That must have been difficult. Whether or not it was conscious, seeing what your parents went through must have influenced how you thought about dating between cultures.

“Absolutely. I definitely didn’t want that division to happen to me. I didn’t want people to think a certain way about me, and I definitely know it influenced a lot of my self-confidence in terms of how I viewed myself. I definitely viewed myself as different, and different was ugly. I didn’t like being different. I really just wanted to assimilate. This was harder because we moved around so much. I went to predominantly white schools, and I never thought of myself as particularly beautiful or interesting until I got older. And that’s when I started to recognize that being different is beautiful. That took a long time to learn. I have so many stories of people telling me how absolutely beautiful I was, but I completely ignored them because I just thought, ‘No, I’m dark and I’m ugly.’”