaten dog. She does, however, use chopsticks when she eats dinner , and yes, she always has white rice. She wears T-shirts, jeans, and sneakers , but to her homecoming dance, she wore a genuine Chinese chi-pao. She loves to read and write, but can’t read or write a bit of Chinese so please don’t ask her to decipher anything. Also, that “two ‘Wongs’ don’t make a right” joke really doesn’t amuse her at all. She loved The Joy Luck Club, but Forrest Gump is also one of her favorites. Sometimes she watches Chinese television stations with her father via satellite, but she rarely misses Thursday nights on NBC either. Katie Leung is a Chinese girl who was born in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and this is her identity crisis. Our plane loudly cranked and strained its machinery, announcing its landing at Beijing International Airport. After twenty-some long and hellish hours on the plane, I groggily looked out of my window at the foreign land and thought to myself, “We’re here.” Despite my exhaustion, I was able to summon up a bit of excitement at the thought of being in China. China had fostered the roots of my heritage, and my family and I would be spending the next two weeks exploring its various wonders. We gathered up our carry-on luggage and followed the rest of the passengers off the plane. A blast of hot, dry air welcomed our arrival onto Chinese soil, and we were immediately bombarded by crowds of people. I suddenly got the feeling that the term “minority” no longer applied to me. “Geng wo lai, geng wo lai.” Our tour guide quickly beckoned us to follow her to where the rest of our group was waiting. Although I was excited to be there, a feeling of isolation crept up on me, as if the entire airport had darkened and a spotlight had found and cornered me. It seemed strange that I was feeling this way. In America, isolation was nothing new to me, living in South Florida where Chinese people are rather rare. Now, among the dozens of people who resembled me in their facial features, the texture of their hair, and the pigment of their skin, I felt isolated again, but this time, and curiously enough, as an American. I had never felt more American in my nineteen years of life. It felt like walking clumsily down a runway while Chinese spectators wondered why on earth I was there and what in the world I was wearing. My attire gave it away. An old T-shirt paired with my favorite sweats branded me the American tourist. I may have been the American tourist in China, but at home, my parents made it well-known that I was an ABC, or American-born Chinese. I guess it made sense, but as a child, I always felt that I was just different. Even though I watched the same television shows as everyone else, ate pizza and hot dogs and styled my hair like all the other girls, the fact that I spoke Mandarin and had rice for dinner every night was enough to separate me from those who were American-born American. I felt even more isolated when I found that I was the only Chinese girl in my kindergarten class and that the odds would continue that way for the rest of my school years. It wasn’t that I was opposed to making American friends. It was just that it was dif‹cult to make friends when their initial reactions to me were taunts like “ching chong chang.” As if that wasn’t bad enough, some of them even expected me to humor them and asked, “Katie, what does ‘ching dong dong’ mean?” followed by an uproar of laughter. Of course, I understand now that they were young and probably didn’t know any better. So was the four-yearold in preschool who put sand down my pants because my eyes weren’t like his. Funny, I had never seen someone with red hair until I met that little sand monster, and yet I had no urge to put...

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