15 Asian Brazilians Talk About The Moment They Realized They Weren't Counted As "White"

"I am mixed race. Every time that I said that I was yellow, my family, including the Japanese half, laughed at me. I identified myself as yellow when a black friend was talking about her activism, and she asked how I felt when people were racist to me. I got quiet, and she said, 'Girl, you know you're not white, right?! You're yellow.' From that day on, I tried to find out more about it, and began identifying myself as yellow all the time!" — Adriana Nakasone

"When I was in fifth grade, a group of white guys in high school started saying that I was the boy from the movie The Grudge and laughing at me. That same year, some guy from the bakery made a joke about dick size at my expense." — C. Gustavo

For me, it's always been complicated. I am the daughter of a white mother and an Asian father, so it took me some time to identify myself as Asian, despite the fact that my physical appearance is quite obvious. I think that I ended up identifying as Asian when I realized that a lot of other Asian women had the same experiences as me. I finally felt like part of a group. There was a situation where a coworker who was curious to know about my origins asked if I was mixed race, and I said yes. They responded, 'So, your dad is Japanese and your mom is normal?'" — Bárbara Kono

"I grew up going to school with very few other Asians, so that was always a matter of differentiation. It took me a while to realize that, but I never completely identified with my classmates, despite the fact that they treated me normally.

I remember this one time when my very close friends were kidding around and making fun of my origin. Because I didn't really understand what was going on, I played along and tried not to take it personally — until it got to the point when I started to cry and couldn't stop." — Olivia Kari

"I think that I've more or less always known that I'm not white — I'm a mix of a white mother and Korean father. But that realization came in a subtle way, through the implicit processes of my building self image/esteem... Just looking at my mother, blonde with light-colored eyes, and then comparing myself to the other kids who were considered to be the epitome of beauty.

For a long time, I tried to fit into that standard, especially in my teens, by dying my hair, using heavy makeup to alter my features to the point that nobody could recognize me in photos, and even wearing colored contact lenses every day. I was always frustrated about not having taken after the white side of the family." — Ingrid Sá Lee

"My parents have a fast food stand, and my father's side of the family all work there. When I was a kid, I just went along to keep them company, but in my teens I started to work there. Serving the public, as a yellow woman, has always been quite complicated. Me luv you long time, Hey there, Jackie Chan, and Don't give me a dog burger, okay Chinaman, etc. I've heard it all.

I felt really enraged, but I didn't understand that it was racist and xenophobic. In conversations that I had with a friend of Japanese descent, he called my attention to these things and explained to me that I wasn't white, but in fact yellow. I started to look for other things to read and ended up finding Asian discussion groups on Facebook. From that point on, I began to better understand my identity: Brazilian, Japanese and Okinawan.

The worst brush with racism happened after I began to see myself as non-white. A woman was very drunk at the food stand, and she started making fun of the way she thought I pronounced 'brunch' as 'blunch.' I told her I knew good and well how to say "brunch". After that, she started to curse me out said that I should go back to my own country." — 伊波明美

"When I was four years old, I was afraid that other children would say that my food was 'disgusting,' because something like that had really happened a few years before." — Iris Chen

"During a 12th grade history lesson, my teacher talked to us about the WWII Japanese internment camps. That same week, there was a debate at school about racism and, as the only yellow person in the class, I expressed my opinion and my experience as an Asian. I almost cried. Nobody cared, and I realized that they looked down on me with such indifference that they couldn't even handle the fact that I felt something about them making fun of me, almost as if I were an inanimate object." — Ayumi Domingues

"I remember the crisis I had as a child. In Japan, I was called 'Gaijin' (outsider), and here in Brazil, I was called 'Japanese.' When I was 7 or 8 years old, I kept on asking myself, 'Don't I have a nationality? Am I an outsider everywhere?' I just wanted to belong." — Yukio Torihara

"My mother had a store, and people would go there just to talk trash about us, and we had to sit there, smiling and hoping for a sale, even if the person was ranting about how everything Chinese is dirty and bad.

One time, a little kid peed in the store (?). I went to clean it up, and the woman was super racist to me, saying that her child could piss wherever they wanted (??) and that the Chinese were so dirty that they were actually in favor of it (???). I hadn't even said anything.

Meanwhile, when I went to China, or was around the Chinese community in my neighborhood, I was constantly reminded that I don't speak Chinese well, and that I don't eat right with chopsticks. I wandered around a lot until I conformed to not belonging anywhere." — Anonymous

"When I did an exchange program, it was the first time that people asked me where I was from. When I said that I was from Brazil, they told me that I looked Japanese, Chinese, Arabic, etc. I explained that I was the descendant of Japanese and Iranians, and they responded with something like, 'Oh, so you don't have Brazilian blood. I knew it!'

This inhibited me from being recognized as a Brazilian even though I was. This was vastly different from the experience of my Brazilian counterparts in the exchange program who, as descendents of the Italians, Portuguese, etc. — AKA, white people — were not questioned when they said that they were Brazilian." — Nassim Golshan

"I think that I realized that I wasn't white when a schoolmate started saying how wonderful it must be to have the straight hair, the manners and the intelligence of my people, like that was exclusive to my ethnicity.

But then she said that if this boy I liked didn't like me back, it must be because of my lack of curves as a Japanese girl. She also called anime 'strange drawings.'

At the time, all that absolutely fucked up my self concept and self esteem." — Larissa Tamasiro

"I have always lived in the outskirts of São Paulo. My mother is a descendant of Japanese and my father is the son of people from Pernambuco.

And, as there are few descendant of Japanese in the outskirts, the people at school always asked me why I was different from the other children. They spoke to me with an exaggerated accent, asking in a joking way if I only ate sushi, or only with chopsticks, at home. They thought it was ridiculous when I said that my father wasn't a descendant of the Japanese. I think it was this context that shoved the fact right in my face that I wasn't white. But, at the same time, they wanted me to feel as if I weren't Brazilian, too. This still goes on today, but in a less obvious way." — Rafael Techima

"Since I was very young, I have been conscious of the fact that my appearance is different, especially whenever people would joke about my eyes. But I really began to become more conscious of the fact that I was non-white, and what that meant, about two years ago.

Before that, I knew that I wasn't exactly white, but I thought that non-white was synonymous with black, or indigenous. I couldn't fit myself in there. I thought that I didn't have to deal with racism, that it was just certain people's 'jokes' that bugged me, and I had to learn to laugh along and not be an unpleasant person.

Afterwards I understood that we don't suffer at the same level that other minorities suffer, but that we definitely suffer. In other words, I discovered that, despite us being a minority that suffers from a lighter form of racism, we are still a minority. And we are at odds with the privileged white people." — Tatiane Mayumi Ito