Tonight, I had dinner with my friend, who is usually very chipper and positive. But as soon as I saw her when I arrived at the restaurant, she was clearly exhausted, with fine lines around her eyes and a dark cast over her face. She looked like she had barely slept in a week. Every response from her was a little snappy or annoyed, and she made lots of assumptions about what I knew that I didn’t know. It felt so odd for the first hour, as though I was having dinner with a stranger and listening to someone who I barely recognized. As the night went on, she broke down and started crying, and finally after she let her feelings go, she started resembling herself again.
A lot of the frustrations she was experiencing were from almost a month ago; she just didn’t have anyone to really talk about them with who would just sit there and listen and not say anything back. That tends to be the way people become when they don’t get to express themselves; they become a shell of themselves that becomes unrecognizable to the ones who truly know and love them, not just the self that they reveal to their colleagues or their superficial friends.
Most of my life, most of my friends have been of Asian descent. It’s partly because I grew up and went to schools where the kids were predominantly Asian. But what has always frustrated me the most is the constant Asian desire to not share our deepest feelings and frustrations, to not be authentic, to not share your opinions even when it’s the most crucial time to do so. Being neutral is not only boring, but it makes you seem like a fake person who doesn’t have thoughts. Pick a side; live a little. As the Jewish political activist and writer and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel once said, “We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere.” In my friend’s case, I feel sad that she didn’t feel like she had an outlet to share in the last three weeks, and that it took her a while to even open up to me tonight. These are the everyday lifelong battles we face in our relationships.