Life is full of colors! It collects and connects different cultures, languages, and people in a melting pot of excitement and transcending experiences. Living in San Francisco, people from all walks of life have always surrounded me.

I was lucky enough to experience this at a young age. Living in the City can teach you a lot about life lessons. Of course, don't get me wrong, besides the wonders, diverse cultures offer an enriching lifestyle. There's always a counter-action factor that lies below.

Growing up Asian, I can never hide that my god-given country was thousands of miles away from The US; I spoke a different language, ate Vietnamese food, and had different customs. I learned to accept it and move forward with an open mind. I went to primary and secondary school with children from all sorts of ethnicities. I learned about different styles of music, art, food, and etiquettes. In exchange, I showed them mine.

For a while, my young mind saw this as a mutual harmony of life. However, it was not until I finished college that I started to see the divide between different minority groups and the stigma that the majority set upon us. This situation was a hard pill to swallow because the veil of racism has uncovered and revealed itself to the world. The outright cruelty that some of these people are doing to Asian Elders is damaging the decades of hard work that social activists and mind-changers have fought to bury hate and divisions' views.

The past years have been tough on Asian Americans, especially the Chinese community because they have been stigmatized with the responsibility of "bringing in the COVID-19 virus," resulting in waves of hate crimes committed by the terrorists.

This is just one of the changes that I saw in 2020; I hope that we can all take a deeper look into ourselves and realize that we are all the same. The idea of separating people based on their physical features still boggles my mind. Life is too short of having hateful views. Moving forward, I hope that we as humans can start to embrace each other's differences and appreciate the complex wonders we all carry.
Embrace the diversity, and then we will start to appreciate the music, food, literature, and cultures that we all bring—making life magically colorful once more.