Many years ago, I worked into the evening at Microsoft. As I waited for a task to finish on my computer, I thumbed through a magazine. It was an issue of A. Magazine, an Asian American-focused magazine. A friend comes by my office to ask a question. After a few minutes, he looks at the magazine cover quizzically, and I respond with, “It’s an Asian American magazine.”
His response shocked me, “You’re the least Asian person I know.” For context, this is a friend who met me shortly after I arrived in Washington years before. He had never heard me speak in any language other than English. I arrived here for my first professional job, and all my friends were people I met at work. Therefore, only two observations indicated that I was of Chinese heritage: my surname and, to a lesser degree, my facial features.