Blood Workings of White Privilage

 I walked around 20 minutes to the local walk-in clinic down the street from my home. Immediately upon entering a flood of faces surrounded me, a crowd of patients who didn't look very patient at all. The general demographics of the area are poor immigrants, women with colorful head coverings, 90's looking wind breakers, two-year old baby girls greedily sucking on pacifiers. There's only a lone white man, and I'm not sure if he's Syrian or white. Above are harsh florescent lightening and I wonder if the three secretaries sitting crouched over files and computer monitors mind or are too preoccupied with the next phone call or customer. A man wearing corduroys  is speaking in a thick British-English Indian saying "definitely" about nothing particularly important. I mean the clinic has already broken a thousand atmospheric stereotypes for walk-in clinics. It's well-lighted, I haven't heard any SARS muffled coughs, no shrieking babies, no flies hovering over old-men, no dust-caked windows.

 I wonder what would happen if I was a mobster  neck-deep debt came in with a bleeding warning.  I would entering furiously bleeding on the carpet with a thumb in a pickle jar, begging for the doctor to reattach my shriveling limb, lest I wouldn't be able to hitchhike ever again.  See I grew up in a white suburban neighborhood where I'm more familiar with couchy waiting rooms, floor lighting,  with month-old beauty magazines, children toys which whisper "No you're not too old to play with me," and Thomas Kinkade paintings serenely hanging on color coordinated walls. There's a drug store or variety store directly attached to the clinic, which seems like a faux pas to me.  I wonder if I should visit it after, but I decide against it because I don't have a coin in my pocket and I'm technically still unemployed.

An Iranian dark hair, white bleached women in her 40's breaks my reverie by calling out my name. She doesn't smile or say a word to me, but I follow her down the white hallways into a closet-sized room. Implicitly she stands there and prepares the syringes back turned to me and I ask, "Should I sit down?" She nods and I obey sitting on  a chair that has two boomerang arm rests and wait until she's ready. I try to relax, glad of my lack of fear of needles because I see the number of glass vials for my blood. I try to break the icy atmosphere by stating a well-known fact, "There a lot of people here today." "Yes," she brusquely responds. She doesn't bite onto my weak social cue for further conversation. I figure it's the "all business and no social" attitude of many middle-eastern, so I relent to silence and contemplation. She asks for my forearms, sizes-up my right arm but decides to go for my left arm telling to make a fist. I make a fist, breathing, letting the needle to slide into my green looking vein. I try to be manly, refusing to think about the pain, but instead focus on the blood flooding into the vials she's filling. If she starting salivating I would declare she was a vampire, but she doesn't say anything or look at me. She doesn't even comment on my lanky arms where doctors usually are glad that they can easily prick. It's an oil well for the blood drive. I just sit there child-like, contemplating what the gooey white stuff at the bottom of the vials. She's finally done and she unties the elastic band freeing my circulation and pushes a cotton ball on the hole and puts some tape on like it's a science project. She mutters something and hands me a cup. I realize that she wants my urine, and wonder if my bladder is full because I went to the bathroom just 30 minutes ago. I go into the bathroom, fill the cup up and I barely get an inch of warm lemonade pee out. Handing it back to her, I wonder if it's sufficient enough for anything. I leave, jealous eyes glued to my back, walking back home. Perhaps those just specters in my head, conjured out of my self interest believing I should have priority. I did schedule an appointment, I deserve to be pandered, to make small-talk with nurses. Perhaps my ideal of medical procedures isn't entirely justified or correct. Maybe there's something wrong with me and not with how other cultures do things. Although I'm Asian and mostly definitely not white, one can still have white privilege way of thinking. Believing you should have the priority, that as the customer you should be satisfied. It's quite an American, Western ideal of entitlement which allows people to jaywalk unthinkingly across streets thinking everyone else will watch out for you.  Maybe we have to watch out for the cars.