I’m Sorry, Lucy Liu by Claire Gallagher I HAVE A THING FOR WASIAN GIRLS
You’re Really Pretty For a Chinese Girl
I can’t remember the first time I heard the phrase “yellow fever,” only that it filled me with a misguided sense of pride in the way that childhood ignorance often does. I felt special and precious, a welcome relief from my typical feeling of otherness in my predominantly white middle school. I had heard the boys in my classes profess their preference for blondes or for brunettes, for big tits or big asses, for princesses or for cool girls, but these conversations followed an unspoken rule: White girls were a common denominator amongst their “types.”
My sophomore year, my hair started falling out from excessive use of the drugstore hair-lightener Sun-In. My hairdresser told me that with the damage I had done, attempting to bleach my hair could quite literally start a fire. So I waited patiently and went back in months later for blonde highlights. I progressed to lighter and lighter hair until I was fully light blonde going into my freshman year at Michigan. My guy friends loved it, telling me I looked best with light hair, a backhanded compliment that told me I looked better when I looked whiter.
I fell in love with a boy in high school who loved to tell me that I was exactly his type: He had a thing for Wasian girls. I breathed a sigh of relief the first time I heard him proclaim that my race was something that attracted him rather than turned him away, and I pretended not to care when I was reminded of my resemblance to his ex-girlfriend because I knew our similarities began and ended with our ethnic makeup. I swooned when he told me he thought I was the hottest girl in my class because I wasn’t “basic-looking.” I was different. He could replace one ex-“something different” with me, a new “something different.”
My older sister used to complain that I had taken all the good genes. She preferred my double eyelids to her monolids, freckles to her milky skin, my nose bridge to her own. I had always thought my sister was beautiful, and I envied (still envy) that everyone used to remark on her resemblance to our mother, while I was said to look like our father.
OUR KIDS WOULD BE SO CUTE, SUCH A GOOD MIX
I pranced through identity hoops. I grew up distant from my father and my father’s side of the family, but I never lacked familial love. I was raised by my mother and my mother’s mother and my A Yí. I spent my afterschool time in A Yí’s kitchen or A Yí’s sister’s kitchen or in the Asian supermarket with A Yí’s friends. Always someone asking me if I had eaten yet, always someone’s leg to cling onto. I found my love for ballet in my grandmother’s living room. My mother encouraged my writing. I had twenty aunties and ten uncles. I grew up on star anises and ginger chunks and bamboo slivers and handmade dumplings and soup noodles. I learned how to cook huoguō (hot pot) before I learned to ride a bike. I looked forward to Chinese New Year more than I looked forward to Christmas. I remembered how to ask my mother if I could have some xīguā, but could not remember the English translation of watermelon. This is all to say that I was raised Chinese. I felt Chinese—I feel Chinese. So I was jealous that my sister was compared to my mom more than I was, but I was not oblivious to the pointed praise that I received from people, regardless of race, for resembling my white father more than my sister did.
*said to me by a boy while in the shower, prompting me to remember that my white father dated a young Chinese girl before marrying my mother.
It took us many years to realize that the features my sister and I obsessed over, the differences in how our parents’ DNA played out on my sister’s face versus my own, represented our obsession with Eurocentric beauty standards. I’ve been told I am white-passing, and I’ve also been told I look fully Chinese. I still feel a certain
He was flighty with his feelings toward me, to say the least, so I learned to intensify the parts of myself that he liked most and to conceal the parts that bored him. He liked that I always wanted to have sex, but with him, specifically; the mention of intimacy with other guys was a turn-off, but how hot was I on my knees for him? He loved that I was a model student, a model dancer, a model daughter: pure and pearly and quiet, good in the kitchen and good with the baby I nannied. Who needs a complex when you can have both Madonna and Whore? While writing this, I tried to remember when my first thought in response to a man showing sexual or romantic interest in me started being, “I wonder if he has an Asian fetish.” I drew a blank.
Our Kids would be so Cute, such a good mix
