By Patti Kameya, Saint Paul
When I look in the mirror, I am Raggedy Ann! What do you see?
“Are you Chinese?”
A small boy peered up from under straight dark bangs. I replied, “No, are you?” “No.” Pause frame.
That summer, I moved into that mid-century rambler overlooking Roseville Central Park. At the block party people asked if I knew the other East Asian wife, who wasn’t there. My neighbor across the street lost her Lebanese husband several years prior. That was it for nonwhites. The child probably lived on a matching street. If he had shown up, I could have been his biological mom. Or his nanny.
“Great! We’re both not Chinese!” Perhaps I made him happy. Off he went, his bag slung heavier.
Who taught him to ask other Asians if they were Chinese? Not his non-Chinese parents. Someday he may learn how war and empire shook people loose from China and elsewhere. Those stories feed assumptions that he too will shake loose, back to somewhere else, just not here. Someday he may realize that for some his quick eyes and jet-silk hair are a costume he can never remove, as his peers proceed in attire they choose: craftsmen, pathfinders, caretakers, gatekeepers.
But the land and the people before us unlock the true story of our community. What populated Lake Bennett before dandelions and buckthorn took over? Do the Dakota frighten each other with Abraham Lincoln costumes? If Dred Scott had not been denied his humanity, would our neighborhood bloom with more color today? For better and for worse, Asian Americans appear incidentally, like Halloween snow. Our costume did not scream enemy during World War II; afterwards it did not sing hero either. As a result, few Minnesotans remember that the Imperial Navy could not hide after the Nisei Military Intelligence at Fort Snelling cracked their code.
The child probably forgot me as he tumbled into sugary sleep. But he may recall and cherish our brief exchange, a moment suspended in mutual non-Chinese identity as the world still turned. After that only white kids stopped by, but they didn’t care to be not-Chinese with me. At eight, I darkened the front and joined the boxelder bugs in the study.