in-class exercise: write about your hair

My hair is dark brown, fine, and straight. Compared to the thickness of my sister's hair, I might as well be balding. Her ponytail holders break under the strain of corralling her locks; I can wrap mine around my ponytail three times to her two.

It always bothered me when people said that I had black hair, even when they expressed it as a compliment. "Oh, I love your black hair." I associated black hair with Asian stereotype. Calling my hair black showed that you weren't paying attention or looking closely or that you couldn't be bothered to notice details. To you I was "Asian." I had black hair.

My hair has gone through its share of trauma. In the fourth grade, I longed for short, wavy hair, so my mom took me to a hairdresser in Myung-dong. I had hair down to my waist when I went in. I began to get nervous as more and more workers fumbled with the curlers in my hair. The chemicals were making me nauseous, so that made all the buzzing even harder to deal with.

After they took the curlers out and fixed my hair up, I understood why they had made such a fuss. They had overpermed my hair. I now looked like the Cabbage Patch Kid dolls that were at the height of their popularity. In the taxi line, two men argued whether I was a boy or a girl.

There are several other perm disaster stories in my life, but by and large I never felt shame about the color of my hair. My sister -- three years my junior -- had a different experience growing up. I did not know this at the time, but when she was a kid, she wished that she had blonde hair. When I first heard this, I was surprised and confused. Why did she think this? And why didn't I want the same thing?

There are personality differences, but I think the real reason is because the four years we spent in Korea hit me at just the right point. I was seven to eleven years of age. My sister was three to seven. Being surrounded by Korean people, all of whom have dark hair, established dark hair as the norm for me. My sister's comparable age period was spent in the US. What a shock it must have been to live in a new city and go to a new school. From seven to eleven, I was surrounded by Korean people and Korean images. From seven to eleven, she was surrounded by the American media, where everyone is white and beautiful. In her mind, white became equivalent to beautiful. She began to wish she were white.