Chinese or Japanese? 

Padding across the puzzle-mat floor, I stretch to grab The Story about Ping from the bottom shelf. 
     I know why you’re reading that book, smirks the boy across from me as he jams Legos together into an uneven tower. You’re from China.
     No, I say, shaking my head.
     Japan? he asks, now squinting his eyes into little slits. Yelling something about fortune cookies and rice, he sloshes shing-shong-ling-long syllables that jar me like a cracked bowl on the floor flinging milk and cheerios to the ground. 
     No. Vietnam, I reply.
     That’s not a real country, he mocks, laughing with those squinted eyes again. Stacking his legos into a misshapen skyscraper (that’s what America’s really about, he says), he repeats the word ‘Vietnam’ over and over like the twang of a broken guitar. 

French Family

He was in medical school, supposed to be away from communist Vietnam for one year only. She was in translation school, teaching English to French professors, supposed to be away from America for two years, maybe three. 
Between the card table in the kitchen and the bookshelf in the sitting room, her two Vietnamese roommates hosted a dinner party, prodding her, my mom, towards him, my dad. 
Her French was perfect, his broken, as he asked her to marry him . . .
For what, she laughed, so you can come to America with me? she shook her head, chuckling. 
But when he asked her again five years later, she agreed, yes: they will be a French family. 
After a few Christmases of buying jam for a penny and taking showers at the community bathrooms, the new family gets a letter from the French government––an invitation to leave-–and Vietnam comes chasing after the broke med student, and his child, who the nurses think has jaundice, but no––he’s just half Asian.  

 You Look Like Your Mother

Nudging aside the stepstool, I wrench on the faucet and struggle to reach the soap pump. A woman totters in, her lipstick too red against her pale skin. 
      You look just like your mother, she titters, peering over her glasses.  
I stop and let my elbows soak up the cold counter-water. My mother? My fair-skinned mother with light hair and double lids? With the frizzed mane instead of sleek locks? 
The wide bathroom mirror reflects my murky complexion: neither pale nor tan, but splotched; my hair neither brown nor black, but umber.  Barrier

Chao ba, I greet my aunt, as I bow my head slightly and clasp her hand. Looking at a row of cousins who never play hide and seek and a dining room that never hosts Thanksgiving, I am not sure whether to greet them, too, or slink into the corner with my brother to talk about soccer and American comics. My cheeks ache from a smile that is not mine, my tongue sore from words that do not belong to me. 
Faking interest in their dusty collectables, I listen to the rhythm of Vientamese slicing through the air like a hailstorm, taunting me, pummelling me. 
Honks rise from Hanoi’s overcrowded streets and the fan rattles through the humid air, but they are not loud enough to drown out the words I once understood and spoke. In America, speaking a few words of Vietnamese makes me Asian, but to my cousins, I am white.

8 o’clock
Your dad’s a doctor? Because my dad’s a doctor. She says, tilting her head and fiddling with jeweled bracelets. 
    Yes, a doctor.
     But I thought you were Mexican, she says, furrowing her brow and rubbing her collarbone. 
Sorry my eyes are ambiguous and my hair doesn’t flow like silk. 
Sorry I don't click into the puzzle of your world. 
Either world––the one where Mexicans can’t become doctors or the one where all Asians look the same.  10 o’clock
With a violin in one hand and a bow in the other, I lean against the back of my chair and listen to my quartet banter about a group name. 
    Two Asians and Two Whites, suggests the violist, her eyes twinkling at her sister. Well, two point five, she adds, with a sidelong glance at me. 
    Or One-Point-Five, laughs the cellist, blond curls bouncing against her shoulders.
Digging my fingers into the strings, I wonder why I have a whole violin if I am just a half. 

Scribblings 
My pencil poises for accuracy. Questions about semicolons and the genetic composition of apples, queries about the function of cyanobacteria and the equation of an ellipse. My name, address, school code.
My race. 
The bubble mocks me. No confirmation. No definition.
But me? My eyes tell a story of ambiguity. One of a girl in Chicago playing hopscotch and piano, and one of a boy in the jungle fleeing bombs and warfare. My Vietnamese aunt calls me con lai, hybrid.
 An amalgam of two ethnicities, two cultures.
Am I Chinese or Japanese? 
Am I half Asian or half White?

 I’m a biracial alien. 
One hundred percent mixed.