Sometimes, when I was younger, I used to watch my mother helping other women as she stirred the pancake mix and seasoned the varieties of soups. They were all crowded in a single kitchen, furiously sweating as they focused on arranging the food for the table on time while also serving the endless needs of the men. And so, for as long as I can remember, seol-nal — Lunar New Year—has been a day that marks the harsh gender inequality found in Korean culture. As the men drink alcohol and leisurely smack their “flower cards”, the women strenuously work all day, preparing food and prepping for my least favorite part of the day— jesa, the ancestral memorial ceremony.
I personally believe, although my relatives would object, that the ritual is pretty pointless. We offer mounts of food and liquor to the dead, merely so that we can eat the dishes ourselves at the end. But the part I find most infuriating is that while the women have worked the hardest to arrange the ceremony, only the men have the privilege of bowing to our ancestors. I am expected, along with the other females, to quietly submit ourselves to being almost nonexistent, as the males take turns greeting the dead. It is not the fact that I want to play a substantial part in the ceremony, but it is that I feel uncomfortably inferior as I am discriminated by the two things I most closely associate with—my family and my culture.

But to be honest, I discriminate against others, too, if not more. I can’t help myself, but feel more comfortable with the Chinese food deliverer in his Honda Accord than John, the Dominos one in his Ford Taurus. And I can’t justify the reason I pretend to talk to my mother on the phone whenever I approach a bearded man in his 30s with a minivan on the streets. I judge others by their gender, race, and more almost instantaneously and sometimes, I don’t even realize that I am doing so.
I remember once in the grocery store as my family was checking out with our haul of our daily necessities, a pair of hot pink acrylic nails. They were neatly trimmed and studded with a sparkly rhinestone on each finger, and they seemed almost too perfect like her hair, which was bleached blonde. I assumed she was a high school graduate, maybe even a college student pursuing a major in cosmetology or massage therapy, working just because some money was better than none. She probably had an unstable relationship with her family, perhaps, also with her boyfriend. And so, by the end of the check-out, I supposed and believed that I knew her and her situation solely based on her nails.
For me, it seems almost like second nature to merely glance at a person and suppose all the probable possibilities in my mind. I know that it is wrong to do so— to presume one’s character based on their physicalities alone— because I, too, know what it feels like to be suppressed under strict assumptions. I hate that I am treated inferior to my male cousins (even those that are younger than me) by my relatives, as others must have felt so as I judged them similarly. And until I can learn how not to judge others, I know that I will also be discriminated against my will.