When I was five and six years old, my favorite colors were pink and purple. I can’t quite call it an indoctrination, but maybe that’s what it was. Pink greeted me in every new outfit, every toy aisle at the store, every bathroom at school. I was taught to like pink because I was a girl, and little girls are supposed to like pink. It felt natural when I wore it; it looked pretty on the pages of the diary I kept; and it was a bright sunspot that stood out against the dark black of my hair and brought color and life into my pale skin. Purple wasn’t just another color that looked good with pink. It was my shadow—my way of saying, “I’m not as small as I look. There is so much more to me than this smile that you adore and reflect.” I’d ask my mother to pull my hair back into a high-set ponytail and use my purple hair scrunchie, and when I looked into the mirror, I felt a few years wiser than my peers. Pink was my color of choice, but I drew my confidence from purple.

 

Realizing that pink and purple were no longer “cool” in second grade was an earth-shattering moment for me. Nearly my entire wardrobe fell between some shade of pink or purple, but suddenly, wearing those colors turned me into a girly-girl. A princess in need of rescue. There was nothing confident or strong about these colors. Pink was for babies wrapped in hospital blankets, and the mean lunch lady claimed purple as her own. No one wanted pink or purple school supplies, and no one wanted to be around someone who used pink or purple school supplies. Red was a salvation I chose out of desperation to fit in. It was a touch of good luck from my Chinese heritage; it was bold and fearless; it was what boys liked, and I wanted to be as far away from the girly-girl side of myself as I could get.

 

I managed to convince my mother to swap out the pinks and purples in my closet for shades of red. I tossed out the pink and purple glitter gel pens and buried my diary in my nightstand. The baby-pink cat-shaped jewelry box was banished into the furthest corners of my closet, never to resurface until the next garage sale. I tied my hair back with simple black elastic bands just like all the other girls, and red and black became my new favorite color duo. Everyone seemed to forget that just last year I was a pink blur on the playground. Boys in class noticed my shift into a darker choice of clothing and decided I was someone they could talk to. They invited me to sit with them at lunch and smiled in approval as I told them that red was my favorite color because it was the color of blood. My red pen was a sword I wielded when the teachers had us grade each other’s spelling tests. Red was a string that kept me tied to the Chinese heritage I didn’t really understand but wanted to honor—though at that age, I didn’t know what honor meant either. As I readied myself in the mornings, I would look at myself in the mirror, donned in red and black, and that little pink smile that adults adored would fall into a dark-eyed smirk.