I keep America’s blessings tucked into every hollow place in my body.

Shoes on my feet, satiety in my stomach, opportunity like dirt under my fingernails. I keep them where I know I can find them easily, in those moments when I get a little too close to forgetting how lucky I am. So if America asks me Do you love me?, I can remember that the soles of my feet have never had to walk over bomb shrapnel, and that my belly does not know what it means to collapse in on itself with hunger, and I can say Yes without lying.
 
My first friend tells me, Ni hao.

The sound is insubstantial, slippery, fits all wrong in my ears even with how little English I know. I blink at her. What? I say, too loud, too jarring. It’s a clunky syllable, one that scores across my teeth as I sound it out. I do— no. I falter.

She smiles at me, lips smeared with a kind of compassion that, if I squint, almost curdles into condescension. She points at herself and says, Hello. When she looks at me to check if I’m following along, I nod, and then she points at me and explains, Ni hao. It doesn’t make any more sense the second time. I stare at the pink half-moon of her nail, the tip of it creasing my shirt.

Understand?

I shape my mouth into a grin. Ni hao, I agree.
My father speaks English like a second priority, by which I mean his English is a messy, patchwork thing, cobbled together with spit and a prayer. He forgets his articles and misuses his punctuation, and sometimes he picks the wrong adjective, props it into his sentences like a placeholder until he can find the right one. 

But his English has always been enough. He knows enough to say, America is good to me. On the days when he’s feeling particularly daring, he even knows enough to utter, I love America.

It has never been what makes him un-American, but sometimes this country’s favored children, blue-eyed and fair-haired, decide he does not pass their scrutiny. My father, with his broken English. My father, with his brown skin and chink eyes. My father, American except for all the places he is still Vietnam.
My last debate tournament, one of the three judges finds me afterwards. He congratulates me on a job well done, and I’m glowing with pride, a breathless string of denial nursing the bright, warm thing in my belly. Before he goes, the judge says, After I heard you speak, I told myself—I need to find that little Oriental and talk with her. Tell her what a fine speaker she is! 

He salutes me jauntily. I go cold, and I think my diaphragm forces a laugh, one that I can't hear past little Oriental still ringing in my ears. In my blazer, my pressed slacks, my Calvin Klein flats, I feel like an imposter, and the realization of it plows into me like a truck. I can't remember how to stand, how to speak, can't remember how to be American. The judge has no idea it took him only a heartbeat to strangle the bright, warm thing and leave it for dead, its corpse shriveled in my gut, a weight I can barely breathe past. 
The man behind us in the McDonald’s line mutters, Ching chong. I don’t notice, too enraptured with going over all the Happy Meal toy options, trying to decide whether I want a green Bakugan or a black one. 

He coughs, clears his throat. Shuffles just enough to bump me into my mom, just enough that it can still be seen as an accident. A little curious and a little affronted, I twist my head to meet his eyes, and I’m cowed into turning back to the front so quickly I’m surprised I don’t get whiplash. 

His gaze is mean, but what scares me most is the kind of mean it is. Even then, barely old enough to order for my family at a fast food restaurant without fumbling my words, I recognize his unique brand of venom: derisive, disdainful, the same way anyone might look at a cockroach or an ant. Like we’re something to be crushed underneath his heel, not even worth a second thought.

My mother’s fingers are bleached white as bone around my wrist. She’s very steadfastly looking at the backlit signs, with a kind of rapt attention that doesn’t belong on the face of someone who’s already decided on chicken nuggets and the double quarter pounder. The man behind us jeers, more loudly this time, Ching chong.

I shake my mother’s arm. She doesn’t look down. Mom, I whisper. Mom. What’s he saying?

Nothing. Ignore him. Her mouth barely moves. We order our food and she has me say that it’s to-go, and we don’t talk about it in the car ride home.

Later, I’ll learn that she doesn’t know what he said, not really. I’ll learn that she can’t tell the difference between ching chong and chink and churro, but I’ll learn that hate translates into every language. Even immigrants can tell when they’re not wanted.
The next time America asks me if I love it, I will not tell it Yes. I will say, I think the question here is whether or not you love me, and maybe I will even be brave enough to stay and hear the answer. 
My little sister keeps the bullying a secret for months.

When she finally caves, it’s in a swath of tears, her lower lip trembling as she explains how the boys in her class pull their eyes back to tease her, and I’m so angry I shake with it. My hands are curling into fists that I don’t know what to do with, because here in America, violence is never the answer. Here in America, people who look like me die silently, buried alive in apathy.

Do you want me to talk to the teacher? 

She fiddles with the stray threads on her sleeve. She saw, my little sister mumbles. She just didn’t do anything about it. I dunno. I don’t think it’s a big deal, and my rage feels eternal, kicking in my chest like it’s going to rip through my ribs. Just like the fists, this is something I don’t know how to wield.

Why didn’t you tell me?

My sister falters. Shrugs. I look at her, the self-conscious hunch of her shoulders and the film of water over her eyes, and my rage sinks its teeth into my heart, tears it in two. I look at my little sister and I see myself staring back, five and eight and seventeen years old, already learning that the best defense is none at all. That people like me best when I don’t make it a big deal, when they can hurt me carelessly with no repercussion. That, here, it is better to be liked than to be whole.
The cashier speaks to my father with exaggerated slowness, wagging the Walmart bag in his face like he’s an unruly dog, tracking mud and all manner of foreign things over the pristine tile. No. Receipt, she utters. Means. No. Return. Understand?

My father’s mouth is pursed with humiliation. I am not stupid, he says, tremulously. I imagine that I can feel the hot rush of embarrassment beneath his skin, its mass pulsing in his veins. I am citizen. Sixteen, I come here.

She smacks her gum, nauseatingly rude in her apathy. Okay, citizen. She says it like a mockery, as if my father wears ‘citizen’ like an ill-fitting costume. You no make return. Yes? She blows a bubble, pops it. I’m old enough to want to reach into her mouth and shove the gum down her throat, if only to stem the acid spewing from her mouth. If only to stop her from corroding my father into something embarrassed and uncertain. He crossed an ocean to be here—what right does she have to make him feel unwelcome, in a country that is as much his as it is hers?

As we make our way towards the sliding exit doors, I sneak a glance at my father’s face. His eyes are suspiciously red. I don’t ask him why he’s crying.
Our food is one of the few things the Vietnamese consider with pride.

My mother’s cooking is pungent, well-spiced and generously flavored. I love the care that she puts into every dish, the dimensionality of umami exploding on my tongue. With her food packed into my lunchbox, every day I count down the minutes until the teacher lets us go for lunch.

No one ever says anything about my food, until one day I sit next to a girl who gags theatrically when I pop off the tupperware lid. I freeze. What? I ask, panic blocking my throat. Her nose is wrinkled in the shape of contempt. 

Ew, she says once, definitively. It’s so much vitriol for just two letters, and I feel my eyes sting with it. My hands tremble when I go to replace the lid. 

She jostles me with her elbow when she goes to unpack her sandwich, all-American peanut butter and jelly encased in ziploc. What? I can’t help but utter, like a reflex. I feel like a toddler, who in the moments where fear strips him down to his bones and little else, clings on to the first word he ever learned. What, what, what—always wondering, always asking, always trying to find excuses to justify the space I take up. 
I love America. Sometimes, I just wish it loved me back.