A Letter to My Ancestors
Welcome to our column written by editor-at-large Caitlyn Mae Araña, called Catching Up With Caitlyn. Through letters, she addresses the trials and tribulations that come with learning and growing as a 20-something.
Tune in for your dose of drama, and strap in ladies and gents… Nothing is off limits here.
Dear Ancestors,
I originally intended for this article to be a video. I filmed it (it was 30 minutes long!) and even began editing it. But the more I watched the more I realized that I was focusing too much on saying the right thing that I ended up saying things that didn’t feel authentic to me. So, instead, I’m returning to writing.
My last Catching Up With Caitlyn was a little over two months ago. For the past two months, I’ve been debating which letter was the best to write, and I had to think if it was the right time to be writing this letter. I thought in the world’s current state, should I be writing this? But I think now is the best time to. So, here it is.
I’m going on a trip. For safety purposes, I won’t be disclosing the location, but I’m going on a trip and I’m so excited about it. Following graduation, the traditional and cliche route, besides getting a full-time job, is to backpack through Europe or just to travel in general. Unfortunately, with COVID-19, this isn’t the most feasible option, so I’ve decided to take a trip within the United States and travel to the West Coast (which is as location-specific as this is going to get).
The original plan for this trip was to travel cross-country solo. The idea itself was frightening, but if I’m being honest, it frightened my mom more than anything else. It was intended to be a trip of self-discovery. I wanted to learn how to be alone. I wanted to learn how to love myself when I’m not with anyone else. I still want these things. So instead, I compromised and have shortened my trip to cover specifically the West Coast as opposed to going the full cross-country.
Originally, the scary part about it was being a solo female traveler. I watched numerous videos about how to travel as a woman safely. However, from the time that I began planning this trip to today, things have changed. People have changed. To put it bluntly, I used to only have to worry about traveling as a woman, but now I also worry about traveling as an Asian woman. When traveling, I have to take into consideration things that I can’t control in order for me to remain safe.
Now instead of looking up women’s travel tips, I find myself looking up racist hate-crime statistics in towns. I find myself looking up demographics of how many Asians live in a specific area and how many of those Asians are women. Mostly, I find myself more scared than I was before. Today, I find myself making little changes to my daily life that I wouldn’t have a year ago. I wear my sunglasses every single time I leave the house so that people won’t be able to tell my ethnicity. I don’t take public transportation unless I absolutely have to, and even then, it’s only buses. I’m cautious all the time.
The other day I went to get a pedicure and had intense anxiety because I thought that if I went to my nail salon, I would die. My mind constantly flickered back to the Atlanta Spa Shooting that made headlines just one month ago. The thing is, though, I told myself that if I didn’t go because I was scared, and nothing happened, then I would’ve let fear control me. So, I went, and I got a quite fantastic pedicure.
So, despite my family and friends’ concerns over my trip and safety, I’m still choosing to go. Growing up as a first-generation-Asian-American, I feel that fear was constantly instilled in me. I wasn’t allowed out often because of the “scary people” who walked the streets. It was always “don’t do this” or “beware of these people” or “don’t draw attention to yourself.” So, for the majority of my life, I was scared. I didn’t start watching the news until I was in college, and my older siblings still don’t watch the news often because they find it scary too. So this trip, for me, is not only learning to be alone or learning to love myself, but it’s also learning how to overcome fears that were instilled in me for as long as I can remember.
Will I still be taking the same precautions there as I do here? Absolutely. I’m going to be cautious. I’ll be wary… of everyone. I’m bringing two pairs of sunglasses.
I think I find the sunglasses thing the most ironic right now. When I was younger, I used to hate who I was and where I came from. I had no appreciation for those who came before me. In school, I had some classmates who would be shocked when I would fail a math test because I’m Asian, and apparently that meant I had to be good at math. No one ever knew what my lunch was at school because it was always food that my family had for dinner, so at lunch it was always, “What is that?” Of course, never out of genuine curiosity. Then there’s the whole ordeal of eating household pets, which I’ve truly never understood.
But then I got to high school, and I thought things would be different. I excelled in school, joined clubs, and made a bunch of acquaintances and somewhat close friends. While a lot of my friends were made up of all different backgrounds, what I did realize was that the majority of my high school was filled with white kids. And every time I had a crush on someone, they always ended up dating a white person. I mean, maybe it’s not a race thing, and it’s just a coincidence. But it felt like one because my whole life, everything seemed to be a race thing. So instead of seeing the world and its preconceived notions and predetermined scales of beauty as the culprit, I turned it on myself and hated myself for something that I couldn’t control.
And to my ancestors, I’m sorry for that. Because the truth is, the amount of people who came before me—who made precise decisions that led me to being where I am right now—is astonishing. They are the reasons that I have a voice and have an entire column dedicated to my experiences. Like how insane is that! And every single day is a learning process. Every single day, I make strides to appreciate who I am and where I come from. And, while, I still struggle with this and find myself blaming my heritage for things that have never been its fault, I have to remind myself that I am who I am. I’m never going to overnight change bodies or looks or ethnicities or lives. My experience is my experience. My life is my life. I might as well start appreciating it now while I can.
Only Love,
Caitlyn Mae