- I imagine how it must have gone. I am five. I have been in America for two years. A boy or girl in my kindergarten asks why my nose is so small, or why I don’t know what letter is on the block in my hand. The block has a pleasant weight, the hardness and softness of wood. It is a cube (as a friend in middle school would later draw my head). When I squeeze it, the outline of the letter remains on my palm. And then I am slamming it against the arch of my nose with all my strength. The girl runs away, scared, satisfied. I cough and blood runs back into my throat, as if I am taking it in. I still have a scar in the shape of a sideways seven.
- But this imagined memory of breaking my nose — who I imagined myself to be at the time was a white version of me, with white pain. I broke my nose because as soon as someone made fun of it, it was no longer white. If I destroyed it, the pain would be whiteness. Whiteness would be earned. I wanted to make myself white so that I could have the chance to make myself.
- “That’s not a racist thing,” the boy or girl says every time he or she makes fun of me. It’s not about the world, he is saying; it’s about you.
- My parents didn’t think my nose needed stitches. That’s why I have a scar. I imagine my mother at night, waking my father to talk. “Why would he try to break his nose? What is he trying to communicate?” She would have thought I was acting out. Later, when I was in high school, a friend invited me to Block Island (RI) and we raced around on two old bikes. I hit a rock and flipped completely over. His grandparents said I was fine, refused to take me to a hospital. I stayed on the island for three more days. When I got home, I insisted on an x-ray. A knuckle split in two. I gave up on my friend then, but it wasn’t a racist thing. It was about the role of loved ones and consequences.
- I don’t see anyone now from the town I grew up in. Many old friends became townies. I barely retain acquaintances. I, the adoptee, am always someone who leaves. How can you relate to me without understanding that? Recently I found a friend on Facebook who stayed in our town for college — we had always talked of moving to San Diego as adults, and there he is now. For a moment I wish to poke him or something. But it is too late for us. It was too late from the moment he met someone who wanted to be white.
- For much of my boyhood, I didn’t like girls. I didn’t date until high school, didn’t even hold hands. Other boys talked about female puberty, male puberty. I pretended I had no desire for sex. I admitted attraction to no one. It was about shame. I was afraid of being told no one was attracted to me.
- Whiteness is the air. Being an adoptee meant seeing that whiteness is a thing we breathe in all the time. Feeling its shape in our lungs. The boundary between the outside getting in.
- A frenemy once told me he’d saved my life after first pushing me off a bridge and then pulling me back before I fell. I did the same thing, after that, to other friends. “Just remember I saved you.” We buy in best when we feel snatched from the jaws we are held between.
- If we buy in, how do we get out?
- You were the nose I couldn’t see. You were the antagonist on the edges, you hugged me in the middle. You were the air. You couldn’t see the air. The air isn’t me. You are not me. I am me.
