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As a kid, I thought very little about identity. I went to a very traditional Catholic school through eighth grade, and there was no discussion about identity. There was an assumption that I would perform well because my mom is Chinese. My mom always contacted my teacher to check on how I was doing, so she was stereotyped as a "tiger mom." But wouldn't any mom check on a daughter with a disability?

In high school, I took Mandarin and took a class trip to China. I was super excited. I had never been, and I always wanted to go. When I got there, I found out that, because of the one-child policy in China, if a family, especially in rural parts, had a kid with a disability, they usually sent you down a river. Literally down a river. They didn't want their one child to be disabled. I was heartbroken. My mom came from Hong Kong to the United States with this mentality, and then she had me.

I was born with cerebral palsy. It's a permanent disability. I have very limited ability to participate in normal, everyday things. I could never run around during recess. I could never go to summer camp.

People with disabilities are perceived as "crippled"-a word used way too often-as not able to be independent, productive members of a community. At the same time, I had to fight the stereotype of being a girl and "fragile." I was never taught about feminism. "Feminism" was a bad word; it meant being a man-hater. I was never ladylike enough for my family. When girls got into fights, they would immediately go on social media and write a cryptic, passive-aggressive Facebook status like, "Oh, good friends come and go." That's how girls were expected to be-fragile, catty, mean, weak-and I was not having any of it.

I never really realized that I had a permanent disability until I was ten or eleven. I had been doing tons of physical therapy, and I thought that if I just kept working at it, then one day, it would be gone. Once I made that distinction, I began to think about what ability really means. I began to see things around me that were ableist. For example, in our chemistry room, there was a poster that had braille at the top and bottom and read, "Don't forget to wear goggles. You don't want to have to read braille!" So, what are you saying-that it's a punishment to be blind?

I'm originally from New York City, and there are hundreds and hundreds of subway stations across the five boroughs, but so few of them have elevators. People with disabilities are by far the largest minority in the world and the most underrepresented in everyday life. So the fact that almost none of the subway stations in New York City are accessible to us is a problem.

How are you expected to take a stand for something if you literally can't stand? Think about the Women's March. As much as I wanted to go, I couldn't. There are people everywhere storming the streets-it just wouldn't be safe for me. I couldn't keep up with the crowd.

Part of the reason I am here today, though, is that we had a lot of socioeconomic privilege. I'm very fortunate, since I had so many medical problems, that my parents were successful, retired young, and were able to be full-time parents. But I didn't feel I actually got to exercise that privilege. For example, after-school activities would never accept me. That intersectionality between ability and privilege has always been a conflict.

Being comfortable talking to people with disabilities adds visibility. Because the more you don't talk about it, the more you don't ask, the more you use softer words like "handicapped," the more invisible our stories and experiences become. I don't mind when my friends ask, "Lauren, are you disabled?" I don't take offense to that, because it's true: I do have disabilities. Just don't be like "Oh. What happened? What's wrong?" assuming that something happened to me, when in reality, I was born with it.

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In this personal narrative, a young adult reflects on the assumptions made about her as the daughter of a Chinese parent and her experience living with cerebral palsy.

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The most exciting part was the laptop.

My mom grabbed the thick envelope out of my hands and read off the amenities associated with the Tang Scholarship to Phillips Academy: full tuition for all four years, a free summer trip, $20 a week for me to spend on all the Cheetos and nail polish my heart desired, and finally, a free laptop.

I had never had a computer of my own before, and to me the prospect symbolized a world of new possibilities. I was the only student from my public middle school I knew to ever go to an elite boarding school, and it felt like being invited into a selective club. My first week at Andover, dazed by its glamour and newness, I fought my way to the financial aid office to pick up the laptop; I sent my mom a photo of me grinning and clutching the cardboard box. Back in my dorm room, I pulled out my prize, a heavy but functional Dell, and marveled at its sleek edges, its astonishing speed.

But the love story of my laptop came clamoring to a halt. In the library, as I stumbled to negotiate a space to fit in, I watched my friends each pull out a MacBook. Each was paper-thin and seemingly weightless. And mine, heavy enough to hurt my back and constantly sighing like a tired dog, was distinctly out of place. My laptop, which I had thought was my ticket to the elite world of Andover, actually gave me away as the outsider I was.

For a long time, this was the crux of my Andover experience: always an outsider. When I hung out with wealthier friends, I was disoriented by how different their lives were from mine. While they spent summers in Prague or Paris, I spent mine mining the constellation of thrift stores around New Haven. The gap between full-scholarship and full-pay felt insurmountable.

But I also felt like an outsider going to meetings for the full-scholarship affinity group. My parents attended college and grew up wealthier than I did, giving me cultural capital many of my full-scholarship friends never had access to. Moreover, I'm white and could afford occasional concert tickets or sparkly earrings. The laptop, carried by all full-scholarship students and coded with hidden meanings, pivoted my friends' understandings of me. At home, I grew up middle class, then became the privileged prep school girl. But at Andover, suddenly, I was poor. Trying to reconcile these conflicting identities, I realized how complex and mutable class is. My class is connected to my parents' income, but it's also rooted in cultural knowledge and objects that are charged with greater meaning.

Which brings me back to the laptop: in the middle of my senior fall, my exhausted Dell broke and I couldn't afford another. When I managed to borrow a slim Mac from my school, I felt the walls around me reorient. I hoped that now I wouldn't have to think about the electric web of privilege and power every time I sent an email. Instead, I felt a new anxiety: I worried when I sat in the magnificent dining hall with my beautiful computer that I had lost an important part of my identity.

When I started at Andover, these constant dueling tensions felt like a trap: like I would never be comfortable anywhere. (The school sensed it too, and all full-financial aid students now receive MacBooks.) But maybe it's the opposite of a trap. Maybe I'm culturally ambidextrous, as comfortable introducing a speaker on the stage of Andover's century-old chapel as getting my nose pierced in a tattoo parlor in New Haven. My hyper-awareness of how my Dell hid my privilege and how my Mac hid my financial need pushed me to be aware of what complicated stories were hiding behind my classmates' seemingly simple facades. I am a full-scholarship student who benefits from cultural, socioeconomic and racial privilege: my story isn't easy, but it's still mine.

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My Dell Hid My Privilege and My Mac Hid My Financial Need

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In this personal narrative, a young adult reflects on their experience reckoning with social class and privilege while attending boarding school.

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By Tiara McKinney

In my last year of middle school, I found out that I would be attending a boarding school in New Jersey. My hard work, long hours spent studying, and stress and anxiety would pay off - but I had no idea what to expect at my new school. I had never visited New Jersey before and the only communities I knew were in my home country, The Bahamas.

I only knew my small island community where I went to school with many of my peers. I shopped at the same supermarket as most of them, and my parents and their parents worked together or knew each other. New Jersey is vastly different and I still have not fully adjusted. How do you ever fully cope with being away from home?

The first day of my freshman year came and I drove about five minutes from a borrowed apartment to the school at which I would be spending the rest of my high school years. My mother spoke calming words while I dragged suitcases and bins from our rented van to the room where I would live. The room was empty and bare with its menacing green carpets and cream-colored walls that reminded me of nothing of home. I shrugged my way down the hallways of the red brick wall buildings to and from orientation meetings while other students strutted down the hallways as if they were runways. They were so sure of themselves... and they had whole family legacies at the school. I knew no one and I had no legacy. I felt out of place.

That first year, I rushed to learn everything about living in the United States and living closely with other people who looked nothing like me and who came from a variety of backgrounds. I changed how I spoke and what I said. I felt it would be best if I didn't have an accent, so I tried to speak like the others around me. I unlearned how to be polite and how to greet people, how to smile to others and say good day. I learned how to just ignore people if we were in public. I unlearned my habit of calling elders ma'ams or sirs. I did not realize what my learning of and adaptation to this new culture also came with the unlearning and erasure of the social customs and traditions that were representative of where I came from - of my culture and upbringing.

When breaks came I traveled home - but when I went home it felt different. I walked off of flights of cold, stale air into the fresh sea breeze that reminded me that I was home. I indulged in everything that I thought came with being a Bahamian: I went to the beach more often, I ate more pastries and food that I had previously taken for granted, and I visited family and friends whom I missed when I was gone.

However... I felt like a fraud.

I had learned everything about New Jersey culture and I could no longer appear authentic when I returned home. I was mocked for my Bahamian accent - or rather, my lack thereof. In all of the stores that I shopped at, family and friends always thought it ok to stop me, my sister or my mother and asked what happened.

"She sounds so 'American' now," they observed and at times taunted.

It seemed I could no longer be one of them.

I felt stuck in between two places, two people, and two cultures. To the students at my school, I was still not one of them and everything that I had tried to learn on the outside was a coverup for my background - about which I would never talk to them. To those in The Bahamas and more specifically my small island community, I could not relate to them either. I was a fake, someone who had not chosen to remember her roots and someone who had chosen to assimilate.

In my rush to learn what I thought I had to in order to fit in abroad, I risked feeling left out at home.

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How Assimilation Changed My Identification with My Culture

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In this personal narrative, Tiara McKinney reflects on feeling stuck between two places and cultures as she moves between her home country, the Bahamas, and her boarding school in New Jersey.

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In this TED Talk, Priya Vulchi and Winona Guo reflect on the year they spent engaging in conversations with people across the country about identity, race, and culture.

Using the strategies from Facing History is almost like an awakening.

- Claudia Bautista, Santa Monica, Calif

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In this TED Talk, Priya Vulchi and Winona Guo reflect on the year they spent engaging in conversations with people across the country about identity, race, and culture.