Mixed by Gladys Smith (16, Virginia)

          混血 (hunxue)  noun. “Mixed blood.” Often, a person of both Chinese and
          Caucasian descent. Informal. A peculiar racial phenotype which seems to scream
          for a second glance, a personal inquiry, a sneaky photograph.

          When I was little, bit by bit, I came to understand that looking the way I looked was something whimsical and rare in China—prompting hushed commentary and occasional awed expressions, reactions a piano prodigy or child genius might elicit. I was frequently marveled at during large gatherings, as it was surprising for many that I spoke Chinese as well as I did for someone only half Asian. My Chinese skills were regarded as especially good given I was “mixed.” And I was proud of it, knowing no better.

          My family visited my mother’s hometown of Tai’an often when I was small, where I was treated as a near-celebrity. I became accustomed to long, unwavering stares and unabashed photography. Restaurants and vendors offered me free food in exchange for photos in front of their businesses, while teenagers swarmed me and begged for selfies. Whenever I got my hair trimmed, the hairdressers bustling about my head would remark on how other customers could only hope their dye jobs resulted in my natural shade. But it’s just brown, I would think to myself, perplexed. So many girls back home have brown hair. One summer, I attended primary school there for a brief month—when I began to see my ethnic background in an entirely new light.

          On my first day, the entire class of 74 kids clustered around my desk, each chittering more loudly than the next. My backpack was different, I didn’t have any of the textbooks, and I had only brought mechanical pencils (which were strictly forbidden, according to my eager colleagues.) They wanted to know why my hair was so much lighter—a coffee brown rather than their inky black—and whether or not I was mute. One boy shouted, “of course she won’t talk, she’s American! She speaks English!” He wasn’t wrong about the latter; however, I was not mute, just absolutely petrified. They only relented when I burst into tears, cowering from the probing questions and unfamiliar faces. A typical American classroom contained no more than around thirty kids; this experience was bone-rattling. The unwanted attention reached a nightmarish peak in the school bathrooms, which had no stall doors: other kids would stick their heads under the sides of the stalls or openly ogle at me. The teacher on bathroom duty noticed my distress and immediately gave me a pass for the teachers’ stalls, which had firm, familiar doors attached.
          
          Over the course of the next month, I found myself almost invariably being followed by a horde of curious kids. I answered the same questions again and again about myself and America, interrogations which quickly became insufferable. English class was my only escape, as I was a native speaker and therefore allowed to indulge myself in doodling for the duration of the lesson. Students and teachers alike seemed to love my sketches, and often requested drawings for themselves. As a child I was flattered, but in retrospect the exoticization of my entire existence is excruciatingly clear. Some people enjoy dipping their pets’ paws into paint and hanging the resulting print as a prized centerpiece, which I now imagine is exactly the type of sentiment behind all of those art requests. My dog did this, an owner might exclaim proudly. A little mixed girl in my class did this, one teacher might say to another after pinning my illustration on the hallway bulletin board.

          It was inevitable that I would make more than a few enemies as a result of all this unwarranted veneration, one of the most memorable experiences being when a classmate flatly refused the little sketch of a cupcake she had pleaded for the previous day. “What? Is it not what you wanted?” I had asked, puzzled. She shrugged, her eyes downcast. I glanced around, and caught the class captain glaring venomously at us. Realization smacked me upside the head. But why? I had thought, panicked. “Class captains” in China were chosen based on academic performance, and oftentimes possessed a disturbing amount of control over class affairs. They would do everything from dress-code fellow students to dole out punishments such as extra homework or after-school sweeping. This made for a dictatorial hierarchy that I had never experienced before, and thus did not know to recognize and respect. This particular captain had been nursing a deep loathing towards me since my arrival, and seeing my artwork on the esteemed hallway bulletin board had been her final straw. She was infamous for prowling around and hunting out anal reasons for punishment, mostly administered along with a fierce but specious speech on why the wretched student was so deserving of their sentence. One incident I remember with clarity was when a girl was assigned an extra twenty pages of textbook reading for showing up to school too early. Needless to say, I already knew I wasn’t up against any rational figure when she began forbidding classmates from accepting my sketches.

          I counted down the days until summer break. On the last day, I was showered with an extraordinary amount of little gifts and baubles that even the class captain could not thwart (although she did her best by glowering from the corner.) Everyone wanted the American to have something to remember them by—I received everything from a jade necklace to a battery-operated plastic peanut that played a jingle upon opening. One boy even gave me a ring, which was followed by an influx of brutal taunting. Although the gifts were appreciated, I was exhausted beyond words by the end of it; nearly 74 kids had once again crowded around me, clamoring to personally hand me their gift or place it on my overflowing desk. My deskmate presented me with a lovely little snowglobe from her extensive collection, which promptly shattered when another student crudely placed his own offering on top of it. My deskmate was devastated, and cut her palms to shreds trying to salvage the bigger pieces. One glass shard disappeared into her hand entirely, at which point her mother was called to take her to the hospital. I cleaned the rest of the snowglobe up alone, overcome with guilt. The majority of my classmates were too busy pawing through and comparing the gifts to notice.

          Later, the more I thought about my month of school in China, the stranger I felt. The attention, behind a façade of worship and intrigue, had done nothing but make me a pariah of the close-knit student body. It was easy to be admired outside of school, but with children my own age it had subconsciously made me the loneliest I’d ever been. No one was drawn to me because of my personality; people were disinterested beyond my tales of America and physical appearance. I knew somewhere in the back of my mind that the children were not to be blamed, as Tai’an had a homogenous population by comparison with America and a hunxue girl might very well be something they’d never see again. If an alien had landed at my own school back home, we would’ve treated it the same way: bombarding it with questions about its native planet, ogling its every action, giving it piles of human souvenirs to take home so as to be latently present in a different world.


          As I grew a bit older, our occasional trips to China took on a different tone. It was no longer my fifteen minutes of fame, a world in which I was a fairy princess. The shine wore off. I began refusing to answer questions about which country I preferred, what my white father was like, why I could speak Chinese so well. The attention became an all-consuming, fanged demon that was tearing precious chunks out of my dignity and person, beginning with my close friend Malia. Malia was the daughter of one of my mother’s best friends; she was a week younger than me, and we had been a pair since infancy. While I was there during the summer, we hiked together, sang together, slept together, ate together, laughed together, and did everything we could hand-in-hand. She was careful and kind, funny and patient, never getting frustrated with me and my unending questions about some Chinese lingo or joke I didn’t understand. However, as we grew older, she became more and more distant. I began to notice that she spoke less and less when we saw each other, and disliked going places and doing things together the way we always had. More time passed, and while we had less and less in common, she gradually began to dress like me. Malia now always wore purple hair ties, like I did, bought a pink wristwatch just like my own, and started to roll her socks twice instead of just once, another habit of mine. She, too, began playing the viola. This left me confused and hurt. I didn’t care who she was trying to look like, or what she wanted to do—I just wanted my friend back.


          It took much longer, and much more self-reflection, before I began to see all the little moments over the years that had forced Malia to become who she was to me now. All the times when I’d gotten something for free, and she hadn’t; when my physique had been complimented, and hers critiqued; where local kids had wanted to be my best friend, while acting as if she didn’t exist. As a child, I never had the capacity to notice these things: I was never given the short end of the stick, while Malia had suffered endless slights and been forced through countless ordeals that she would never have encountered if it hadn’t been for me. In a sense, I had been born on a gleaming pedestal, one she would forever look upwards at, all because of the unfortunate preconditions of race. From her viewpoint, it was impossible to see the thorny surface on which I stood; all that was visible was the superior treatment I was lavished with. Perhaps she had failed to notice how my mother had to cover my face with her jacket to avoid unwanted photography, how miserable I was when being dragged around by other kids, and how differently Chinese men viewed me from a typical little girl. The twisted side to the attention that comes with being mixed was something I was loathe to share with her: one father at the Chinese school I attended groped me on multiple occasions, which was both terrifying and painful for an 11-year-old girl. I hated how large, drunk Chinese men in restaurants would lurch around me, trying to pet my shoulder or offer me candy. I hated how fathers of my classmates would try to make me laugh, asking if I would be their “little friend,” playfully tugging at my hair. These interactions filled me with the kind of shame that seemed to stick in my throat every time I opened my mouth, something dark and sickly sweet enough to rot my teeth every time I tried to let it flow out.


          By the age of twelve, nothing sounded better to me than somehow being able to unzip the little hunxue girl I was trapped in, step outside, be rid of this sort of perverse admiration and, most importantly, have my friend Malia back. Being hunxue in China, I felt, took so much more than it gave. I’d have liked to say—to everyone from the primary school gift givers to the restaurant drunkards--I am real. I want to be real.