Essay

            I had faced many difficulties in society, because of the discrimination that society places on everyone.  I held myself very accountable for my own actions, and do what I believe is right.  During my seventeen years of living I had experience many hatred from others; towards my ethnicity.  That is why I learn to value family and friends so highly. 

            I have never really known what hatred and prejudice was like, until it happened to me.  I am Chinese, Vietnamese, and Cambodian.  I live in Long Beach, California; where the Cambodian community is large.  During my years of growing up I was mainly sheltered by my parents, I grew up around my parent’s friends and my relatives.  When I entered, high school I did not know where to start or who to begin my year.  While finding my classes, I manage to get myself lost, but I was not alone.  I met a girl named Esmeralda Alvarez, she too was lost, so we tried to find our classes together.  We became good friends ‘til our senior year.  She was killed while staying outside her house taking care of her sisters while their mom was out working trying to support her kids alone.  The person who shot her was a teenage hoodlum; who was trying to get into a gang.  Esmeralda’s life was taken away because of a boy trying to prove that he’s tough.  Later that same week I was robbed on the streets by a Hispanic male, I didn’t do much; but tried to cool down my scared red neck.

            When the day of her funeral came, her friends who were mainly Cambodian all showed up to the memorial.  We didn’t sat close since we felt that the stares that we were receiving was already enough to drive us crawling back home.  As my friends, each took turns saying a few things about her kindness and love.  I walked out with tears blurring my eyes.  As I was walking to bus stop, I heard some of her mourning relatives blaming my kind for her death.  I couldn’t do much, but think to myself that maybe it was my fault, like I could have prevented it somehow.  I wasn’t sure what it was but something.  I came home wallowing in my own doubt about the thought of her gone, I went through counseling that only made me more depressed.  My sister’s words encourage me through my time of grief.

            It has been three months and then days since she left this world.  I had gained a more confident self-esteem for my ethnicity and myself.  I do not blame anyone for her death but think that her death meant that I should do something that would prevent another such occurrence.  I think that if the Cambodians and Hispanics learned to resolve their hatred for one another, then another individual wouldn’t have to go through the same thing as I did.  So by not taking the anger I felt about her death, I took it as a lesson to be learned.

            This experience was probably the most devastating one I had ever went through, but it actually made me realized what was most important in my life.  It also put a new ring to the saying “You’ll never realized  what you had, until it’s gone,” from that saying I learned to value friendship and family a lot more.  Especially my family, since my people and friends are families.