I have to preface my story first by saying that I grew up in Hong Kong for the first ten years of my life. Many of you may know, Hong Kong is not an ethnically diverse city, and I mean it really really isn't. A quick search on Wikipedia shows that from around the time I was growing up in Hong Kong, 95% of the population there was Chinese. However, I was one of those people who just didn't see color in people, and when I moved to England at the age of 10, it was really the first time in my life that I would really be interacting with foreigners. I say all of this to say that, at the time I had no concept of American history, especially not concerning slavery and the likes of that.

Fast forward to me at the age of 11, I am in my first year of middle school. I have two friends, let's call them Lenny (white guy) and Carl (black guy). In the middle of the year, things got a bit heated up between Lenny and Carl. Looking back, I can't remember why the conflict was happening, but one thing led to another, and it wound up with Lenny taking a leak in Carl's bodywash. Now Carl had a philosophy that, if somebody did something bad to him, he would do it back ten times worse. So naturally, Carl got back at Lenny by pissing in all of his shower gels. So Lenny got pretty pissed off, and one day he came to me and said "Carl is a n***er". I looked at him and nodded as if I understood what the hell he meant, and he asked, "Do you know what that is?". I said no, and his response was simply, "It's a really bad thing, that they use to describe black people. It's like a word for a slave. It's really really bad.". I nodded as if I cared, but honestly at the time I didn't realize that it really was supposed to be a big deal. Took me a couple more years to really learn about things like white and black culture, differentiate between races, that kinda stuff people do when they adapt to a new place.