I remember in Brooklyn, New York, the first Black Friday I went to after arriving in the US. Like a long-ass line lmfao. People set up camps the night before. Around 2010. Online shooping wasn’t a thing yet (not that I’m aware of anyways). We got like a TV and a Laptop, like the very cheap stuff, don’t think it can run any actual like triple A games. That laptop was the gateway to the internet, well besides the library, which I always used those times to play games, not use it for into-seeking (I was 8, lol, what was I gonna google with 30 minutes of library computer time?). We didn’t even have internet at home, never had internet before in China either. We’d go to a nearby McDonalds for free internet 😆. Like I remember the image of just my brother sitting outside and we’d just be like downloading something or searching for info omg, it felt almost like as if we were commiting a crime, I remember feeling so anxious… like its silly to think about now, its a free wifi, why did we feel so anxious lmao.

When we later did manage to afford actual home internet, I remember just googling a lot of space stuff, since I don’t have 30 minute time restraints anymore. One my my favorite books I remember reading was a Chinese kids book called 十万个为什么 about science stuff, that was the first time I learned about space stuff, that probably got me interested in space.

Anyways, I remember like black fridays afterwards, we’d go to a Bestbuy like… one a year, or timetime we’d skip a year and it’d be every 2 years. Cuz you know… Asian parents and their frugal-ness lol. But then like sometime around 2017 to 2020, we stopped going. I mean, everything is online now lol.

I always felt anxious af. Social anxiety lol. I hate the store employees, like I always felt like they are just racist against Asians.

I remember this fucking dipshit employee that ASSUMED WE CUT IN LINE, because like there was in asile that divided the line into chunks, like imagine the line being a bullevard and there are intersecting streets (the store asiles in this example), know what I mean? So the dipshit employee assumed we just came from the asile and like cut in line. Like fuck you, we waited you racist dipshit. I was like under 16 I think, my brain was still like 10 or something, at least the emotional part of my brain (being in an Asian family really fucks with your emotional regulation). So I remember getting mad and sort of cried.

Apparantly later as an older-teen/young-adult I learned that there was a racist stereotype of ethnic Chinese apparantly “cut in line” which we never did, but of course racists be racists. I didn’t know about this at the time, but now recalling that memory, I now connected the dots and I understand why.

I mean I always hated black fridays at stores, but after that, I hated it even more. Also like being recognized by classmates always felt awkward af lol.