A Story Followed Me. One I Wasn't Told.

On dolls, picture books, and belonging in America

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I didn’t look like the two dolls with wheat-blond pigtails and delicate aprons. My hair was night black, my eyes hazel, not baby blue. They had porcelain faces. I had freckles. After school one day, my friend asked which American Girl I wanted to be for our tea party. I said the stuffed horse on her bed.

When adults asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I knew they wanted answers like a teacher or a nurse, not a chimera. I was still working out how I’d make the transition to a lion with feathered wings, but that was clearer to me than how to become a woman.

I liked stories like Richard Scarry’s Busy Busy Town best, where dogs drove cars and mice piloted planes. My favorite was about Smokey the cat, a firefighter. It wasn’t just that they were animals. All the animals lived together in the same towns. Rabbits lived happily among wolves. Sparrows and crickets were friends. In the suburbs of Denver, most people were white like my dad. Few people looked like my mom, who is Korean American, and even fewer like me, a mix of them.

As I grew up, I learned people didn’t see me as a true blend of my parents. They saw me as a poor replica of my mom with my lighter skin and folds in my eyelids. When she wasn’t around, there was a question I received. What are you? 

Not who, but what. Like I was an animal. Something unthinkable. 

It happened first at the park from a girl on the swings, then at school, Costco, bookstores, museums, until I could expect to be questioned anywhere. I was being followed around by a story, a dim marquee that announced I was from another world, even though I was born here. A perpetual foreigner.

My mom would stop going on outings with us. She sensed people’s eyes questioning us. She’d been called an animal since she arrived in America at the age of six. In time, I learned to read these looks. I became fluent in silence.