The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Michigan in Color
Monday, January 27, 2020 — 3A

As soon as I stepped into the 
harshly-lit, humid and ever-
so-crowded 
Beirut 
airport, 
familiarity flooded my senses. 
Anxiety did as well, as it 
had ever since I boarded the 
plane from Rome. I was going 
to visit my extended family 
alone after completing a study 
abroad program in Greece, 
one I deliberately chose for 
its proximity to Lebanon. My 
sleepless eyes gazed through 
crowds 
of 
restless 
people 
trying to get home, scanning 
for a familiar face, until they 
finally settled on one — my 
cousin, ten years older than he 
was the last time I saw him. 
His eyes were the same kind 
ones I remembered, and they 
instantly filled me with relief. 
My 
cousin 
drove 
me 
through 
narrow, 
bumpy 
streets of Beirut, through the 
neighborhood that for so long 
existed only in fragmented 
memories in the back of my 
mind, coming to the forefront 
in the presence of certain 
smells, pictures or feelings: the 

A Tribute to Home

Why I Joined MiC

During my first semester writing 
for the Michigan Daily I noticed 
myself wanting to write more 
about my experience as a freshman 
of color. Because what I’ve realized 
the past several months is how 
much race seemingly plays a 
significant role in creating new 
relationships. Back home, even 
though my high school friends and 
I come from different religious, 
socioeconomic, ethnic, and racial 

CHERYN HONG
Assistant MiC Editor

I want to learn myself. 
I want to learn my power 
of voice. I want to learn 
my heart, my trials, my 
confusions and my strength. 
I often shy from that which 
I need: self-love, affection, 
my own art, my own words 
and thoughts. When I say shy 
from, I mean avoid. When I 
say avoid, I mean run, or hide. 
I grew up in a space that 
encouraged this avoidance 
of self because that self was 
black. I had to force love 
upon myself, and cultural 
education 
came 
from 
nowhere but home. School 
meant being called a n***er 
in the hallway on my way to 
learn the benefits of French 
colonization. School meant 
defending my collar bone, my 
calves, my thighs, hips, and 
hair to the lacrosse players 
who joked that I belonged 
on 
the 
team. 
Isolation 
became a beautiful place, 
where I could craft my own 
curriculum and create my 
own assignments. Those took 
the shape of poems about my 
body, my heart, my people. 
They embraced the thoughts 
I wildly feared, and the fears 
I perpetually thought of. My 
journal and my laptop became 
a home and a school that was 

GABRIJELA SKOKO
Senior MiC Editor

Photo courtesy of the author

void of everything but me. For 
years that is what my writing 
has been: just me, alone. 
What I have realized is that 
it is okay to share. Maybe even 
necessary. Maybe refusing to 
share is why I am so scared of 
my work, or scared to claim a 
title as a ‘writer.’ Maybe I can 
inspire the way I am inspired. 

That is why I am here: to learn 
from others and myself. I am 
so honored to be welcomed by 
this team. I am so grateful to be 
offered this outlet of inspiration 
and culture and love. I want to 
thank Michigan in Color for 
accepting me, and for believing 
in my thoughts. I cannot wait to 
get to work. 

Photo courtesy of the author

backgrounds, the extent of our 
differences never interfered with 
our capacity of connection and 
intimacy. 
The past several months I have 
been diminishing a large part of my 
identity. I began to forget certain 
Korean words because I didn’t 
want to speak my native tongue in 
front of my white peers. I started to 
eat less East Asian foods I craved 
because they were “too smelly” or 
“gross.” I detached myself from 
anything “oriental” because I didn’t 
want to become an Asian culture 
and heritage guide in social groups. 

Her voice was like shea butter, from
African trees where healing grows 
Her skin was the bark, pushing
through clay and stony soil and racism
Her hair was the branches, carrying
the fruit of Black resistance and hope
Her words were the green leaves, growing
against the drought of the Sahara, or
the America, or the (mis)education
which seeks to quench her message, the 
water upon the seed of MLK’s dream:
That we would learn to live together and love one another. 

She, King

AYOMIDE OKUNADE
Senior MiC Editor

smell of busy Michigan Avenue 
through the window of the car 
on a hot summer afternoon, a 
stack of shiny photographs at 
the bottom of my mom’s drawer 
in her room. Pieces buried deep 
in the recesses of my mind 
that I was never able to quite 
put together, but appreciated 
nonetheless.
On the 2am drive to my 
grandma’s house where I would 
be staying, my cousin and I 
exchanged few words. I told 
him he had changed; he told 
me I had too. We exchanged 
questions of how the flight 
was and how we’ve been as I 
stared out the window and took 
in the sights- towering faded 
buildings, balconies decorated 
with clothes lines, little shops 
closed for the night. There was 
so much I wanted to say and ask 
him, but I couldn’t bring myself 
to formulate words. My heart 
was jumping with excitement 
and nerves- after not being here 
for so long, I worried about all 
that I had missed. So much had 
changed in the past decade- 
and I worried 12 days would not 
be enough time to catch up, to 
rekindle that sense of home that 
I used to feel in Lebanon. Even 

worse, I worried that I would 
not be able to connect to my 
family anymore and that they 
would regard me as an outsider, 
because after all, I was.
In the days to come, nothing 
would prepare me for the 
overwhelming feelings that I 
would experience — nostalgia 
most of all. Memories I forgot 
I even had were revived as 
old traditions were revisited. 
My short stay in Lebanon 
consisted of family gatherings 
every single day — a room full 
of aunts, uncles, cousins, all 
gathered in my grandmother’s 
house, eating on a spread of 
newspapers on the floor. It 
consisted of sweltering heat 
and periodic power outages 
and motorcycles buzzing and 
card games until morning. I 
met new family members, as 
the passage of time had brought 
them into my life. So much had 
changed; we were no longer the 
uninhibited little kids we used 
to be, unaware and unbothered 
by 
the 
disconnect 
that 
is 
created by living worlds away. 
I was aware of every awkward 
pause, every forgotten Arabic 
word, every relative’s different 
life that I was so out of touch 

with. 
But 
the 
unequivocal 
pull of family, the love that 
traverses time zones, oceans 
and decades, was still the same, 
and I imagine it always will be. 
In 
my 
Grandma’s 
spare 
bedroom, where my cousins 
and I were staying, there was a 
little wallet-sized picture of my 
mom as a teenager tucked into 
the side of the mirror. My mom, 
the youngest of 11 siblings, the 
first and only one to move to 
America after marriage, the 
one that left everything she 
knew and loved and risked it all 
at the tender age of 18. I felt her 
presence with me in Lebanon, 
in the way her siblings would 
talk 
about 
her, 
remarking 
about how much I resemble her 
both in physical features and 
mannerisms. I saw her eyes in 
my Teta’s, as she held my hand 
and recounted stories about my 
cousins and me so many years 
ago. I tried to imagine what 
she was like in her younger 
days, surrounded by family 
and her language and free from 
the bounds of stress that come 
with immigration. In all the old 
pictures, she’s always smiling 
big, looking carefree and happy. 
I wondered what her life could 
have or would have looked like 
had it taken a different course. 
I wondered who I would be 
had she stayed, had I grown up 
there with all of my cousins, had 
I never known the balancing 
and clashing of two identities 
as they fought tirelessly to 
reconcile their differences. But 
that reality is only a distant 
dream, and for now I choose 
to enjoy the nuances that come 
with who I am. 
I felt insanely lucky to be 
there, to have these roots, to 
belong somewhere that expects 
nothing of me except to keep it 
in my memory. I felt lucky and 
undeserving of the out-pour 
of love from all of my family 
members — the way they put all 
of their responsibilities on hold 
to make sure I had the best time 
I possibly could. The way they 
finished my sentences when I 
struggled to make a coherent 
thought in Arabic instead of 
dwelling on my mistake. To 
my aunts who invited me for 
breakfast and dinner every 
day, my grandma who spent 
hours making food she knew I 

liked, my cousins who took off 
work to spend time with me. To 
the owner of the corner store 
a block from my grandma’s 
house who surprisingly still 
remembered me and whose 
eyes lit up when I walked in. 
The days went by fast, too 
fast. It was time to pack my 
bags for a final time and make 
the journey home, much before 
I was ready to say goodbye. 
The drive to the airport was 
silent and tearful, the car 
overflowing with my suitcases 
and my cousins who insisted on 
coming along, and in true Arab 
fashion we stayed hugging in 
the airport much longer than 

we needed to. 
People 
wonder 
how 
you 
can be so connected to a place 
you are so geographically far 
away from, how you can feel so 
strongly for people you see once 
every decade if you’re lucky, 
how you hold on to a language 
that seems to fall apart in your 
mouth. I don’t know how to 
describe it, other than that 
home never really leaves you. 
While I left feeling incomplete, 
I also felt a piece of me come 
back that I never even knew I 
missed; now I’m counting down 
the days until I can go back 
home again.

“I feel most colored when I 
am thrown against a sharp white 
background.” Zora Neale Hurston 
encompasses how I feel, because 
I was detaching myself from my 
race as it was the most salient trait 
people here noticed about me. I 
have never felt more Asian, Korean, 
yellow and ashamed. While I 
haven’t 
experienced 
blatant 
discrimination or racism, there 
are subtle moments of ignorance 
or stereotypes that I have been 
confronted with, which has made 
me feel alienated from my peers. 
I want a balance between white-
washing myself and restricting my 
social circles to people who look 
like me. I will go through life with 
a one-dimensional lens, however, 
the more I immerse myself with 
a diverse group of peers, the more 
empathetic, understanding and 
multi-dimensional my perspective 
will 
become. 
And 
in 
short, 
Michigan in Color combines my 
zeal for writing and allows me 
to express my racially charged 
stories freely, without sacrificing or 
completely taking over my identity. 
I’m using my position in this 
section to finally allow myself to 
revel in the fact that I am a proud 
Korean-American and exemplify 
how much of an impact my 
ethnicity and race has towards 
how I view myself. But more 
importantly, I’m using my position 
to learn from others: people who 
have both similar and different 
experiences of people of color 
against a sharp white background. 

MAYA MOKH
MiC Co-Managing Editor

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Photo courtesy of the author

MAYA MOKH/Daily
An alley outside the author’s Grandmother’s building in Beirut, Lebanon. 
Kids gathered and played in the lot at the end of the alley every day.

