I catch a whiff of dental disinfectant as gloved fingers poke at the ends of my braces. “Say goodbye to these metal menaces,” Dr. Brown jokes, positioning his pliers on the bracket of tooth number 17, my third left molar. As the pliers forcibly wrench each bracket upwards off my teeth, I try to remember a time before I ever had braces, dimly grasping a memory of my first appointment with Dr. Brown. “A smile is a curve that sets everything...

My family visited Malaysia the summer after 10th grade. Because Dad wanted me to live his teenage life, he enrolled me in his old high school, Hin Hua, a segregated Chinese Malaysian institution. When I’d adjusted to teachers traveling between classrooms instead of students, I joined the school’s traditional Chinese orchestra and told stories about America during English class since I couldn’t speak Mandarin well. However, my conversational Chinese skills improved while I attended the school due...

After hearing Dad complain about other teachers' racism towards minority elementary students in the school where he worked, I decided to intern at Project Humanities, an organization at Arizona State University dedicated to improving race relations. I published advertisements for and attended project-sponsored lectures focusing on issues such as portrayals of African American masculinity in the media—topics which seemed dry compared to the Ferguson riots—until follow-up discussions citing scientific studies forced me to acknowledge the significance of unconscious...