ba-dev-toca-trocar
Sentence Switcher
Intertextual Reference
Quiz
Art
Your Poem
Random
Export as Markdown
Click sentences from quotes below to build your poem
— How to Write an Autobiographical Novel - Alexander Chee
==I AM HALF WHITE, half Korean, or, to be more specific, Scotch-Irish, Irish, Welsh, Korean, Chinese, Mongolian.
It has been a regular topic all my life, this question of what I am.
People will even tell me, like my first San Francisco hairdresser.
“Girl, you are mixed, aren’t you?
But you can pass,” he said, as if this was a good thing.
He said this as he scrutinized me in the mirror, looking at me as if I had come in wearing a disguise.
“Pass as what?” I asked.
“White.
You look white.” When people use the word “passing” in talking about race, they only ever mean one thing, but I still make them say it.== He told me he was Filipino.
“You could be one of us,” he said.
“But you’re not.” Yes.
I could be, but I am not.
I am used to this feeling.
As a child in Korea, living in my grandfather’s house, I was not to play in the street by myself: Amerasian children had no rights there generally, as they usually didn’t know who their father was, and they could be bought and sold as domestic help or as prostitutes, or both.
No one would check to see if I was any different from the others.
==“One day everyone will look like you,” people say to me all the time.
I am a citizen of a nation that has only ever existed in the future, a nation where nationalism dies of confusion.
I cringe whenever someone tells me I am a “fine mix,” that it “worked well.” What if it hadn’t?
After I read Eduardo Galeano’s stories in Memory of Fire, I mostly remember the mulatto ex-slaves in Haiti, obliterated when the French recaptured the island, the mestiza Argentinean courtesans—hated both by the white women for daring to put on wigs as fine as theirs, and by the Chilote slaves, who think the courtesans put on airs when they do so.
Galeano’s trilogy is supposed to be a lyric history of the Americas, but it read more like a history of racial mixing.
I found in it a pattern for the history of half-breeds hidden in every culture: historically, we are allowed neither the privileges of the ruling class nor the community of those who are ruled.
To each side that disowns us, we represent everything the other does not have.
We survive only if we are valued, and we are valued only for strength, or beauty, sometimes for intelligence or cunning.
As I read those stories of who survives and who does not, I know that I have survived in all of these ways and that these are the only ways I have survived so far.
This beauty I find when I put on drag, then: it is made up of these talismans of power, a balancing act of the self-hatreds of at least two cultures, an act I’ve engaged in my whole life, here on the fulcrum I make of my face.
That night, I find I want this beauty to last because it seems more powerful than any beauty I’ve had before.
Being pretty like this is stronger than any drug I’ve ever tried.
But in my blond hair, I ask myself: Are you really passing?
Or is it just the dark, the night, people seeing what they want to see?
And what exactly are you passing as?
And is that what we are really doing here?
Each time I pass that night, it is a victory over these doubts, a hit off the pipe.
This hair is all mermaid’s gold, and like anyone in a fairy tale I want it to be real when I wake up.==