So Close, Yet So Far

"Raising Victor Vargas"

Last night, like many other saturday nights,
I stayed home, yeah, yeah please pity me,
and I watched this little indie film on PBS.
I had read about this movie before,
which came out a few years ago,
but never seen it.
It is a coming of age kinda movie about a Hispanic kid
who is living in Lower-Eastside
or Alphabet city of Manhattan.
This cute boy named Victor is sixteen
and has a looka-like younger brother
and a younger sister.
All these kids have been raised in a small apartment
by their religious granma
originally from Dominican Republic.
As a young teenager, of course Victor wants a girl
and he met a very pretty one.
Now his mission to get this girl starts
and his granma think he is becoming a bad influence
to his younger siblings because of that.
Nothing-really-happened kinda movie, which I like,
just a description of the daily ordinary life of the people
who live in the poor urban environment,
no drug, violence or excesive sex involved.

I have been living in the Alphabet city for a long time,
between Avenue A and B, to the exact.
Beyond avenue B, east side of avenue B is a pretty much
Hispanic area.
So I rarely go there.
Actually now things are changing, many Whites live beyond B
because the rent has sky-rocketed all over New York.
But, until like 10 years ago,
it was almost exclusively Spanish.
Those days, whenever I walked in there,
kids yelled at me "Chino, Chino".
On snowy days, kids threw snow balls at me.
One day I observed who they threw balls.
They targeted Asians, and White girls sometimes
but never to White men.
I guess they feel that they are bellow Whites
but certainly above ugly geeky Chinese
(all Asians are Chinese for them).
They did not do that out of naughtyness,
that was absolutely racial hatered.

I have been living so close to a Hispanic community
but never had a Hispanic friend.
Then I do not have Chinese or Korean friends either.

When I saw this movie,
I thought these kids are not realistic,
They seemed to be too sweet.
They live in a poverty and not nice neighborhood
but it seems not to effect them at all.
But then, it dawned on me how I could tell that.
I do not know about Hispanic people.
Some kids are bad enough to threw snow balls to me and laugh
but some kids might be sweet like those in this movie.

I realized how close I live to them,
then how far I am really from them.