By Jordyn Wong, 16
Content warning: mention of breast cancer
The question stumped me: “What is your favorite color?”
I learned how to say the colors of the rainbow in Cantonese when I was three years old. My dad’s favorite color was yellow, or wong sik, just like our last name. My favorite color was red, or hung sik. Hung sik was the color of the lanterns; the color of the lucky envelopes on lunar new year. From preschool to fifth grade, my parents would visit my classroom on lunar new year and teach the class. When I was in kindergarten, it was so exciting to see my peers guess the animals of the Chinese zodiac. Yet, by fifth grade, I handed out the red envelopes to my classmates with my head held low. My favorite color is hung sik, like the lanterns. But to my classmates, it’s red like the stripes of the American flag. As I grew up, I no longer saw beauty within hung sik. During my first days of elementary school, when my peers asked me my favorite color it was still red. Red like the color of my precious little block that my sister, jie jie, would steal away from me when I was being a burden. But all the other girls liked pink, so I did too. It was similar to red, but a more dainty and muted version. Slowly, the mental creep of wanting to fit in with my friends caused me to stop loving the once beloved color, like a red light. Hung sik soon became a color of my past, fading into a delicate hue of pink.
I didn’t actually like pink. It was fragile and pretty—like cherry blossoms in the spring. But pink was also the color of the ribbon that had once entangled my grandmother, Mama, as she developed breast cancer. This pink ribbon had separated us with a drive to the hospital. As my Mama grew weaker after various treatments, I worried that she would not be able to untangle herself from her life in the pink ribbon. Fortunately, Mama was able to escape the pink ribbon that turned into shackles. Either way, I had no passion for pink. It was the color of the ballerinas that I saw on television. But when I tried ballet when I was three, I cried every class and quit after three weeks. It lacked the energy and the fire that red had. It wasn’t just red, it was hung sik; the color of the dancing dragons on the streets; a dance that I much rather preferred.
Maybe wearing a pink ribbon tainted every other occasion that I’ve seen the color— serving as a reminder of my Mama’s pain. Hung sik was a symbol of vitality— showing quite the opposite of what pink represented. Today, my favorite color is hung sik, not pink. No matter how much I wanted to bury my burning passion for hung sik, it remained a part of me like a fire that cannot be put out.
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