During my junior year in high school, my favorite English teacher gave me a book to read because she thought I might identify with it. I am Chinese American; the book was The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston, an autobiography subtitled "Memoirs of a Childhood Among Ghosts."
She meant well, but the book made me feel like a total foreigner. I hated it.
It made me wonder: Was this the way white Americans saw my family? Did they really think that I came from a family that believed in ghosts and treated their daughters like property?
Read More