When I first moved to USA at age 9, I had quite the culture shock because I hadn't lived in North America since kindergarten.
My new school was a public school in a neighborhood where there were not many Asians. Besides me, there was only one other Asian boy in the entire school.
On my first day of school, I stood timidly by my parents in the yard. Apparently everyone already knew each other. "Look! There's a new freak in our class!" a boy said loudly to his friends. I remember walking up the stairs with my class to my new 4th grade classroom. Everything was different and terrifying. I was quiet because I wasn't sure what to say. "She's sad," I heard a girl whisper to her twin sister.
That year, I had a red lunchbox with a Jolteon (Pokémon) sticker on the corner. At lunch on the first or second day, the boy sitting across from me noticed it. "Hey! Pokémon!" he says, getting the attention of a few other boys around him. He looks up at me. "Do you have Pokémon in Hong Kong?" "Yeah." I said. In that moment, it felt like something changed. I was no longer just the girl who looked different and was quiet and came from a vague, foreign land that no one had much mental imagery about. I was the new girl who, well, also knew about and liked Pokémon. That was something my classmates could relate to. And this "Hong Kong" place.. maybe it's not so strange after all if kids there also play Pokémon.
"Pokémon is from Japan, actually, and that's in Asia." I think I even said.
It happened slowly, but I ended up making a lot of friends in the class. My classmates were still fascinated by me and where I came from and asked funny questions (stories for another time), but they liked me and respected me..
I had liked Pokémon before moving to Connecticut, but the fact that it helped me get "an in" when I was the new girl... probably made me value it even more. And at age 9 this experience taught me that as long as I could find a point of connection, I could bear being new (something I continued to do for much of my childhood) and could transition from being viewed as "the stranger" to "a relatable human being".