“Be grateful for what you have”

Being the ignorant teenager I am and specializing in thinking I know more than I actually do, I always thought I knew what this phrase meant whenever my parents rattled off to me about their childhood hardships in a developing country compared to my current pampered lifestyle in America. Of course, being a said ignorant teenager, I always brushed them off with a dismissive wave and an off-handed remark about how they’re growing old and we aren’t living in the stone age anymore. But in light of significant events over the past year, I realize that just because I know what those words mean in that specific order doesn’t mean I’ll ever understand those words, well not yet at least. There’s a difference between definition and comprehension, and I only knew the latter.

I live in a predominantly Asian community, specifically Viet, and was born into a middle-class family with more than caring parents, so my only “childhood hardships” were ones revolving around school and friends and everything that a child usually worries about. I never worried about not fitting in because everyone looked like me, I never worried about people not understanding because we all shared these same experiences together, I never had to worry because we were all alike. In hindsight, I really have taken all of this for granted because some of my peers don’t have this luxury. And where I live is only the tip of this ever growing mountain of “things I happen to have that not everyone is lucky enough to have”. 

Looking at George Takei’s experiences in an internment camp in his graphic novel They Called Us Enemy, let me stress, a camp designed to essentially imprison his family and other Japanese-Americans like him, I’m yet again reminded at how lucky I am. That I should be grateful that instead of spending my childhood in dusty, barbed-wire camps I’m instead running around in a grassy park free of any boundaries as far as the eye can see, that people never teased me for things I couldn’t control and the list of injustices I haven’t experienced yet goes on. 

So yes, I do have many things to be grateful for, especially when compared to what past Asians had to go through, but maybe I’ll only realize that when I finally leave out the tiny bubble of a community.