lime green pantsuit and glossy black hair are what I remember of my first kindergarten teacher.  I’m pretty sure I thought she was nice.  She must have believed in her students’ abilities‚ because by the age of five I was reading and writing little things.  At the time I didn’t realize she was from the Philippines and that like her, my classmates were brown, while I was white.  She spoke Filipino English.  I did too.

The next year my parents succumbed to homesickness and moved the family from culturally diverse Hawai‘i to predominately white Idaho.  When I arrived at primary school‚ I looked but didn’t sound white.  Mrs. Cochran quickly informed my parents I was ‘slow’ and needed special attention.  Establishing my intelligence was straightforward‚ and soon I was elevated to ‘gifted’ status.  Within months I used the words and speech paterns of my white classmates.  Today I wonder what life would have been like had I not slipped so easily into whiteness.

Twenty–four years later I revisited kindergarten and met Jocelyn.  In the children’s drawings‚ the stick figure with the long twisty braids was always her.  She was sternly serene and composed even amidst the chaos of eighteen six–year olds.  That comes with nine years experience.  Her English wasn’t so good‚ but then I was the English teacher.

That year‚ I had trouble telling the difference between Taiwan’s cyclones and the cyclone my English class was.  But every payday the difference between white and olive skin was abundantly clear.  Though I taught ten hours a week and she 42‚ I was paid 30 percent more.  I might have thought that English instruction simply had a higher market value‚ but at the time‚ schools were aggressively seeking North American English teachers.  However‚ the ads often read‚ “no ABC’s (American born Chinese) need apply”.