Art by Demetria

The one and only time I was invited to a frat party in college, I went with this boy (I thought) I had a crush on. We were in the same freshman social justice program together and I knew from his nonchalant style and charismatic hair flips that he would be a crucial vessel for networking. It’s not that I was using him, but I enjoyed the power game of gaining a reputation for myself. Dressed as a classic college fem, I navigated the musty, noisy hallways of the upperclassmen apartments hoping I didn’t look too much like a newbie. When the door opened to what seemed like 100 cishet white men, I instantly whipped out my game face. I wanted to prove to my boy-friend that I could hold my own, I could be what he admired.

The centerpiece of the exposed brick apartment was the beer pong table. Sipping water from a red solo cup, I watched boy after boy chug and swing. I must’ve played the part well because my date nodded me over to the table to ask if I would play with him. “Isn’t this a bracketed tournament?” I asked, concerned. I didn’t want to disappoint him with my less than average hand-eye coordination. “Yeah, but you’ll be great! I promise. Just follow my lead.”

Flattered that he wanted me to be his partner, I walked up to the beer pong table to give it my best shot. Within two minutes, I lost the game and made him chug for the both of us. I apologized for costing him a loss because I genuinely felt guilty. “I thought you were supposed to be good at ping pong?” I started to stutter, not really knowing what to say. Noticing the confused look on my face, he clarified: “You know…you know what I mean.”

Suddenly, I felt the weight of the whiteness around me, knowing full well it was also within me. I scanned the room for anyone that might be a safe haven. Does he look half Asian? Maybe 25% Black? Or maybe she’s slightly Latinx? I desperately investigated the skin tones of the drunk people around me, hoping I could find someone who would understand that I felt both mortified and guilty all at once. The complex calculations of my genetic makeup started rushing through my veins. Does he think I’m partially Chinese? Or maybe ⅓ Filipino? Or maybe ¾ Latinx? Oh, sometimes I get Hawaiian. Maybe he thinks I’m ½ Pacific Islander. No, don’t be stupid that wouldn’t make sense. Caught up in my self-effacing calculations, I told myself I was reading too much into the situation. After all, the fractions of my identity weren’t making sense — but, I was supposed to be good at math.

During my sophomore year of high school everyone had to take the OGTs (Ohio Graduation Test) in order to graduate. For most people, this test was insignificant. It was a chance to take a two hour break from chemistry and algebra. For many exams before the OGT, I was one of these kids. Psychology test? No problem. Chinese class? I studied 8 hours this week. The OGT wasn’t a standard school exam, though. It was the first time a test attacked my adrenal system, not because I had test anxiety, but because it was the first time I ever had to calculate my race.

After filling out my name, DOB, and other identifying information, I saw a perplexing box: the “two or more” option. It was a mandatory category with a “fill in the blank” line next to it. I wasn’t sure how to add up my race in a one-word answer. My pencil kept dotting the blank line, making messy marks. With only five seconds to pencil in a bubble, I remember feeling sweat drip down the small of my back while my hands started to shake. Up until this point, my mom always told my siblings and me to fill in “white” on any documents we needed to complete. I read down the list: “Chinese, Japanese, Pacific Islander, etc.:” I knew I wasn’t any of these. Already falling behind the proctor’s instructions, I quickly checked “two or more” and wrote in “Burmese.” I remember thinking: “People don’t know what Burma is. They’re going to invalidate this test.” Despite my heavy breathing and racing thoughts, I knew I couldn’t crumble before the test was over. A memory suddenly flooded my brain. This wasn’t the first time I was asked to choose.

I took a few deep breaths and tried to block out whatever had just happened.

Sitting on my pink and blue duvet cover underneath a ceiling completely covered in Jonas Brothers posters, my childhood best friend and I partook in our Friday night after-school ritual: Tiger Beat magazine quizzes about boys, advice columns about kissing and makeup ideas for the school dance. Everything about our giggles, snacking and gossiping felt incredibly safe, which is why I felt so alarmingly uncomfortable when my best friend suddenly brought up my skin color. In a brief moment of silence from talking about cute boys, K explained that she was confused about me.

I remember fixating on the wall right where the periwinkle paint met the white ceiling. It was a pin straight, slightly raised border. My insides were too warm to contain and I felt suffocated by my shirt. As I tried to control the pulsing in my head, I noticed the translucent rainbow reflecting off the small crystal ball hanging above me. My mother hung this feng shui token years ago as a strategic move to usher me into an early (straight) marriage. This symbol of passive aggressive manifestation never really bothered me, though. When the sun hit it just right, tiny rainbows would refract onto my walls, filling in the white space with moving color. I admired the playful radiance it gave off. It offered me comfort, especially as K leaned closer into me with scrunched eyes.

“Are you Black or white?” Kept ringing in my ear for what felt like an hour. Before I could chime in with follow-up questions, she added “Well, there’s only two races: Black and white. You’re definitely not Black, so are you white?” Inconspicuously counting on my fingers, I tried to calculate anything that would add up to an answer for her. My parents hadn’t prepared me for this moment, or any moments about race for that matter. There was no automatic line I was taught to say or explanation I felt I could give. As far as I knew, K was right: there were only two races and I’m not Black. “Oh, well I’m white I guess.” It made more sense than anything else my brain was trying to configure. If my mom is white, all of my cousins on her side are white, and some of my family members on my dad’s side are white, plus I tally up my brother’s white appearance, my inability to do well in STEM classes, and my love for country-era Taylor Swift, I guess it added up to white.

I adopted this whiteness as my own until senior year of high school, when I started dating this dreamy brown guy.

“‘President of Browntown, a group for Black and brown people of color to support one another and engage in community activism.’ That’s exactly what I wrote on my resume,” my then-boyfriend, S, reported with a smirk. “So tell me how meeting weekly for dinner at Sakura in Toledo, Ohio is ‘community activism’?” I retorted. “It’s all about how you word it,” he winked back.

Browntown started as a joke. S and I were both on the rowing team in high school. East coast culture + expensive gear + expensive boats + exclusive rowing clubs = wealth, and wealth = whiteness. While we were both aware of the amount of privilege we both carried, we also knew the sum of the total outnumbered people like us. So, we naturally hung around the other brown kids during water breaks at practice or on regatta days over the weekend. In the few years we all started hanging out, someone suggested we call ourselves “Browntown” and hold weekly meetings at a brown restaurant of our choice. S was the self-proclaimed Mayor of Browntown and we were all assigned meaningless roles to play as citizens of our hypothetical town. I think I was the secretary, but it didn’t matter to me. I was really just there to support S.

It always felt strange that he just assumed I was a part of Browntown. He never thought twice about inviting me to “official meetings,” nor did I ever bring up the fact that I felt like I didn’t belong. Everyone in the group was a friend of mine and each one of them always offered vulnerable thoughts or feelings within the group. I hadn’t seen their relaxed shoulders, hearty laughs and carefree gestures in other spaces.

Despite this curation of fellowship and safety, I never once allowed myself to feel like a percentage of the whole. I felt valid that I was his girlfriend, but not enough to consider my racial make-up an extracurricular activity. I wasn’t really a part of Browntown, I was an ally to S, which meant I passed. No one ever asked me where I came from or what I was, so I figured that meant they thought I was a white ally with a plus one permission slip.

Ten years later, I still don’t think I could muster up the courage to assign myself a permission slip. If these same folks got together again, I would probably be invited with open arms. Even amongst friends, I would accept with conditions. I would need to put up a front; I would need to own up to whatever percent of exotic I claimed to be. I would be an imposter, even if my calculations were exact. I couldn’t — and still can’t — claim permission for myself. Life’s applications don’t always give space for a 10 page persuasive essay.

“You should apply with me,” S suggested one day after a Browntown “meeting.” He was applying to the University of Miami’s diversity scholarship, a program that pretty much paid your whole tuition if you attended their “diversity day” as a senior in high school. It never occurred to me that I could do something like that, especially since I wasn’t really diverse. “We’ll get to spend the night together alone in a college dorm if you apply and come.” Ultimately, the tease of a hot makeout sesh in a college dorm is what motivated me to submit an application for a scholarship I knew I was going to get. Miami’s only claim to diversity in 2012 was the cis female gender.

Walking into the ballroom during the diversity weekend, my lungs were tight, my chest heavy and I was pink and warm all over. The only thing keeping me from collapsing was S’s shoulder next to mine. He was the reason I could be there. When we were asked to find our assigned seats, my body started to tense up into and out of dissociation. I can’t sit at this table. I’m not a diversity student. They’re going to see right through me. They’re going to ask me where I’m from. Placing my nametag on, I looked up at the table around me to notice that almost everyone was white passing. Admittedly, this made me feel better, like I was okay because at least I wasn’t pale.

“So what brings you here,” I asked the woman across from me, hoping to get a sense for what the hell this program even was. “Oh, I’m 10% Native American,” she cheerfully responded, “So where are you from?” “Toledo,” I shot out, because I genuinely thought that’s what she was asking. “No, like, where are you from?” Every head started to turn towards me in anticipation for my answer. My eyes searched the room for S, hoping to find a way out, but I knew I couldn’t use him as a crutch this time. All of these white faces were inspecting me, poking at my genetics, trying to uncover the secret to my skintone.

Do they think I’m partially Chinese? Or maybe ⅓ Filipino? Or maybe ¾ Latinx? Oh, sometimes I get Hawaiian. Maybe they think I’m ½ Pacific Islander. Suddenly the porcelain tea cups in front of me started to look like red solo cups. This was the exact moment I started committing the racial make-up of every person in my life to memory. S is 100% Indian, second generation. The Miami University girl is 10% Native American, born and raised in Ohio. The guy across from me, 50% biracial, Black and white. I started to clock the statistics everyone fed me. If I could know how other people divvied up their ethnicity, maybe I could find permission to do calculations on myself. If they could enjoy a cup of tea at the table, then maybe I could, too.

I watched the light olive skin of her fingers gently tighten as she raised the white teacup to her lips. Within the first 10 minutes of our first date, I found a sense of comfort in her short, curly black hair and dark — near black — pupils. My eyes had never met a color so dark in such close proximity. Against the odds of my social anxiety and general fear of being a woman in a city on a date with a stranger, I felt a soothing calm wash over me as she talked about her family: half in New York City, half in Yorkshire. For a split second, I thought about her racial calculations, not because I felt I needed to know, but because maybe, finally, someone might be like me. I knew our skin colors carried the weight of the same questions.

I set these questions aside throughout the honeymoon phase of our relationship until it became clear that I needed a support system of friends if I was going to save our impending codependent relationship. “Come with me to Late Night Tea!” she chirped after coming home from the Leeds Queer Film Fest. She explained that she met a few QTPOC folks who gathered once a month for an evening potluck and she thought it might be a healthy place for me to make friends. “But I’m not POC,” I automatically shot back. Looking just as confused as I felt on the inside, she sat me on her bed and looked at me in deafening silence. No one had ever asked me about my personal relationship to my race before. Am I saying all of this to impress her? Do I just want to feel included? Should I try to seem more Asian than I am? What if she asks about my family’s favorite meal, or what languages we speak? Do I lie and say we love some exquisite fish dish and that I know a little bit of a language that’s been dead for years? Without hearing my thoughts, she gently suggested, “Emily, I really think you’ll find people who feel the same way you do. Just come with me” (she’s 50% Dominican).

With a pit in my stomach and no cultural dish to share, I walked into a house filled with the smell of curry and incense. Shaking and certainly not hungry, I stepped into the living room, where I was quickly the center of attention. My then-girlfriend walked straight into the kitchen, leaving me alone with no one to hide behind. There were too many calculations to add up, too many comparisons to make. How could I find a seat in the circle without knowing where everyone else stands? I focused in on the friendliest face I could find and plopped down on a pillow, hoping no one would bring up the puzzled look in my eyes, the walking math problem I always was.

From the morning I woke up and read the schedule, I couldn’t focus. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t participate in any of the retreat activities. Four o’clock was the racial justice training for my full-time volunteer program and I knew what that meant. By 4pm I needed to have figured out if I was fully white or fully POC. They were only going to have two affinity groups and I needed to look like I was in the right one. What will people think if I go to the POC group? Should I just go into the white ally group? Will people question me? Am I taking up space if I go into the POC group? What do people think I am? I spent the whole afternoon pacing the retreat campgrounds trying to condense 22 years of racial identity crises into one decision.

Four o’clock came faster than I was ready for, and I found myself seated next to some new friends. Most of the room was white. For most of the hour-long talk I blacked out, or rather, disassociated. It was probably about implicit bias and white privilege, but I was too busy making sure my friends couldn’t see my right heel rapidly tapping up and down, a coping mechanism I inherited from my father. Unlike my father, I’m not particularly small or thin, so when I shake the chair, I shake the room. I only have 30 minutes left. What group do I go into? Can they see my leg shaking? Stop it, Emily, you’re shaking the whole chair! What if they think my shaking and pulsing is weird? Can they feel this? Do they think I’m fat? What if they see I’m nervous? Do they think I’m white?

With twenty minutes left of the talk, the speaker stopped to put a few chairs in the middle of the circular seating pattern we were in.”If you’re ready to talk about race sitting right here in the middle of your peers, come to the center now.” The room was silent, and a sudden thick tension snapped me back from my blackout spell. Everyone was looking around the room and then looking down in their laps, avoiding eye contact. Except for those of us in the room with darker-than-white skin, no one looked at each other. I noticed tapping, twiddling and nervous coughing across the room. Pale faces grew paler.

Part of me felt the weight of this white guilt pushing me to get the fuck off my chair. I knew I needed to get up and sit in that center seat, if only to support my closest friend in the program, C, a biracial — 50% Black, 50% white — queer person. We were the only two non cis male queer melanated people in the program, and I knew I needed to sit up there as an ally to them. But what if people ask me about my race? Will I look like I’m faking my identity? Do I say I’m an ally to people of color? Do I say I’ve been marginalized for the ways I show up in the world?

The foot tapping now spread to my left leg and my face was bright red and sweating. Luckily, a white friend from my program stood up to go into the middle of the circle, which eased a lot of the white guilt in the room. “I’m sitting here because this is an important topic and I want to support my friends here.” Then, my closest friend in the program got up to sit down in the center in silence. I felt horrible. I needed to be up there with them. I needed to support them. You’re such a fucking wimp, Emily. You can’t even be a white ally for your friend right now. Before I could make the decision to stand up, the speaker intervened to moderate a conversation mostly addressed to white people. It was something about using our collective whiteness to inspire equity.

As he finished his talk, he started to explain the activity I was dreading. I felt every tapping muscle in my body freeze. “Instead of having two groups — one for white folks and one for people of color — we will also have a third group for mixed racial identities.” I guess I should’ve felt relieved by this, but instead I felt even more terrified. I hadn’t factored this into my decision making. I knew what group I should go to, but I also knew people were going to judge me. Should I just go to the white ally group like I had planned? I saw C and my community mate — 50% Mexican, 50% white — walk towards the mixed race group. I instinctively followed them. I noticed quite a few white passing people and let out a small sigh. The numbers started to frantically add themselves up in my head. C was here with me, and if anything I was supporting them. I was here because they needed the support.

Sitting cross-legged in the middle of a grassy field, everyone’s eyes scanned each other’s faces with blank expressions. A few folks twisted their necks inside and outside our intimate circle, as if on guard for eavesdroppers. Others plucked blades of grass, one by one, from patches underneath their feet. We heard laughs and small talk in the 40+ person white affinity group just across the field. There was none of that here.

The white passing people spoke first. Most of them talked about the struggles and privileges of being white passing. Breaking the silence, these folks spoke without stuttering. Their 1-2 minutes of sharing were tight and succinct, as if practiced or rehearsed before. They each made eye contact, spoke with decent posture, and used just the right amount of hand gestures to accompany their speech. One person claimed their Mexican side as a part of her own history, sharing stories of the discrimination her father’s side of the family faced. Another person used Spanish words to speak of the love between his grandparents. The language sat comfortably in his mouth. I longed to taste the sweet comfort of a language all my own, a language wrapped in the legacy of “Win.” I began plucking whole clumps of grass now, wondering what “father” was in Burmese.

Then someone of two different Asian races (50% each) spoke up. She talked about her grandparents and the clash of different cultures in her family, making sure to nod over to me every time she finished a thought. She only looked at me. Each time she glanced over, her eyes were wide and gentle. She smiled, making subtle hand gestures towards me as well, as if to signal that it was my turn to speak. Baffled by this foreign gesture, I kept quiet and didn’t say much. When asked to share, I just agreed with what everyone else said. I tried to keep my legs still. C didn’t say too much either. After everyone spoke, silence visited us again. The grass plucking continued. The short glances over, and down again, commenced. No one made any sudden comments or movements. No one wanted to draw attention to the center of the fishbowl.

This is how I carried myself — as the center of a fishbowl — even before college. As long as no one asked any questions, I was free to swim. If the attention was going to be on me, I wanted it to be for my good grades or athletic achievements, not for my genetics.

They told me it was because I was a model student, which could’ve been the case since my grades were decent and I was involved in a few extra curricular activities. At first, I felt like I was a movie star. I got to skip school for a day, get my hair done, and pose for pictures with the most popular girl in school. I was fortunate enough to go to a private Catholic school, so recruitment efforts were always high budget. Flyers and postcards were sent to every household with an 8th grader in all of Toledo. Maybe people would recognize me! Maybe parents will see my face and want to talk to me about all of my accomplishments, stellar grades, and excellent education. Maybe people would be impressed with me! My innocence led me to believe that people actually valued my opinion and looked up to me. Maybe this means I can finally make student government this year. Maybe this means I’ll be nominated for the excellent service award. Maybe this means my teachers would brag about me to my other classmates.

When my mom called me “racially ambiguous” later that day it all clicked. A few of the popular white girls were chosen for the photoshoot, and then there was my biracial friend — 50% Black, 50% white — L, and myself. Sure, we were probably good role models, but we both knew that wasn’t the point. Our school wanted to promote diversity in a subtle, non-confrontational, socially “palatable” way. While I want to say now — as a fully grown adult with awareness of how harmful these tokenizing situations can be for darker Black and brown people — that I hated being “palatable” enough for this white high school, it wouldn’t be the truth. I wanted to believe that I was good enough for someone, especially for the people I was trying to please, so I posed just as they wanted me to. I followed directions. I basked in the small spotlight they gave me. At least I felt like someone was celebrating me, even if it was only what they could see on the outside. It was merely a few professional photos, but it felt like I could finally make my parents proud. I wasn’t good at math, I didn’t have perfect grades, I wasn’t the star athlete. I believed my genes had failed me, so it felt good to have someone look at me with hope and pride in their eyes, even if it was all fake.

One Christmas a few years ago my father decided to gift our family with Ancestry DNA kits. The whole genetic testing thing was all over cable TV. Even if my parents were suspicious of any government conspiracy theories, they never expressed it. Honestly, I don’t think that would matter to them. We were collectively excited to see the numbers broken down on a screen. Answers could help us build a case to other people, but it could also help us understand each other. The 15 year old inside of me prayed for more Asian genes in hopes that maybe I was a secret genius or expert piano player. My mother put me in piano lessons for 10 years and Kumon for five. I wasn’t allowed to play with friends until my extracurricular long division math homework was done and I had practiced piano for at least 30 minutes. I perpetuated my own stereotypes because maybe, one day, I could actually be what I looked up to, what my parents wanted, what I wanted. Explanation, proof and permission were finally at our fingertips.

My dad’s dad, who I know as Papa, immigrated to the US from Myanmar after going to medical school in Rangoon. Hoping to become a successful doctor, meet someone and raise a large family, he traveled all the way to Terre Haute, Indiana to live out his American Dream. It’s my understanding that he wanted to leave his past behind, mostly because of the government violence stained across his childhood memories. He was separated from his relatives at a young age, forced to become a Buddhist monk and to this day doesn’t have a birth certificate (we guess he’s around 90). Becoming a doctor meant giving his lineage a chance for a better future, filled with the privilege of choice and freedom. Even after immigrating here, marrying a German-American woman and raising five children, he never really revisits his roots. The whole race thing became taboo for every branch of our family.

My dad continues to fill every social space with conversation about his DNA test results. For a quiet and introverted man, his high inflections, raised eyebrows and goofy smile pleasantly surprise friends and acquaintances. He quickly learned that the more data he collects from both sides of his family, the more accurate his results become. Every Christmas a new extended family member gets a test from my dad, in hopes that it’s one step closer to an answer for the question our family hears all too often, “So where exactly are you from?”

I should’ve been relieved when I got my test results back. After all, it was an easy answer. My papa is Burmese, my nana is German and my mother’s side is Indigenous. However, this is pretty inaccurate, and my mother was just flat out wrong. The first results I got back implied that my papa’s relatives immigrated from China and settled in Myanmar. I was partially Chinese. My nana’s relatives were actually Scottish and must have settled in Germany. My mother’s side is pretty much English and Croatian, but according to my mother, “I could’ve sworn my dad was Native American.” He passed away when she was 13 and doesn’t remember much about him, except for that he “looked” Indigenous. Although the complications were fascinating, I felt my heart drop as I looked through the statistics and traced the heritage map provided in the app. I wanted it to say something like “50% Burmese, 50% European American,” because that would make it easy. People could easily calculate my identity. Even though, according to these tests, my Asian side only makes up 25%, I carry misplaced shame for not representing the places I come from.

I am mostly “white” and I hate that. I hate that because I walk through the world looking like I carry a long line of Asian-American ancestry behind me. My white guilt is met by the way I’ve been socialized — and still often marginalized — for my external appearance, making for an evergreen clash of what it means to carry privilege and be called “exotic” at the same time. I carry shame because when I show up to POC places, I feel like an intruder. When I show up to white spaces, I feel uncomfortable, tokenized, and unsafe. Oftentimes people want me to embellish the Asian parts of my ethnicity for their satisfaction, and while I take great pride in my Win name — which stems from generations of strong and successful Burmese women (some of which we are still finding and reconnecting with today!) — it feels deceptive to ignore that I, too, am a colonizer.

Despite this reality, my results continue to change regularly. Just last week I got a notification that I’m actually not Chinese at all and that all of my Asian roots come from Bangladesh. I texted my close friend from grad school to tell her the good news. She’s 100% Bengali, first generation, and always told me she had a suspicion we had a deeper connection than both simply wanting to change the Western Literary Canon. She was the first person I ever met outside my family who really understood me, not because of my mixed ethnicity, but because the first thing we talked about (straight up at grad school orientation) was our countries’ ever-existing violent relationship. She told me things I already knew, which made me feel seen in a sea of people whose Asian knowledge consisted of Japanese anime, orange chicken, K-POP, and other things American white people use as benchmarks.

These tests are only teaching me what I should’ve learned in my childhood; My race, my experience, my identity and my family history are all explorations and realities that happen on their own independent timelines. My family’s collective excitement isn’t about discovering our identities. It’s about permission. I know who I am and what identities I carry. I know how I’m politicized. The game I’m playing is permission, and I’m discovering that even bloodwork and spit tests can’t give me that.

Tracing maps, configuring statistics, guessing people’s racial make-up by percentage are all ways I create identity science in my head. I would rather be wrong about myself than have someone accuse me of taking up space. I still want to believe that my life’s questions would be answered if I could just choose one affinity group over the other. No matter how many times I look at the ever-changing breakdown of my results— add them up, configure them in a way that makes sense — I still can’t get it right. I still can’t categorize myself for you. I still can’t fit into a system of binaries.

The deepest loneliness I’ve ever felt exists outside of the binaries. Unlike my 100% or 50% friends, there is no “Mixed Race, But Am I?” support group. Even if there was, I surely wouldn’t find a group of people who were all partially Burmese. My family is the closest affinity unit I have, and even then some of us look completely white, others get called Latinx, Hawaiian, Filipino, and even Black. Not one of us can relate to the problems, oppression, or privileges the other has. I navigate the world as the labels placed on me.

No matter how many times I try to configure the numbers so my race adds up to an even, easy number, I know that it never will. It will never be simple enough for a standardized test, application, POC support group or scholarship application. It will never be an easy answer in a group of white people, people of color, or even a group of Burmese people. I have yet to find my racial experience in a book, or an artist who paints people like me. I can’t google “queer mixed race Burmese American white person” and find a Facebook group.

If I could sum up all the parts of my identity, there would be no one answer, one right way to do it. The defensiveness, the loneliness, the white lies, the casual laughter at a compliment or comment on my skin color are all factors in my identity. The weight of the numbers I hold in my head continues to sag on my shoulders. I make it through by marrying the pie chart of facts with my own narratives of experience. Even if I was good at math, I’m learning that the fractions of my identity are so much more complex than a symbol or equation.

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