I slowly drove up a narrow hill road.
Before I even covered half a mile, the view suddenly opened up, revealing a railway bridge, with a small river flowing beneath it. As I crossed the bridge, a village hidden in the valley unfolded before my eyes. Scattered houses dotted the hills, seemingly touching the sky, and yellow cows grazed leisurely on the sloping meadows.

By the roadside, a fence enclosed a group of goats. A kind-looking elderly white man tending the goats gave a warm smile toward my passing car.

In the middle of the road, a boy was riding a donkey toward the street.
I gazed at him with a heart that fluttered—as if I had met a long-lost child from my hometown.
Suddenly, I was startled. I recognized the boy’s face.
He was the same boy I had seen months ago at a department store.
Around 12 years old, he had been playing with a friend, riding the escalator up and down. I remembered his face distinctly—his forehead and nose were marked with reddish skin that hung like a rooster’s comb.

“Hey, did you get hurt in an accident?” I had asked, stopping the breathless boy who passed me.
“No! I was born with this birthmark!” he replied.
It was that same boy. I had felt a pang of regret for asking such a careless question back then.
Now my heart ached.
What a small world this is!
And he lives not far, but just across the road—my neighbor!

“It won’t be easy to live there as an Asian. I heard many white folks there are conservative and racist…”
“…Really?”
That was a warning from an old friend when I left over 25 years of life in New York to move near the Smoky Mountains.

It wasn’t long after I moved south that I was shocked to find flyers recruiting for the KKK being passed out at a neighboring town’s festival.
I had only seen such white supremacists in movies and novels—those who rode horses at night, dressed in white hoods and robes, burning down Black families’ homes.
But here they were, recruiting members in broad daylight, without even the hoods.
A strange fear crept into me.

“I’m not Black. They have no reason to target me.
But… I’m not white either.
In the end, I won’t be free from their scale of discrimination.
Still, I’ve chosen to live among them.
Maybe their prejudice against other races is just as deep as the bias I carry inside myself…”

Suddenly, my legs walking on that road felt as heavy as lead.
“We avoid each other only because we don’t know each other.
If we care to know one another, we could become precious neighbors.
Who am I to be free from racial bias and prejudice?”

That day—filled with dread and reflection—was the longest day I had ever lived.

Now I feel that I’ve truly visited my neighbor, a place just five minutes by car or about thirty minutes on foot, though I had never been there before.
That’s where the unfamiliar boy from the crowd lived.
And there lived simple neighbors sharing in the joys and sorrows of life.

From across the road, a once-distant and fearful face came riding toward me on a donkey.

— Kingsport, TN

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