yellow skin (as an aside)

how to live in a country that isn't yours when no country is

shanghai wharf - chen chengbo

Your mother, who has never said anything positive about your appearance, tells you not to worry about the color of your dress. She says any color will suit you, because you’re so pale. You translate the word to pale because you know that is what your mother meant; the original word she used was white. Your mother, who has never said anything positive about your appearance, praises you for how pale you are. And so you learn your worth is determined by your proximity to whiteness.

The dress is for the second wedding you’ve been invited to this year. You are awkwardly standing in the corner of the venue because you were invited as part of the “family” category. Everyone else in this category calls your cousin’s husband by his name, just like they did for your other cousin’s husband. Every single one of your mother’s cousins’ husbands are jiefu. A few weeks after the wedding, your grandfather calls you. “Your cousin married a man of good character,” he says to you, “but when you get married, I hope you find someone who speaks Chinese.”

When you retell this story to your friends, the joke is your grandfather is xenophobic. A small part of you knows this to be true, too; your grandfather has always been uncomfortable whenever he visited America. He looks at American food with disgust and insists on bringing his own chopsticks to fast food restaurants. When the servers smile at him, he frowns. But you are the only cousin that still speaks Chinese and he tells you that you are his favorite even though you call the least, so when he asks you to find a husband that speaks Chinese, you nod and say haode.

A man approaches you at a bar and says you resemble a Horikoshi character. He thinks it’s a compliment. You wonder if either of your cousins would consider this a compliment. You wonder if you subconsciously think this is a compliment. The comparisons grow more frequent, almost always Japanese. Sometimes, you are mistaken for Korean. Your mother rolls her eyes when she hears Korean songs on the radio, but insists you do look Korean. “It’s a compliment,” she tells you, “because you’re so pale.”

You stop going to bars so you don’t have to listen to people compare you to characters they assume you know. You stop looking men in the eyes because you don’t like how you look in them. Someone sends you a video of a girl who “looks like you” and the “compliments” make your stomach turn inside out. Your mother calls to ask why you haven’t had a boyfriend in three years. You think of how it would break her heart to say you want to go home — and when you say home here, you mean China — because she spent her whole life running from it. You think of how when you lived in China, you thought of going home — and when you say home here, you mean America — daily.

None of your friends, even the ones that “look like you”, speak Chinese so you are the one that orders whenever you go out to eat together. You tell your friends it’s important to say the words in Chinese so the waiter brings out the food quicker — you are always seated faster when you say ayi hao at the door — but even if that weren’t the case, you think you’d still speak in your mother’s tongue. The longer you stay away from home, the more words start to fall from your memory.

Your mother calls and you find the number of English words you use increasing. You go home for the New Year — Chinese, not January 1st — and your mother’s friends all marvel at how you speak Chinese. None of their children speak Chinese anymore and you don’t blame them. You are the only one left clinging onto a language that isn’t fully yours and so all the ayis tell you your pronunciation is excellent. At home, your mother laughs at how you get complimented for your Chinese despite being illiterate — a wenmang.

You translate the word to illiterate because the word wenmang doesn’t mean anything in English. The translation is a one-to-one match, but you still wish you didn’t have to translate it at all. You think maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to listen to your grandfather if it means you no longer have to say illiterate every time you say wenmang. But you have grown up knowing that your worth is determined by your proximity to whiteness, so you only apply for jobs in America and stop going home — and when you say home here, you mean China.

When you think about childhood, you think only of China. Your favorite yogurt brand is only sold at a supermarket by your grandmother’s house. The only kind of orange juice you like isn’t sold in the country you live in. You look up how long it would take you to get your favorite breakfast food — it’s 21 hours and 6,700 miles. And so you learn to swallow your childhood, but how do you swallow a childhood without piercing your mother’s tongue?

You are home for xinnian because when you say you are Chinese-American, Chinese is before American. You say the words “Chinese-American” in front of your mother and she laughs because you are not Chinese. “I am Chinese,” your mother says, “you are American.” She isn’t wrong; Chinese is your second language for good reason. But she isn’t right, either; the way people look at you is proof there is a hyphen attached to “American.”

When you were five, you proudly told your friends that you had two homes. Now, you feel resentful of the length of the hyphen — 21 hours and 6,700 miles. You call your grandfather to shorten the gap and he says “come visit.” You lie: haode.

---