Outsider

Eugene H Krabs 2
2 min readMay 3, 2021
“Standing out” by MaxIFaleel is licensed under CC BY 2.0

I found myself reading “My Grandmother Washes Her Feet in the Sink of the Bathroom at Sears” by Mohja Kahf and I could not have felt any more like I was literally living through the poem. Both my parents are Vietnamese and they both came from Vietnam in around the 1990s. They were about 30–40 years old at the time, which means a lot of what they do revolves around Vietnamese culture and tradition. So you could imagine exactly how I felt when walking around the store in front of the cashier they immediately start to attempt and haggle the price. They don’t do this anymore, but I could tell the cashier was judging my parents especially since they started to tell me in a condescending tone to tell my parents that “price here is non negotiable”. I did at first feel embarrassed but now looking back I see that it wasn’t necessarily their fault that they were attempting to lower the price. When I went to Vietnam with my parents I tried to purchase “ramen” and they said around $5 and I went to get the money out of my pocket, but instantly my mom started saying to go down to $2 dollars and eventually it went back and forth to $3. She even played the walking away trick to force him to make a move. Then I noticed that I was the one who didn’t know what they were doing rather than my parents. It’s all relative to where you live and how the system works there. So I can now understand if someone starts to do something I would find weird, it might be normal for them. From coming from a different place to having a disorder, you shouldn’t judge people, rather you should try and understand them.

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