"The White Girl with the Asian Eyes": Is vulnerability the key to writing poetry?
I wrote a lot of poetry when I was younger, but there is one poem that stands out to me. Even now, I think it’s one of my best. I called it “The White Girl with the Asian Eyes”.
You hurt, you haunt,
You criticize
The white girl
With the Asian eyes
You don’t use slurs
You never curse
But you’re my friend
Which makes it worse
You tell the jokes
And lightly grin
I laugh as well
So I fit in
The racist things
You say are true
I don’t believe them
But I do
Since I’m your friend
You needn’t be
So damn correct
Politically
But I’m ashamed
At what you think
The half of me
You'd call a *****
I bite my tongue
I don’t react
“Not you,” you say
“But it’s a fact.”
As you insist
That you are right
I let you win
Cause I am white
You’re prejudiced,
You hate, you lie,
But I don’t stop you:
So am I
It’s been too late
I cannot find
The half of me
I left behind
And when I weep
A white girl cries
Her white girl tears
With Asian eyes.
What makes this poem in particular good? I think part of it is the simplicity. If writing is about choosing words, poetry is about choosing words carefully. In fact, if I were editing, I would make it a few stanzas shorter. But I wanted to present it the way I originally wrote it. (The one change I made was to censor the slur, saving me from saying it and forcing the reader to fill in the rhyming word.) The rhyme scheme and meter don’t do anything fancy; they don’t get in the way. When I was younger (and even now, as a writer of sonnets), I insisted upon my poetry rhyming, sometimes to its detriment. In this case, though, it gives the poem a lullaby quality that contrasts with the subject matter.
Part of what makes it good it is also definitely the subject matter. If this poem was about, say, springtime, or love, it wouldn’t stand out to me now, looking back more than a decade. They always say “write what you know,” and this is something I knew. This poem pins down a certain pain of mixed race identity that, while not universal, I think a lot of people can relate to. Identifying and expressing that pain requires introspection and vulnerability, a kind of vulnerability that is rare at any age, but especially as a young adult.
I wrote this poem my first year of high school, in 2011, a time in my life rife with teenage edgelords, in a political context that was brimming with latent racism barely suppressed by Obama era “political correctness” - the previous generation’s way of saying “woke”. But you don’t need that backstory to appreciate the poem, and you could probably guess the context. I couldn’t, and wouldn’t, write something like this as a (male-presenting) adult in 2026. That is also something that makes it special to me. The writer changes; the words remain.
That isn’t to say that vulnerability alone is enough to make a piece of writing good. You may disagree with me about its overall quality. I believe that good art is taking pain, or some other difficult feeling, and making it into something… well, not necessarily beautiful, but tangible. An AI could never write a poem like this, because the purpose of this piece of art, of every piece of art, is to communicate something human.
I never shared this poem with anyone when I wrote it; certainly not the people it was about. But it's never too late to open up. Maybe it would be braver to post the poem without context or analysis. But it's also brave to look at your own writing and say "Hey, this is good, and here's why." And I hope it inspires others to share those tender parts of themselves.