I didn’t realize that something was wrong with me until sixth grade. A substitute teacher was there for the day, and we were reading a book about a girl who was forced to relocate with her family to a Japanese internment camp. When the sub left the room for a moment, someone stood up and said, “You know who looks Japanese? Mary Anna.” He used it as an insult and the class laughed.
As far as bullying goes, this comment was considerably mild, something someone who was thicker-skinned than I was at the time would roll their eyes at and ignore. But I wasn’t thick-skinned, and I was still at the phase when I cried whenever I got angry or felt threatened. I went home and histrionically bawled to my mother because I hadn’t recognized before then that people thought of me as separate.
Several other things began to make sense. In second grade, my best friend told me I looked better with glasses (they hid the shape of my eyes). At summer camp in fourth grade, a girl told me my face did not match my body. People commonly came up to me and asked, “What are you?” and I had never known what they meant by that. They still do, actually.
Comments regarding my race as I grew older became more elaborate and insulting. It was appropriate that older persons would develop more effective ways of attacking a person’s identity. My grades were the result of my heritage, not the work I put into them. I was called “j*p” and “ch*nk” — the second being the incorrect racial slur. A few of my more irreverent classmates would pull their eyes into slits with their fingers and stare at me until I looked back. It was funnier because I openly objected. I was told by friends, “If you didn’t act like it bothered you, they wouldn’t do it.” Someone a few weeks ago asserted to me that, “All Asians look the same.”
Every conversation I have with someone new becomes a countdown. When will they ask me? How much do they care? It happens, inevitably: “What are you?”
What am I. What. Sometimes they ask this before they say hello. I never know what to say, because repeating my race over and over becomes tired and frustrating, as is the response frequented by other ambiguously ethnic people: “I’m a person.” I don’t like answering, because it isn’t a question worth answering. It isn’t worth my breath to explain to others how disconcerting it is to be repeatedly referred to as a “what” and not a “who.”
As soon as we encounter new people, we long to catalogue them and mentally place them with others of their kind. Once someone allows you to confidently call them white or Asian or black or Latino or gay or straight or woman or man or trans or mentally ill, you feel like you know who they are. But that is not true.
People will tell you that you shouldn’t be offended by what they say. I will offer this: no one gets to decide what you may or may not respond to. No one gets to remove what little agency you have by claiming that what you say does not matter on the basis that they should be able to do whatever they want without consequence.
You cannot know who I am just from asking me one question, and to presume you can is to dehumanize me from the moment you meet me.
