09.11.2012 - Entry #3: People in the Neighborhood

My neighborhood seems to be a few crayons short of a full box, if you know what I mean. I'm not too sure exactly what the racial demographics are here at UNR, but if I had to guess, it'd be something like this:

• Caucasians: ~85%
• Asians: ~10%
• Other: ~5%

I'm living in an environment that's almost completely devoid of color; an environment where rice isn't a staple at every meal, Qdoba is considered good Mexican food, and the tannest person here is whoever forgot to put on sunblock before going outside. Being Filipino and coming from a high school which was over 55% Latino, one may think that I'd be experiencing a bit of culture shock.

One would be wrong of course. Look at this picture below from my senior year of high school:

My usual lunch bunch, aka the "Nerd Herd"

Like high school, many of the people I associate with are white. This has been the trend for most of my life. A large part of this happens to be because of my academic success- from G.A.T.E to AP classes, my education has always been a large and important part of who I am. And according to research which states that Latinos and African-Americans are significantly less likely to do well in school, this has resulted in many of my classmates consisting of races which do emphasize an importance in education: namely Caucasians and Asians. And considering that Caucasians far outnumber Asians in Nevada, this has led to a predominantly Caucasian learning environment, one that has followed me even to college as an Honors Student.

What does this mean for me? A lot of confusion for one- while I am Asian, I'm really white-washed. I can't speak Tagalog like my parents and my favorite food is lasagna. For the most part, I'm completely comfortable with that- I've made no plans to learn Tagalog and I could eat lasagna for a good few weeks. There are times however, especially now that I've moved up to Reno, that I yearn to hear the Filipino language or when I crave a plate of adobo.

I keep those yearnings to myself though, simply because there's nothing anyone here can do about them. There are no Filipino restaurants in Reno and there's only 1 other Filipino that I know here. Instead, I've decided to continue doing what I've been doing and adapting- learning more about my surroundings and the individuals within them so that I connect with the people around me.

This is not a difficult task either- consider the picture below:

Doing homework in the LLC

Not many people- females especially- would be shirtless while doing homework in a public study lounge. The fact that these guys (and me) did so is because they've gotten to the point where they feel comfortable enough with each other for reasons outside of the fact that they share the same skin tone. One must remember that race is only one of many different factors in how well one can fit in with a particular group of people; many other factors are involved, such as interests, personalities, hometowns, common experiences, and more.

In conclusion, while I am once more one of the few Asian people in a land that is predominantly white, I don't foresee any problems with me fitting in with my fellow Honors students. After all, there's so much more that brings us together independent of the amount of melanin in our bodies.