Winner of the 2024
Linda Ross Award for Creative Writing
“The thing you are most afraid to write. Write that.”
– Nayyirah Waheed
Part I: The Roots
My mother’s roots began in a place called the “White Lily Orphanage” in South Korea. From there her roots expanded across the ocean to reach within the United States, taking root in the city of St. Louis, all before she was even a year old. My father’s roots began further north in the United States from the state of Minnesota. It wouldn’t be until 15 years later that his roots would dig their way across the soil to St. Louis, where he would one day meet my mom. My roots first struck the soil in the Spring of 2002, and have remained buried in St. Louis since.
But what are roots if not what determines who you are, and what you’ll become?
Roots are meant to grow, to be a foundation for something more–
Yet, all mine seem to do is bury me further into the dirt.
“Excuse me, what kind of Asian are you?
“Well, you’re not really American… you know what I mean.”
“Where were you born? No, like actually.”
“Oh, you’re part Korean? Konnichiwa!”
“What are you?”
My relationship and feelings with the fact that I’m biracial has always been somewhat complex. Positive feelings of pride, individuality, and love at some point began to mix with more negative emotions such as shame, anger, and insecurity; all mixing and blurring together to create a warped image of myself everytime I look in the mirror. Some days I notice my dad’s nose and the waves of his hair. Other days I only see my mom’s eyes, their darkness and their shape. I used to wonder if there is such a thing as being too “white” or being too “Asian”, or perhaps even the other way around. What I’ve learned is that the answer is yes–you can be too little and too much and it still won’t be enough.
When I was a kid, I used to want to be white.
As in the full package, blue eyes and blonde hair just like my dad. The whole Swedish, German, and whatever other white European genes included. But I didn’t always feel that way from the beginning. I used to be proud that I was mixed, it made me feel unique and different in a way that’s empowering to a child so young. I used to brag to my peers at school that my mom was adopted from South Korea; I even found a book from the library about Korean culture, and I’d teach my friends my very butchered (maybe even offensive) version of “Annyeonghaseyo”, the formal way of greeting in the Korean language.
But then came the day a new student came to my elementary school, a boy from China. He barely spoke English, and from his head to his toes, there was no denying he was 100% Chinese. He was the real deal. As my classmates quickly grew fascinated and impressed by him, I began to realize that I would never compare to him because I was not Asian in the way that he was. I didn’t speak a second language, I didn’t eat rice at lunch, I couldn’t use chopsticks yet, and there was the undeniable fact that I was only half compared to his whole. So, I forgot about my half that was Korean, and began focusing on the half that was white. But it didn’t matter, because no matter how many nights I spent praying for my eyes to turn blue, it never happened.
After all, you can’t change the origins of your roots, right?
And it seemed everyone else didn’t want to let me forget.
The first time I had someone tell me “to go back to China” was from a boy as my brother and I were leaving school. He proceeded to say this to us every day for weeks, maybe even months. To which I always smartly responded, “Shut up! We’re not Chinese!”, as if that really mattered to him.
People only see what they want to see after all.
But the best part of being biracial is that it means you get your regular amount of racism, plus extra (free of charge). You get the usual interrogation/disbelief about where you’re from and where you were born, the kids singing the “Chinese, Japanese, Korean” song to you while they pull down their eyes, and then it grows into boys having crushes on you (cough Asian fetish cough) and asking, dare I quote, “How do you know for sure you’re not some North Korean soldier sent here to spy on us?”.
I think I would have preferred being called a slur.
I’m joking…mostly.
But over the years, and after suffering many terrible interactions with all sorts of people, I have discovered that if people can’t tell what race you are, they will decide it for you. And experiencing this type of interaction with the world is damaging to one’s idea of self. From a young age, I experienced the feeling of alienation as I often struggled to find a place to belong, something I still struggle with to this day. I was “too Asian” for the white kids but “not Asian” enough for my Asian friends and their families, but then I was “too American” for my Asian friends and “too ethnic” for members of my own family.
I’ve always been constantly reminded that no matter what, I am not enough.
My personality doesn’t matter, nor my interests or achievements in life, because in the eyes of others I am nothing but a racial puzzle waiting to be solved. Our eyes see what they want to see after all, they don’t see past the surface, and as a result I become whatever’s easiest to take in depending on who’s looking.
And the true and supposedly simple answer to who I am lies in the story of my roots, but who has time to dig up all that?
Part II: The Body
The roots grow, they venture further into the soil. Spring blossoms into the heat of summer, and summer fades into fall’s gentle embrace, then finally fall submits to winter’s cold gaze–and through it all, the body remains. There are the beginning growing years, light and innocent in memory. Then budding turns into blooming, and this is the hardest stage for all young bodies to trial through. There is pruning and withering, but somehow the body remains despite the pain. The roots produce a flower emerging quietly into the world, some say the flower is beautiful.
The flower hates being beautiful.
The flower is not a flower, the body is not a flower, the body is more than just a body, and the roots must have been grown poorly, but nature is not meant to be corrupted, yet rebirth is a part of creation, and these roots–
These roots made a flower, but this body is a tree.
“I like your new haircut, it makes you look so feminine!”
“Why would you do that to yourself?”
“It’s fine if you’re trans, but don’t ruin your body with that stuff.”
“What are you?”
“Freak.”
Knowing that I am transgender and accepting that I am, have always felt like two separate concepts to me. I knew something was wrong when I first began having dreams of my body looking differently at fifteen, but accepting the fact that deep down I wished I had been born a boy, was something I wasn’t ready to accept. So, like every reasonable teenager faced with a secret internal dilemma, I repressed and ignored it as long as possible.
Which failed miserably.
Since the first realization, I could only ignore this aspect of my identity for so long. Over the years, the reminder that something was off with my body would come spinning back into my life like Miley Cyrus on that stupid wrecking ball (without warning and near impossible to look away from even if you wanted to). I spent years hating my body and not understanding why, and I even went to great lengths to change my appearance in whatever way other people demanded from me.
I dressed overly feminine for years, showing off my body in a way that was considered “appealing”. I caked on makeup like a shield, as if I could protect myself from my own misery every time I looked in the mirror. I had learned to dislike my body and its flaws from a young age, beginning in middle school when peers and even “friends” would make fun of me for being too skinny and small. Hating my body and the person attached to it became easy, because if everyone else hated my body, then it would make sense if I did too.
Yet, despite the world and its cruelty, I was even more so.
I was my body’s greatest enemy, and I released war and ruin upon it like I needed it to survive.
Looking back at it now, my ways of hyper feminizing myself into some alternate persona feels much like a form of non-physical self-harm. Because in truth, I was completely miserable. I wielded self-hatred like a torch in the dark, and I fed on my own insecurity until I was sick from it. The person who was supposed to be me in photos, and the face associated with my name, never felt right. I could hardly recognize myself. My body felt like nothing but a cage I had been trapped in unknowingly since my own birth; and knowing why I felt this way and accepting it took years, but at some point, I had to acknowledge that who I was on the inside was much different than who I was on the outside.
Because who you are born as and the person you become aren’t always the same.
So, I came out as trans.
I told the people I trusted most in my life, and I was greeted with warmth and kindness that was so shockingly different than what I felt about myself. Perhaps their eyes held a kinder gaze towards me then my own. I started to change my appearance; I cut my hair, changed my wardrobe, and began wearing a binder to make my chest appear flatter. I started to feel as if my inner self was finally aligning with my own body. It was liberating, it was that cage door being swung wide open, yet I still couldn’t find myself stepping over that threshold. Because finally putting a name to what you’ve been experiencing all your life doesn’t make the problems and feelings surrounding it go away, especially when the rest of the world can be so unkind.
Even if I began to be able to see past what my own eyes told me, it didn’t mean that others gained the same ability of seeing.
Being unable to medically/physically transition was another battle in the war against my own body, and a war that soon involved not just myself. Even though I began seeing myself for who I really was didn’t mean that everyone else could or would even bother to try. Pronouns became sticky on people’s tongues, getting caught in their teeth when they spoke about me. My own gender became a twisted fascination/ form of amusement, as people began to confine me in their version of what being “trans” meant. They saw what was easiest about me for their eyes to understand.
From a cis gendered male coworker, I’ve been told, “I just think it’s so cool that you’re trans dude, you know I’ve noticed Asian people are really good at switching between genders.”
That statement in itself felt like a two for one combo in the slur department, and it was as equally shocking to hear as it was painfully hilarious. But, no, I did not laugh.
I am aware many still see me as a girl, or at least a feminine person. I often don’t take it personally when people assume at first glance, but once again it feels like I’m being reminded that I’m not enough. It feels as if the person I was born as is all I’ll be for the rest of my life, and that version of me is what the world really wants. Another reminder that I don’t belong, and that I am forever stuck on the outside looking in at a place I’m not allowed to occupy. A garden to which my unruly body is not allowed.
Part III: Identity
My body and its roots have been the most defining aspects of who I am since I can remember. It’s hard to recall a time where there hasn’t been someone in my life assuming and assigning pieces of myself, to myself, for me. It feels like my existence has created a whirlwind of a storm that left branches of my own body on the ground for me to pick up and regrow.
Who am I?
What am I?
But most importantly, why am I?
Why do I become what the rest of the world sees of me? I become defined by others without giving them my permission, but why do I let them? Every individual becomes altered in the eyes of others–I am not the only one nor am I an exception. But how much does that truly define us? Who’s to say that a murderer can’t have a kind face? Or that the most hideous person to be seen could be the kindest soul on earth? We put so much power and belief into what our eyes tell us, but they hardly ever see the whole picture.
How can we possibly cram an entire person’s being into one glance?
The simple blink of an eye?
As a child, I wanted to be white because I saw that being white was the better option as opposed to being of mixed race. I saw that being white was “good” and that being Asian was “unique”, but I also knew that I wasn’t the right kind of unique. I was different in a way that wasn’t easy to look at, not easy to pick apart and define. And then to appeal to everyone’s eyes but my own, I broke apart my identity into pieces and reshaped it into something that wasn’t me. I may have fooled everyone else, but eventually I saw right through myself.
I finally began to see the whole picture.
There is power in sight and exposure in being seen–two sides of a scale seemingly unbalanced. And to negotiate with others on the subject of who I am, has always been an attempt to tip the scales in my favor. I’ve hardly ever felt that they’ve been in my favor; I’ve hardly been spared the effort. There have been days I’ve been so fed up with being seen by others I’ve wanted to destroy the scales altogether, but I don’t possess such power. Instead, I cursed them, or hid myself from the world to avoid judgment. But that doesn’t make them go away. So, I’m left to wonder, what power do I possess?
There is no denying that I cannot completely abandon what defines me; I cannot change the origin of my roots or change the kind of people my parents were, but then what is left for me to define? How much of my identity belongs to me alone, untouched, and not swayed by the hungry eyes of the world? All my life I have let others and the entirety of the world define me, create me in their own image akin to the abilities of some makeshift god.
Not anymore.
I’ve come to realize that who I am, and who the world thinks I am, are both aspects of my identity. They contradict and they clash, tearing each other apart in an attempt to destroy the other–yet they both have created me in their own ways. To be seen is to be acknowledged, but it’s not to be fully known. How the world sees me is but one corner of the mirror who reflects who I am, one piece out of the whole. So, I will take the scattered pieces of my own fragile identity and rebuild myself in my own creation. I will overcome the threshold preventing me from moving forward and leave the cage that used to hold me to rot in the dirt. I will grow into the person I want to be. I will allow myself to be known.
The roots are safe beneath the soil, but what of the tree?
It reaches for the sun.
Raya Kruger is a transfer student from St. Louis Community College and is currently a junior at Lindenwood University. He is earning his degree in English with an emphasis in Creative Writing. In his free time, he enjoys buying books (ignoring the many others on his shelf), rereading Six of Crows, and writing poetry, short stories, and nonfiction pieces. He is a biracial transgender writer and often shares his experiences in his work.
Arrow Rock Literary Journal 
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