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Intern Essay: Where I Belong

David Xiang at the White House after being awarded the nation's highest honor for student poets.

As the nation grapples with recent calls for exclusion as well as acts of violence against minority groups, one first-generation immigrant living in Little Rock reflects on learning to accept himself.

KUAR intern David Xiang, an award-winning poet and recent graduate of Central High School, talks about his own struggle with not wanting to feel excluded.

You can listen to his essay in the media player above or read it here:

“Can you help me with my math homework?”
“Have you eaten your dog yet?”
“Are you sleeping, or are your eyes squinting?”

These are fairly common questions I receive, because of the way I look. I've changed my first name from Haosen to David to try to make things a little less complicated, dismissing my heritage.

I’m Chinese by birth, American by citizenship, and I often feel no one really cares about the details.

But, I'm not really asking for your pity. Let me give you a little more context.

I was born in Yichang, a city in the Hubei Province of China. My father was a well-respected doctor at the university hospital, my mom an affable pharmacist. When I was two, we left for the land of opportunity. We had no money, no friends, and no knowledge of Western culture. My parents had to start from scratch, earning their degrees again in a language neither of them knew how to speak. To say they worked hard is an understatement.

I grew up oblivious to all this, only knowing that I wanted to buy school lunch and not bring noodles and dumplings from home. I wanted Nike pants, not the Chinese brands my grandmother mailed to us. I tried to shed my identity. I was ashamed of who I was. I thought I was an outcast, someone who didn’t fit, someone who would never fit.

But as I’ve grown older, I’ve learned to value myself. It wasn’t spontaneous; I didn’t have a fantastical dream one day telling me to appreciate who I am. Over time, I just came to the realization that, at the end of the day, hard work and effort are the values that will define me, not my ethnicity. Ignorance and racism will try to hinder me, but nothing great is ever achieved without hardship.

And being a first generation immigrant has only increased my workload, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned from my parents, it is that when things gets tough, you work even harder. Giving up is never an option, and that’s become the foundation of who I am today. In being embarrassed by who I am, I had been quitting on myself without ever giving myself a fighting chance. In order to utilize my talents, I had to first take pride in who I was, and that has led me to places I couldn’t even dream of at my age.

I started writing poetry and went on to become one of five National Student Poets. This distinction had me traveling to the White House, where I was greeted by the First Lady. I followed my interest in science and it led to an internship at Harvard Medical School, where I found myself sitting down for private dinners with Nobel Laureates. These accomplishments then led to receiving letters from Arkansas senators, representatives, and the governor congratulating me for my successes.

Sports was another avenue that increased my confidence. I've made friends on and off the field that stand up for me when strangers try to tear me down. Not to mention, all these experiences have exponentially accelerated my maturity.

If you have to judge, judge my work ethic, not of my skin color. If you have to stereotype, stereotype my personality, not my culture.

For I’m not totally Chinese, I’m not totally American. I’m me, and that’s all I can ever wish for.

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