A story about the subtle climb up the racial-social hierarchy of adolescent life.
Growing up during the early-to-mid 2000s, my high school was a diverse enclave of ethnicities and cultures. Among the students, layers of identities piled over each other. In the long hallway by the entrance, photos of graduating classes since 1957 lined the walls. The faces transformed from mostly whites to the more recent assorted faces. Only now, most of the teachers and management retained the insular white-scape.
Still, when friendships and groups formed, many kids gravitated towards those within their own cultural background. As a teenager I was shy and uncertain with very limited social abilities, which hindered connections with other students, regardless of race.
By joining the volleyball team in grade eight, I managed to find others who shared my interest and made friends. People’s definition of friend varies. In my case, the friends were those with whom I had a surface relationship with. Friends who I mainly gathered with at lunch to appear as though I was part of a group, but mostly nodded or laughed along without really contributing. This led to few invites outside of school and other exclusionary behavior from the group.
During one of these gatherings around our lockers in the hallways of our high school, I was accidentally invited to sushi in downtown Vancouver because I happened to be present during their scheduling discussion. Delightedly, I accepted, but had to beg my parents to allow me to go until they relented.
One of the members of the group who was going was named Curtis Lee. Curtis’s family was from China, and he was born in the Champlain Heights of East Vancouver at the edge of a clean cul-de-sac where the suburban homes were large, colourless, and smelled of pine. If you go to his house, you take off your shoes (like most Asian households), and if you want to put your backpack down, never on his bed.
Curtis was outgoing, funny, smart, a bit neurotic, and loved to write. He was also bitchy, an affectation that he played-up for laughs. At his core, he was not afraid to speak his mind, but rarely did he indulge in seriousness. He sidestepped uncomfortable conversations for jokes, revealing the watermark of a well-positioned guarded wall behind which he was hiding his real self.
At the beginning he was cordial to me, but later saw right through me. He saw my pathetic yearning to belong. To change myself to fit into whatever popular space was available. One time during break hours, the group gathered outside of the art room to talk about their day. The bell rang and one-by-one members of the group left for their class, leaving only three of us behind. In the sudden quiet, speaking directly to my face, he said, “Ugh, Dipa is so boring!” They both laughed, and walked away together.
So, when we all arrived at the restaurant in downtown, I hoped that I would fly under his scrutinizing radar. We were seated in a large room with an oval-shaped table at the centre, crouched low to the ground. A wooden bench surrounded the table with throw pillows as seats. We removed our shoes and each took our place on the cushions. Fixed within the centre of the table were grills for cooking meat.
The conversations began. Jokes were thrown around the table. Curtis dominated the conversation. “Where are you from again?” He asked Keith, who played on the boys volleyball team. “Burma,” Keith replied. Curtis asked, “Where is that?” Keith replied, “Next to Bangladesh, near India”. Curtis looked up at me, a sneer swept his face, and said, “Ew, you are close to where Dipa is from.” He laughed and everyone else at the table kept their heads down. They were all expecting me to say something, but I didn’t. I regretted joining the dinner. Most of the members of the group were Northern Asians, except for Keith and I, and a Malaysian girl.
Why was my country gross to him? Is it the shades of brown? The poverty? Apart from my limited social abilities, much of the low self-esteem I felt all throughout high school emerged from this inferior status placed on my cultural and ethnic background.
It’s a memory that has played in my head over and over again, even still today in my 30s. Disparaging comments similar to that was always said about India (and Bangladesh, my birth country, once kids learned it was a real place). You are not dark enough to be from India. You are pretty for a brown girl. I though you would have a uni-brow. How come you don’t have a thick Indian accent? Why do your people eat with your hands? I think from the combination of my race and quiet demeanor, I appeared weak and vulnerable, and was therefore an easier prey for bullying.
During those years, my high school had a subtle-but-afflicting social hierarchy of cool based on race: white people at the top; Latin and black people; mixed races; sociable Northern Asians/Vietnamese/and South Asian male athletes; South Asian females; and general unsociable Asians who appeared as nerdy stereotypes from a distance. Curtis and I recognized each other’s goal to reach the top of the hierarchy; to be as close to white as we can. Whiteness was like a shield. At our school, if you were white, you were automatically accepted. You were allowed a range of quirks and misshapen identities because you had authority in the wider social realm, and was therefore more protected from disdain or prejudice.
So, right after Curtis’s comment, the sad truth was that I expected someone to say something similar in response. It was 2006, not that long ago, but in the microcosm of the adolescent-world identity is so viscerally at stake. Kids play the same tunes they see in the world through TV and film. They gravitate towards the most popular and dominant identity’s.
Years later, completely discarding everyone I knew in high school except for Lola, one of the members of the group who I didn’t become close to until after high school, I saw Curtis again. Lola stayed friends with him, and invited us both to the opening of a film at the Woodward’s Centre in Gastown. We sat next to each other and I tried to be nice. It had been a long time, and the past was only childish antics. He came with someone, a boy. Well-groomed with short hair and a collar-less thin, black bomber jacket. Lola told me they were together. Curtis had come out a couple of years ago while he and Lola travelled around Europe.
Curtis had a different air about him now. He was more reserved, a bit somber. I tried to make conversation, but he was uninterested, and then I brought up the group dinner downtown during high school. Curtis listened and said, “I don’t remember that night.”
I am not sure why I told him about that night. I think I wanted to talk about our dynamic in high school. I think I wanted to prove to him that I was not boring; that I was cool which meant that Bengali’s were cool.
Seeing him with his partner, I surmised a new vision of Curtis: a person who had struggled to keep his real-self tethered inside for fear of hate. Someone who redirected his pain towards others because if he pointed it at himself he would combust. I thought that if I brought up the dinner, he would acknowledge my pain and apologize because he recognized the bottomless pit of rejection. He too faced discrimination as a young Chinese-Canadian, gay, boy.
But there was no such acknowledgement. Dismissively, he said he did not remember that night. It shut down our conversation. Similar to the Curtis from high school, he was as direct as an arrow, unwilling to show his vulnerability. In hindsight, I now think of his dismissal as a shrugging-off of the invisible truth lurking in our society.
In Canada we express our love for the country by calling it multicultural. Although this is true, the over-arching culture that dominates unchecked in Canada is white European culture. The pursuit of success means acclimating to this dominance, and in consequence, relationships between people of colour are susceptible to tension and fraying at the edges. The mind-set of white dominance conditions us to fight each other for the limited pieces of pie dangling below our white peers. As the model minority myth shows, only one of us can be the best. Not necessarily always the best in academics, but the best at being white.
Curtis was flexing the little power he had in his society. Inscribed with herd mentality, as all human beings still are, Curtis picked out the perceived weakest in the group—socially and racially—and belittled my Bangladeshi birthmark to thwart me from my unfocused scramble up the racial-social ladder.
To discuss the dinner would mean thoughtfully discussing both of our tortured relationships with whiteness, including our own complicity in maintaining its structure. When I brought up the dinner, whether or not he remembered that night, he was exhausted by my moral gesticulation. Curtis knew it was too complicated to discuss, too grand of a task, the patchwork of our existence within whiteness too intertwined. It was easier if we just moved on with our lives.
To this day, I still think of him. Equipped with at least better sociable traits than I, along with particular behaviour modifications better suited to whiteness, I imagine him living a life of success. A large home with lots of glass secluded by forests, a loving partner of equal intelligence, a refined taste for life’s pleasures. As I write this and replay those years in my head, I see only the cold face of envy.
--- Dipa Barua