I Can Identify

Being adopted from China I can identify with some of the things Bich went through. She went to a school she described as "a sea of blonde". At Christian High most people are Dutch, or at least someone in their family is. A lot of the kids have very Dutch last names beginning with Van or Vander. She talked about sticking out, all of my friends are Dutch and when standing next to them my black hair and darker skin is accentuated by their pale complexions and light hair. It doesn't really bother me that much because I'm used to it, and we don't really talk about it. She also talks about how when she was out with her family people would stare at them and say things like: Don't you know how to speak English. When I'm out with my family people sometimes stare at us too but for different reasons. We get stared at because my parents and little brother are Caucasian and my little sister and I are Asian. Bich's family got stared at because they were Asian in a Caucasian world. When I was first adopted someone actually asked my mom if I could ever learn to speak English. I can understand how she felt when people would say stuff like that and stare. Bich went back to Vietnam years later with one of her uncles and her Grandma. They were all spoke Vietnamese very fast and she wasn't able to keep up. All her relatives thought of her as American though she looked Vietnamese, Americans thought of her as Vietnamese because that's what she looked like. When my family and I went to China it was like that for me too. People would speak to me in Chinese and I couldn't understand a word of what they were saying. During that trip I realized how American I really am. When she went to Vietnam she realized how American she was. That's also why I found this book so interesting, I can identify with Bich in a lot of ways.