Beauty, tears, scars, resilience,
etched in the skin of my community,
faces like mine with history in our eyes,
the worry of being too different on our conscience.

We are the conniving Dragon Lady,
the submissive servant by your side,
the relentless “model minority”,
an incessant foreigner since the 1880s.

Blind to them is the struggle to just BE,
without the badge of fetish, silence, perfection on our chests,
“I am an Asian woman*”, we need an asterisk,
a signal of all the shit only we can foresee.

We go about our daily lives stereotyped.
Doctors, Educators, Politicians, Artists we are,
yet so often our we are reduced to filth,
the world is overdue in considering our minds.

We settle for less because we are used to nothing more.
How do we climb when we are seen as disposable?
Our lives taken like we were never here,
no one bats an eye, they move on, to before.

Asian women, a community we did not choose,
a diverse blanket of pride, dignity, fortitude,
spun with centuries of ancestors,
warping with every generation but never coming loose.

Beauty, tears, scars, resilience,
the tattoos of an endless struggle.
But still we FIGHT, we have no choice,
when they refuse to concede to our brilliance.