FLOWERS

A young Asian woman recalls she had given out a 50-dollar bill to purchase a bunch of flowers mistaking it as a 5-dollar bill. Her racial anxiety triggers her into thinking that she wasn’t given the right amount of change because of her ethnicity.

 
 

This is a story about a young Asian woman who struggles to embrace her Asian identity. The Asian woman Jessie is the one who has a biased view towards her Asian self, not the African American flower shop owner.

Jessie's unconscious self comes up with the theory that she would be treated better by the flower shop owner if she was an All-American blonde woman. When translated to screen, her strategy is to put on makeup and wear a blonde wig in order to look “whiter”. Yet of course, by the end of the film she realizes that it was nothing but misunderstandings. She realizes that there wasn't any racism involved. She thereby tosses the blonde wig and embraces her ethnic identity.

It begs the question of being white in America. Who has popularized the idea of white supremacy? Not only white people constituted to white supremacy, but the internalized struggles of ethnic minorities also somehow fostered this idea.

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