In the dark, while the entire city slept, I dragged my body out of bed, affixed an energetic façade, and placed it on the screen for my classmates to see. We will no longer exist as shadows.Īlthough I could participate in classes and interact with friends over Zoom, I felt like I lived like a domestic rat a nocturnal creature that lived in China and studied in America.

We are born of emperors, of spiraling temples, mosques, palaces, of jade, gold, and billowing silk. We can chase whiteness forever, but we will never truly attain it, and if we get anything, it will never be more than a mask. The shadows everywhere else portray the heritage and homeland they are forced to discard and repress. This facial mask represents the persona of whiteness that Asian Americans are forced to wear. In every one of my thoughts about my narrow eyes.įreud’s theory of loss argues that Asian immigrants, and immigrants as a whole, exist in a state of melancholia, where they perpetually grieve the loss of their homeland but also never attain proper assimilation into their new country.Ĭarl Jung’s archetype of the mask - the personality we show in public - and the shadow - every trait we have cast into oblivion - became my main inspiration. In every uncomfortable cringe I have when my parents struggle in broken English. Maybe it was because my family refused to talk about discrimination. Perhaps such unawareness was because I had been told that racism was a thing confined to the past. I had not lied, or at least I did not think that I had lied. Before movements like #StopAsianHate or #BLM, I and many others were blissfully ignorant of the racism that still permeated American society.Ī school survey once asked the question, “Has anyone discriminated against you because of your race?” I had answered no. The photo was my meditation upon the recent awareness of anti-Asian hate in the United States. It is ungraspable, a shadow thrown upon her retinas, a ghostly haunting. When she looks into the iPhone, face covered by a white facial mask and hands clasped around her neck, there is something in her eyes. Spend some time with this collection, our 25 favorite of the 4,000-plus multimedia submissions we received, and you’ll see that being a teenager right now is also singing karaoke in the bathroom, making mochi on cold December nights, 3D-printing face shields for frontline workers, and coming out to your dad (and being relieved when his response is, “Okey dokey, sweets, whatever floats yer boat”).

As 13-year-old Courtney Duffy says in her winning piece below, “Coming of age in 2021 is realizing that the world is going up in flames, and you have to be the one to locate the fire extinguisher.”īut as traumatic as the last 22 months have been, it’s not all flames. Via our comments section and contests like this one, we hear from young people around the world every day, and have watched as nearly two years of pandemic isolation and disruption have intensified all the other stresses this generation is facing. In December, the United States surgeon general warned that young people today are facing “devastating” mental health issues.

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