From AGNI
My relationship with my identity, like so many Korean adoptees and people of color raised in the Pantone promise of American Whiteness, was fraught with contradiction. I usually felt white until someone reminded me that I wasn’t—often some asshole yelling, “Love you long time!” or something much worse—as I sped by in my wheelchair with my special joystick, only able to flip him off in my soul. Even in the bluest of neighborhoods in the bluest of states, I realized it was inescapable: no matter what, people would never see me as background, as white noise, as part of the blank canvas. Unless I was in my past life as a marketing coordinator at Coldwell Banker and an agent was courting a white, high-end client, or I was attending a meeting at Harvard and no one needed more napkins, I would never have the privilege of being invisible.
I was an Asian character written by a white author.
As an undergrad at Boston University I was called the “gaysian,” and once in line at Espresso Royale, I met a butch woman who introduced herself as the “kyke dyke” while I was waiting for my Americano. We laughed, but I never saw her again. My first roommate in the Philosophy House, Liesl, who was smarter than me, complained that she was always second chair to some Asian kid. “Was I an amazing clarinetist like Lindsay Liu? Nooooo. And why not? Because my white-ass parents were like”—her voice changed like they were grounding her—“‘We want you to be happy.’ Maybe if they were Nazi Asian parents I’d be at Harvard right now.” We laughed. After all, I was always second chair to a white kid who had Nazi white parents. Maybe the flaw was having white non-Nazi parents? Perhaps this was why we were philosophy majors.
My race was never real, just an absurd aside that only the people closest to me understood. Back in Arkansas where I grew up, my friend Jen would poke me and point to the calligraphy on the wall, “Hey Mandy, what’s that say?” when a group of us would go to a Chinese restaurant, making us laugh so hard we couldn’t even tell the hostess how many people were in our party.
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