Exclamationquestion’s Weblog

Yesterday I went to the strip district after I ran. I had gone there once before, I liked it probably because it was new, exciting, and busy. People were all around me, all different sorts of people- white people, black people, asian people, fat people, thin people, angry people, happy people. I  felt refreshed by the variety. I listened to the music playing in my ears and just looked around, I simply allowed myself to get lost in the beautiful pottery, or the dried flowers, or the different types of chocolate. I allowed myself to feel happy, to stop thinking and just listen and look. The Asian market intrigued me because of its’ uniqueness- I walked around the aisles looking at the different types of food and drink, like coconut sodas, or the dried meats from some sort of animal, or the green tea with the ginseng root floating in it’s glass bottle. I loved the feeling of seeing something new, or perhaps I thought that by seeing these things I made myself more unique. Maybe because I saw the Asian man working at the counter I was liberating myself. 

A black lady asked the Asian man who was stocking the dried meats with their foul smell on shelves, “Where are the coffee packets?”. There was no response, not even a movement, the asian man just kept stacking the dried pieces of pig fat on the shelf in front of him. The black lady looked at me, as if to reassure herself that she actually did speak out loud. I looked back, I was interested in the Asian man stocking meat and this black woman and her coffee packets. Not a word was spoken between us in that moment, but she knew that I had heard her question and that the Asian man was either ignoring her because she was black, or he could not understand English. So, she put her face directly in front of his and stated, “You don’t speak English.” It was not a question, It was a statement. He replied back by shaking his head and the black woman looked at me and rolled her eyes.

The liberation disappeared. I remembered where I was, I was in Pittsburgh. I remembered that the ginseng roots, and the coconut sodas did not have anything to do with me. I was a white, brown-haired girl, with a tan listening to music in an Asian food store, where I did not belong.