Notes From a White-Passing Asian

“Where are you from?” was a question I heard often enough, from taxi drivers and waiters and strangers of various sorts, before wearing a mask made me less ambiguous yet more deceptive. My disguise has been unintentional, my blond hair and pale skin more eye-catching than the gap between the top of the mask I’ve been wearing and my face, because it’s a kind of mask that must have been fitted on people with more prominent nose bridges. Back then, before the pandemic, before my race was newly seen as a bringer of scourges, when I merely teetered between being good at math and accommodating in bed, I translated this question as, “How may I exoticize you?” Yet over the last few months, it has dawned on me—much too slowly—that the next time I am asked this question, I may be more likely to interpret it as, “Should I want to hurt you?”

This is one of the simultaneous blessings and curses of white passing: how emotions get dulled and deferred. The dullness is perhaps the more obvious blessing, at least superficially—dulled compared to those who don’t pass for white because men of all races have to hunt in your face for a feature they deem fetishable, and white women have to detect something in your body language before they can render you passive. And even then, your proximity to the master race neuters their unmaking of you, especially when your evaluator is white, because their inherent self-involvement means that they see themselves in you.

The deferral of emotion is more clearly ambivalent. Not only does it delay the inevitable, but the suspended feelings fester, like when your dog urinates on your dark carpet and the stain blends in for days, until you notice the stink and it is suddenly overwhelming, even more than if you had seen and dealt with it immediately. Rather than knowing for sure that you’re being judged exotic, inferior, or hated because you’re Asian, there’s the moment when you notice yourself being observed, the moment when you wonder what it is about you that is being noticed, the moment you cringe when the person opens their mouth and asks their “Where are you from?” There is the moment when you decide whether to lie or mislead, and what type or degree of misdirection you care to employ given the mood and situation. You may ignore the question’s implication and say, “California,” but it risks the more probing, embarrassing, “Where are you really from?” which everyone says is more shameful to the asker yet it’s always been you who’s turned red.

So you say the half-truth, “I’m part-Asian,” even though your fancy DNA results say 99.5 percent Asian. Yet when you say this, they somehow always assume East Asian instead of Filipina because of your lightness, usually Chinese but sometimes Japanese. Then they say “Ni hao” or “Arigato” or tell you about their trips to Asia if they’re old and white or ask about your tight pussy if they’re a man of any race. Or you say the most straightforwardly true, “I’m from the Philippines,” and there are follow-up questions about mythical military fathers who met your mother in a bar or missionary fathers who fell in love with a woman from your village, while America spat out your own dark father so that he’s now in the homeland, and part of you wishes to fail in the foreign land so you could go back too.

Yes, at least the accent and manner you’ve grown into because of white expectation, along with your skin, means that they don’t offer you money when they proposition you. It means they don’t marvel at how good your English is, ask if you’re a nurse, or inquire if you might be available to take care of their newborn or aged relative. This camouflage also means that when you hear about six Asian women murdered at several massage parlors in Atlanta, their lives are vague to you in a way they are absolutely not when you hear about white men murdering women in the Philippines, a place where your accent and manner would have never allowed you to be mistaken for white had you stayed.

You are white America's hostage, unwilling at first but fed and petted for long enough that you can now be trusted.

It’s this constant deferral, this delay, that makes you curious but not shaken when you see a headline about a sixty-five-year-old Asian woman getting attacked in Manhattan, and you click a video link to find grainy footage of a familiar midtown avenue along with the type of coat and knee-high boots you used to wear when you worked in the city, the type your sisters wear, the kind your stepmom in her sixties wears, and suddenly you are racked with the searing pain of “It could have been one of us” when a man pushes her down and kicks her, then again, and again, even before you learn that the woman being hit, Vilma Kari, is Filipina. You gasp at the scene’s coda, when the open door of the building that hosts the security camera closes, indifferent.

Only then can you picture the terror of a gunman bursting into a massage parlor to shoot. Only then do you feel in your bones the generations of violence your kind has experienced, the Filipina women who are routinely trafficked into America as indentured servants at best, sex slaves at worst; Filipino men who were lynched in the 1930s for courting white women; the hundreds of thousands of Filipino people who died when the United States refused Filipinos our independence at the dawn of the twentieth century. You feel the pain but also the stench of your denial, one that people of your race who do not have your skin find so much harder to maintain.

Yet denial only masks an even deeper stench, one that you fight every day to make clean but that has already rotted your soul: the smell of complicity. Because the reason for the dullness of your feelings and their deferral is that having white skin has turned a part of your spirit white, and no effort of yours to recover can redeem you. You are white America’s hostage, unwilling at first but fed and petted for long enough that you can now be trusted to walk around on your own. Seeing yourself for who you are is a start, understanding that you are only free as much as America will allow. But can you ever escape your complicity when you can’t escape your own skin? You’re in so deep that you’ve even been taught to pick up the weapon of indifference and have lost the ability to keep from firing it, even when you turn your own gun on yourself.

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