A Response
Hapa Mag - February 12, 2020
By Melissa Smith
"You look like you could be half."
Smile when people say that. Say thank you, spell it out letter by letter like gratitude is a shape your tongue takes in sheltered intimacy.
Something about the shape of your eyes, the tone of your skin. "You could pass for Nepali because you're a little chinky." Laugh. Laugh harder. Laugh like lost language tangled in the not enough blanket of mixed race.
"No one would ever look at you and think you're white."
Wrong or right, and you stare at your father without words. There's not always a response.
Not always a response, and you meander around in a body that no one really cares about, in curly hair and almond eyes, shirts slightly too big to hide the way you're stretched across countries and continents, buried to your cheekbones in dirt and expectations.
"You're just a tan white girl."
Flush red like you took a shot, and stumble on the justification that maybe you're not, maybe you're not, maybe, maybe, scratch at the edges and contours of not enough.
No, there's not always a response.
"Just another white woman accusing a brown man of abuse."
No response.
Hold in anger, clench it in your jaw bone, nestle it like a lover along your spine. Love anyone who doesn't look like you, that's everyone, and smile when you do it. Smile. Smile.
Say thank you.
Melissa is a writer on a contract with a government agency in Washington, D.C. (her views don't reflect that of the U.S. government). She is finishing her final edits on her first collection of prose poetry, Probably Nothing, before submitting to publishers for review. Follow her on Instagram, @melissas_seasons, for more.