Asian-American immigrant

Born in the East, thrown to the West

My best was all I could give

For the past five years I've accumulated fears

Fistfuls of tears that fill the tank in which I'm drowning

Secretly frowning behind the bars of my own forced smile

All the while knowing that my issues are going to last

A long

Long while

The racial slurs and stereotypes are the heated topics of debate

People hesitate to speak to be politically correct

As to not affect the sensitive foreigner

While I accept the validity of the issue of the fluidity between

A joke and an offensive slur

I think that sometimes these foreground issues blur

The window through which we have to see

Inside the walls of the likes of me

There is a struggle with incompatibility

For we are the children brought to the land of the free

Yet we arrived in chains

Chained to the traditions of our past

At last we are here yet we are downcasted

Expected to fulfill our duties and honor our mom or dad

Who had worked so hard so we can succeed

And we'd work so hard only to find

That life is cruel for our kind

We must obey, we must portray,

We don't want to disappoint you

But while our peers set out to spend their youths

We'll simply be too old to

My eyes have always been shrouded with green

I've seen them going out, going just to "live a little"

And little did I know, I can't live like that until I'm older

But then I'll grow old, or be too tired to enjoy it

Having spent my youth fitting a mold, or fulfilling my parents' portrait

Ignore it, they tell me, but it's easier said than done

For one, they do not see the lives my parents have led

To have fed the mouth through which I'm speaking

But leaking through my eyes are secrets

That I'm afraid at which they might be peeking

Because I was brought to a land where I must be one way

And say and play and do as I am told

But lo and behold, I am no longer of one culture but of two

And I want to be a little American, too