I have since renounced that Korean citizenship, because it would have required me to serve in the Army, and today my parents live on a farm that sits on five flat acres on an island in Puget Sound. In December 1979, my mother flew back to Korea from the United States to give birth to me, because she assumed her stay in America would be temporary and I would need Korean citizenship. 321, in nearby Park Slope, she would join other half-Asian and half-white children at New York City’s wealthiest schools. But sometimes during her naps, I would play the “Goldberg Variations” on our living-room speakers and try to imagine the contours of her life to come.Īt the time, it seemed like the other markers of her upper-middle-class life - grape leaves from the Middle Eastern grocery Sahadi’s, the Japanese bridges of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, weekends at her grandparents’ home in Newport - would keep pace with the changes in the building. The worries were replaced by the normalizing chores of young fatherhood. These pitiful thoughts quickly passed - for better or worse, my talent for cultivating creeping doubts is only surpassed by an even greater talent for chopping them right above the root. But now, while my wife slept at night, I would stand over our daughter’s bassinet, compare her face at one week with photos of myself at that delicate, lumpen age and worry about what it might mean to have an Asian-looking baby in this America rather than one who could either pass or, at the very least, walk around with the confidence of some of the half- Asian kids I had met - tall, beautiful, with strange names and a hard edge to their intelligence.
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When our daughter was born with a full head of dark hair and almond-shaped eyes, the nurses all commented on how much she looked like her father, which, I admit, felt a bit unsettling, not because of any racial shame but because it has always been difficult for me to see myself in anyone or anything other than myself.
My wife is half Brooklyn Jew, half Newport WASP, and throughout her pregnancy, I assumed that our child would look more like her than like me. During the first days of the Trump administration, when my attention was split between the endless scroll of news on my phone and my infant daughter, who was born five days before the inauguration, I often found myself staring at her eyes, still puffy and swollen from her birth.