Biracial
“You don’t look biracial,” he says, certain. We’ve just met.
When my Japanese mother says “American,” she means white. Success meant assimilation.
“Your freckles come from your mom’s side?” The usual disbelief. Can a face look like two histories intertwined?
Kids pulled at the corners of their eyes to taunt me. Salespeople in Tokyo respond to my fluent Japanese with broken English.
No one questions my husband’s identity. Dutch father, American mother, he is tall, blonde. He’s also Brazilian, that passport, with its stiff blue cover, bestowed by birth.
My skin, like his, is pale. But freckled. And unabashedly biracial.
Photo Credit: from Mark Warner
Sounds like a filter through a biracials persons ,mind. what others say versus what they hear.
Thank you! I felt a brief sense of that reality
Well done! The generated pictures in my mind are repainted with each sentence. Bravo
Rob