““Whenever kids asked me, “Are you Chinese?”—which was often—I would invariably respond yes. My mother heard me doing this once and gave me hell for it. “Why didn’t you say you were Korean?” she asked. I was not doing that again, not after an incident in first grade in which a boy told me: “You’re lying. There is no such place.” I remember briefly wondering whether my parents had been bullshitting me about where they came from.””
