I can tell it again. Well, first of all, in the dorm that I lived in,
one end
Page 38of the hall was majority White, and my end
of the hall was a little bit more diverse. My next-door neighbor was—
one was part Honduras and the other one was African-American. And then
in my room, I was Cambodian, my roommate is Ethiopian. And then across
the hall there is an Indian, one of my Indian friends, and she had a
White roommate. And then two doors down, there's other Americans. And
then down the other end of the hall it was basically all White. And so I
think too that it wasn't supposed to be that way, but just because we
were all living at this end of the hall, we were all closer together,
we'd all see each other more so we'd all hang out more, whereas that end
of the hall, that was like the same kind of story. So it wasn't that we
didn't get along, that we hated each other, but at the same time, it
wasn't everybody knew each other very well. And so particularly on my
end of the hall, I have an American friend. And she's a great person,
but she's very different from me. I had one friend who was very open to
everything that I said and I told her. And for my other friends who
lived nearby, my Indian friend and my Ethiopian roommate, we had this
commonality. What we had in common was that we were different. We knew
we didn't come from here, our families were very different. We had a
different religion. And so when we all got together sometimes our
conversations would be like, oh, okay, this is what we think of America.
Well, this is what America thinks of our country. And this is our
religion. This is how other people view our religion. So it was always,
I think conversations like that that really helped me like understand,
and try to explain to others like what it was.
Page 39But
this one friend of mine— and we're still friends now, we see each other
all the time— what the whole like gist of the conversation at first was
we feel that some Cambodians or Indians or whatever nowadays feel that
they have to become Americanized in order to assimilate totally into the
culture. And we don't agree with that. You know, true, we all make our
own choices of what we want to do with our lives, and who we want to be.
But at the same time, it's really sad that you want to totally drop away
everything. Because it all comes down to your looks. And as superficial
as that sounds, people are not going to judge you by your personality or
by who you are first and foremost. They're going to judge you by what
they see first. And when they see that you're different, they're going
to treat you automatically different. So the whole point was that we
can't ever be American. Well, even those people who think that they're
totally American, they're not totally American. They're always going to
carry this part of themselves around that's going to say that they're
not totally American. And there's more—I know there's more to being
American than just looking like one or whatever. But at the same time,
it's just different. And so all of a sudden, my friend who was there,
she took it the wrong way. She took it to mean that Americans are bad,
that we were saying that we're too good to be Americans, I think was the
way that she took it, which is totally not what I'm saying. The whole
point is, why do you want to be something that you're not? That was our
whole point. Because then it leads to conflicts within the family, or it
leads to conflicts within the community. All these kids who come and
they try to assimilate and try to like totally forget who they are, all
it leads to is problems for themselves, for their parents, you know, for
Page 40their whole community. And it's just really
sad. And she gets up and she's like, I don't know what's so different
or, you know, what's so bad about me and about all those other girls
down the hall. What it is that you have against us. What is it that's so
bad, why do you like not like us? What makes me different from my Indian
friend or my Ethiopian friend? And I just got so upset. And she started
to leave, and I could see that she was really mad. And I was crying at
this point. I went up to her and I was like, wait a minute, you don't
understand. You don't know what you're saying. It's not the point that
we don't like Americans or whatever. It's the point that you know, what
if you went to another country? Say, what if you came to Cambodia? And
you would take Christmas with you over there, simply because it's such
an important part of you. You would take Christmas over there, right?
But how would you feel if you know, your kids didn't like to celebrate
it? Or how would you feel if all of a sudden Christmas was identified
with Cambodian people. There were American kids saying we're celebrating
Christmas, but we're Cambodians? It's not—I know I'm associating like
Christmas with being American, but at the same time, culturally it's
very important here. I know it's important for all Christians in
general. But at the same time you wouldn't want that to happen, would
you? How would you feel if that happened? Because that's what's
happening now. We have Cambodian kids who are going around saying, we're
Americans. And they're carrying with them things that are very
Cambodian, and, I guess like diffusing it with American thoughts and
ideals. And it's not totally Cambodian anymore. We feel like we're
losing what's important to us, and what we want to keep, what's unique
to us. Because we
Page 41don't have much. We don't, we
really don't, you know. This isn't even our real home. And so after
that, I think she really understood. And I think that was really at that
point, where it was very important for me that I remained Cambodian.