I paused when someone questions my masculinity. It was a sign that I had absorbed what society views how a man should behave and act. I never understood why this is so. I have loved giving my friends hugs and getting close to them and going shopping for as long as I can remember. I even remember asking my mother and father that I wanted a Barbie for Christmas. As I grew up, I began to developed thoughts as to how certain gendered constructs came to be such as why pink is associated with femininity and blue with masculinity. With attention to gender, there was also the issue of racial constructs. I grew up by myself which led to my initial isolation from the world, but the answers that I sought required me to explore outside my comfort zone. These constructs were shielded from my eyes during the time in my home …show more content…
“What do you do when you are walking on the sidewalk late at night and you see a black man coming towards you?” my mentor, Chris Ly, asked me. I felt the discomfort of this question and I wanted to avoid answering it, but he knew the answer that was about to come out of my mouth. “I would walk across the street,” I replied. My mentor continued this dialogue by bringing up the sometimes unequal treatment by policemen of different races. “I am an Asian man driving a white Toyota Prius. The cops will not pull me over. But they would most likely stop a Hispanic man driving that same Prius,” my mentor added. It was shocking, but true. I now only realized how the world was filled with complexity as we go through life. To put it in my life, whenever I hang out with my friends and we run into a problem that required customer service, they would always ask me to go ask. Since I am Asian, they assume that I was the most educated. “When there is a rape reported on the news, we tend to blame the woman for it, but it can also be the man who is the one to blame,” my mentor