Duluth

My family feared white people. White people, after all, danced on our newly paved driveway, leaving gym-shoe footprints. White people threw rocks and rotten eggs at our windows. White people stole my family’s first big purchase, a ’72 Thunderbird that was found two months later—stripped—in a steakhouse parking lot off Cicero Avenue. White people were not yellow like us, and in this world, this private section we carved for ourselves, white people outnumbered us. They were everywhere with their whiteness, doing white things, playing white games, cooking white food, which by then I had begun to savor, especially the ketchupy meatloaf and anything concocted in a casserole dish. White people knocked on our Buddhist door with Bibles. White people rang us out at grocery stores, changed our oil, delivered our mail. “They are everywhere,” my mother would say, “like ants.” This thought petrified me, a boy of six or seven, trying to find my place in this part of the Chicago filled with white boys and girls who looked at me with tilted heads.

So it was a surprise when my mother announced that our family vacation that summer was to Duluth, Minnesota, to visit a bunch of white people in the whitest city of the whitest state. Even the sound of the state—Minnesota—conjured thoughts of white. Duluth, the brightest of whites. For the first time, we weren’t trekking to Florida to see my mother’s old friends from her nursing-school days in Bangkok or to the Wisconsin Dells’s “Indians” and water parks. We rented a Ford Aerostar and drove the many hours north during the hottest summer the Midwest had experienced in years, to stay with a white family in a white house.

On the drive there I asked my mother who these people were. I sat in the front seat, unbuckled, my feet dangling, as my father drove squinting at the rising sun. I didn’t understand why we weren’t heading south to see Mickey Mouse. I was fond of Mickey, though I never went on any of the rides at Disney because they scared me.

“Seeing good people,” my mother said.

“Are they Thai?” I asked.

My mother shook her head. “Farang,” she said. Foreigners. “Cao,” she said. White.

“How can you be white and good?”

“Not all,” said my mother. “Some white people are like Thai people. Like the Dunlaps.”

In the years to come, this would be the ultimate of my mother’s compliments. My white friends in high school and college were like Thai people, except the ones who smoked and drank, which were all of them. The white woman I married and later divorced was like a Thai girl. Her white family, a Thai family. But then, in that oversized car, I didn’t understand what my mother meant. I went to school with a ton of white kids, and none of them were Thai. How could you be white and Thai?

The outside landscape changed, the car leaving behind the flat fields of Illinois, beginning our sweep through hillier terrain. I lost myself in tall, dark grass and quivering leaves.

At the border of Minnesota, we stopped at a rest area still under construction. The day was gray, and the green was deep and thick, thicker than Illinois. I thought that this was a place where werewolves dwelled, somewhere in the belly of that green. My mother and father spread food on a picnic table and scooped jasmine rice into small Styrofoam bowls. I went to use the bathroom, half-finished, no sinks to wash hands, only a toilet with sparse toilet paper. Sitting on the seat, I noticed a hole above me, and through that hole, a construction worker on the roof staring. He didn’t stop staring. He stared the entire time I was in there. In the overcast light that backlit him, he was a ghost.

Minnesota was the land of ten thousand lakes. I spent most of the trip counting every creek, pond, lake we passed in the rental car. I could count only to fifty, so I started over and over again. When we pulled into the Dunlaps’ property, I counted the pond in front of a two-story colonial house. In each window a candle.

“Nineteen,” I said.

“We’re here,” my father said in Thai. He sighed, from the length of the drive, I’m sure, but also at the thought that for the next week and a half he would be sleeping in a foreign house with foreign people. My father liked to live his life his way, liked his food cooked in a particular manner, liked his bed he built from leftover wood at a lumberyard. He’d brought his golf clubs, and I knew I would see very little of him because he planned to spend most of his days on the links.

Before my mother opened the car door, she straightened my White Sox baseball cap and wiped smudges off my cheek. “From now on you can speak English. Speak English the whole time. Forget the rules. This week we speak English like we’re Americans. Okay, luke mai?”

I nodded, but the rules on our refrigerator stated I was to speak Thai at all times. Stated that I was Thai first and foremost.

“Speak English to me and Daddy, okay? We will speak English to you.”

I nodded again. I said, “Can we get ice cream?” in crisp English.

“Maybe later,” my mother said, twisting my nose.

“Cherries Jubilee,” my father said.

“Rainbow sherbet,” I said.

“Okay,” my mother said. “They’re waiting.”

Outside our car door was a white family, smiling and waving and ready for us.

In 1968, Patricia Dunlap took care of my mother and other Thai nurses who came to work in Chicago. Here was this robust white-haired woman meeting a meek shaving of a Thai girl, barely thirty, in a land whose air was harsh on the skin. When they met, instead of taking my mother’s extended hand, Patricia pulled her in for an embrace, saying in a jovial voice I would come to recognize, “Welcome to America, sweetie.” She insisted my mother call her Mom. “I’m your American Mom,” she said, and my mother, whose own mother had died when she was a teenager, immediately felt at ease, as if the decision to start a life eight thousand miles away were not a mistake like she feared, not if there was this woman around, not if America was filled with Mom Pats.

But of course, Mom Pat was a rarity. She would have to be for us to remember her in our family collective. Her personality bounded from her bosom, which was large like the rest of her—her smile, her hairdo, her voice.

Mom Pat volunteered to help new nurses from Asia adjust to the culture differences before starting work at Englewood Hospital. She herself was a nurse but decreased her hours and took on the duties of being a den mother. When my mother arrived, she couldn’t speak much English, save for a few words here and there. She smiled at everything. Nodded at everything.

“That mother of yours nods at everything. Kinda like you,” Mom Pat now said. She lugged my suitcase filled with more toys than clothes up the stairs. My parents were downstairs with the rest of Mom Pat’s family, their English loud and scratchy.

“Do you like it in Chicago?”

I nodded.

“Do you have a lot of friends?”

I nodded.

“What’s your most favorite thing to do?”

I nodded.

“You’re a peculiar boy,” Mom Pat said.

I was peculiar. I did not like Chicago. I did not have many friends, only the stuffed animals I played pretend with. But I did not know how to explain these things to this woman who wore pink shorts and flower-print shirts. This woman who smelled of balm and rose powder. Mom Pat led me to my room. We wound our way through the house with delicate dark-wood furnishings. Every time I made a move to touch something, say the antique accordion, my mother had scowled or made a noise deep in her throat, shaking her head. Because of that, I kept my hands dug deep into my pockets, though my fingers itched to feel everything.

“There’s a special room for you, sweetie,” Mom Pat said.

She opened the door.

How do I describe the fear that entered me? The immediacy of my boy tears? How do I describe the sight of that room, which unraveled and stripped me of my little-boy bravado? I feared this room, yes, feared the angled ceilings, the ornate crown molding, the silver spin of the ceiling fan. Feared the grandiose bed high off the floor, with more flowers on the comforter and matching sheets. Feared the old rocker in the corner of the room that overlooked the pond outside and the expanse of green that was the property. It was a room much larger than any room in our home in Chicago, but I felt its walls closing in on me. Felt the isolation of the room.

“What’s wrong, sweetie?” Mom Pat said. She knelt to my level, but I pulled away from her. Her face so close to mine, I saw the cracks and wrinkles, the chapped and dry lips, the furrowed brow deep like the ravines we passed on our way to Duluth.

Yes, I was scared of Mom Pat too. But that room. It was filled with porcelain dolls. On every surface a doll stared at me with dark eyes. Twenty, thirty, forty. In lace dresses and frills and pink bows and bonnets. Fifty, sixty, seventy. Atop shelves and dressers and tabletops.

This fear was not about the dolls. It was a fear of being with the dolls without my mother and father. Of being alone in this unfamiliar room, where my cries echoed in the high ceilings above. It was an accumulated fear—of the white man at the rest stop, the white boys at school, the white backyard neighbor who called my family names. It was a fear all gathered up into that room, contained within its walls that used to be white but now were the color of an onion peel.

My cries brought my father running. I held onto him. Grabbed the inside of his leg, buried my head in the back of his thigh.

“He’ll sleep with us,” my father said. He patted my head.

“But there’s no room,” said Mom Pat.

“He sleeps between us,” my father said.

“But he’s six.”

“It’s okay, Mom Pat.”

I could hear Mom Pat’s indignation, the way words gathered in the back of her throat, the question mark after each statement.

“My boys slept in their own rooms when they were three.”

“He’s attached,” my father said. I felt his rough chemist hands on my back, heard his hard calluses scrape my shirt.

“This room is big. I made it up for him.”

“Thank you, Mom Pat,” my father said. “But he’s a scared boy today.” “But,” she started and stopped. “Darling,” I felt her hand on my shoulder, “this room is yours. Come here any time.”

Mom Pat went down the stairs, and my father walked me to his room, where my mother was unpacking her things into drawers. Their room was smaller. Smaller bed. Smaller window. I climbed onto the bed. I pointed at the bookshelves.

“I know,” my mother said.

More dolls. Staring.

She moved to each one of them, turned them around, so all I saw were their backs.

For dinner, Mom Pat said she was making a traditional Thai meal. She had been at the stove for hours preparing it. The smells out of the kitchen were not the smells of a Thai kitchen. Where was the sting of fried garlic? The pungency of fish sauce? The citrus fragrance of halved limes? Where was the sweet of coconut milk or the complicated herbal mixture of red curry? Where was the flowery scent of jasmine rice?

I sat in the living room with Tom, Mom Pat’s son, while my father lumbered around the pond outside and my mother sat in the kitchen as Mom Pat cooked. I could hear the muffled tones of the conversation, my mother saying only yes and thank you and Mom Pat’s continuous talk. Tom smiled and asked a lot of questions. He had wild brown hair, and his flannel shirt was untucked, and he had rips and tears in his jeans. I was envious of ripped jeans, the fray of them, how they represented something I was not, something my ironed khakis and slacks could never be. Tom looked like a boy born from the Duluth earth, a boy with dirt caked under his fingernails and streaked on his face, a boy like another Tom, Tom Sawyer, a character in a book I began secretly reading, a boy I wanted to become—untamed, masculine, and thin.

This Tom smiled at everything, and his teeth were perfect, like the ones on commercials for toothpaste.

“Do you play tennis?” Tom said.

I nodded.

“Me too,” he said. “I’m on the team.” He swung an imaginary racket at an imaginary ball. When he hit it, he made a popping sound. “Are you any good?”

I nodded.

“You look like you’d be good,” Tom said. “I get that feeling about you. That you’re good at a lot of things.”

This was my first compliment from a white person. Besides my teacher who was paid to compliment, who was paid to teach and love and protect. I did love Mrs. S., but I knew I was difficult in the way someone different was difficult. Not like Danny F. and Tommy W., who liked to throw paper airplanes and put tacks on chairs. Difficult like extreme shyness. Like moments when I slipped into Thai, especially when I was nervous or scared. Like how I drew the Thai flag during art hour week after week, or Buddha sitting on his throne.

Tom leaned in. He rested his arms on his knees. I’d seen other boys take this posture. The lean in. It was intimate. I mimicked Tom.

“Hey,” he said. “You think me and you can be friends?”

I nodded—oh God—I nodded.

No one told me to wait. No one told me that I should not shove Uncle Ben’s fried rice into my mouth or bite into sodium-saturated teriyaki chicken. No one said that before dinner with white people, Christian white people, we should bend our heads and say grace, give thanks to “our Lord who has given us this meal.”

Mom Pat had scooped rice onto each person’s plate. “I got the recipe from Reader’s Digest. They said it was authentic Thai.”

“Smells like home,” my mother said.

My father looked at the meal with a smirk.

I was hungry, even if the meal did not smell or look Thai. It smelled like the buffet of American food at the mall, where old people wandered with walkers and canes, filling plates with mashed potatoes. I was hungry, and when I was hungry I was no longer a shy Thai boy, but a brat. Once at temple in Chicago, I demanded I eat salted fish and rice before the monks did, even though it was proper that monks ate first. I did not care. I wanted salted fish and rice. I wanted it, and I was hungry, and the combination of the two turned me into a howling banshee. A howling banshee that could only be quieted with salted fish and rice. I was hungry now so I began to eat as soon as the food hit the plate.

My mother stilled my hands.

“What?” I said.

“We wait,” said my mother.

“I’m hungry,” I said.

“We wait.”

The day was long, and because it was summer, the sun lit the dining room, lit the fine china, lit the silverware, lit the bronze cross across the room. The sun wasn’t going down, wouldn’t go down for another three hours, and for the first time, I wanted night to come hide me in this strange world, in this strange house with these strange people. My father was strange because he was without voice, a man usually filled with story and merriment. And my mother was strange. Strangest of us all. Because she was speaking English. Because she sat straight in her chair, hands folded obediently in her lap. Her hair was up in a ponytail instead of cascading down her back. Who was this woman? My mother would tell me how wrong America was. She would tell me to fear everything here, to trust no one. She would say, “You are not like them. Remember that?” She would say, “You have to be better.” She would speak of Thai food—real Thai food—as divine cuisine, and anything else and everything here did not compare. Maybe except the pizza at Pizza Hut.

In front of me was not Thai food. It was far from divine. But I was hungry, a hunger that clouded thought and judgment. A hunger that made me forget manners and another rule my mother wrote on the refrigerator door: Represent us with dignity.

“I don’t want to wait,” I said in Thai. “I’m hungry and I want to eat right now.”

“Speak English,” she said.

“I don’t want to.”

“Be a good boy,” my mother said.

“I’m hungry and I want to eat and I don’t want to wait.” I stared at the rice. Stared at the shriveled chicken. “This is ugly food. I don’t like this.”

My mother smiled. “You are being impolite.”

“This is ugly food. Ugly everything.”

I didn’t care about all the eyes aimed at me—Mom Pat, Tom, my father. I didn’t care about my mother, whose face began to twitch, whose smile began to invert into a frown, who began to look more like my mother. This was her danger face. This was the face that accompanied spankings. I knew I had crossed a line, and that made me look down at the delicate lace of the tablecloth. I was tired and hungry and not in Chicago, but in Duluth with its lakes and dolls and odd-smelling Thai food.

“It’s okay,” Mom Pat said. “It’s been a long day, hasn’t it?”

“I’m sorry, Mom Pat,” my mother said. “He’s a bad boy.” My mother’s lips became a thin line, and in that line was her honor that I had taken from her. She grabbed my hand, hard. She told my father in Thai to grab my other hand. He did so. “Continue, please,” my mother said.

Mom Pat started praying. I looked around the room. Everyone’s eyes were down or closed. My mother’s eyes were tightly shut, though I could feel her hand, clenching and unclenching, a heart about to burst.

I think my mother’s fears of white people were not because they were white but because they weren’t Thai. What she really feared, perhaps, was a sense of dislocation, of waking up and forgetting where you are. What she really feared was loneliness and helplessness, the hollowness that spreads throughout the body. What she really feared was the thought of never returning home. In this country, white people were ever present. And because they were, they became her scapegoat for every predicament in the world.

When her car did not start in the Chicago winter.

White people.

When I received a B instead of an A in English.

White people.

When she lost her checkbook.

White people.

White people became a singsong of woe in our house. Oh, white people, oh, white people, how you’ve made us miserable. Our collected complaints about white people made us smile and laugh. Inside our small home in Chicago, there were no white people to fear. We did not have to put on a different face, did not have to remain on guard, our shoulders bunched to our ears. The only white people in our house were the ones on TV, and we liked to laugh and make fun of them.

Now, in Duluth, we woke to white people. We lived with white people. There were other white people, besides Mom Pat and Tom. There was the rest of the Dunlap family—Brad and his wife, Stella and her husband. They lived in town and came to visit every day.

And then there was Great-Aunt Jeanie.

She was in her nineties and sat crumpled in a wheelchair. She was the oldest woman I had laid eyes on: Her sagging skin, as if the Duluth sun was melting her. Her cracked lips, her chipped and sharp nails. She didn’t speak but groaned. I did not know how to react. I did not know how to respond when she groaned at me, this groan filled with phlegm, like rocks swimming in mucus. I didn’t meet Great-Aunt Jeanie the first night, because she was already in bed for the day. When I saw her in the morning, I thought of death. I thought this was what death looked like, and with that came fright and fascination. Like when I visited the Field Museum’s Egyptian mummy exhibit. How I stood and watched and marveled and feared.

Great-Aunt Jeanie spent most of her time in her room except for hour-long stretches in the sunroom filled with hanging ferns and ficus trees in pots. Mom Pat would wheel her out and plant her in front of a window that overlooked the pond. When she spoke to Great-Aunt Jeanie, her voice was even louder. “Isn’t it beautiful today, Aunt Jeanie? That sun will put some color on you, then.” Great-Aunt Jeanie would groan a response.

That first morning, it was as if her groan were casting a hypnotic spell, as if I were being pulled into her orbit. Then, shakily, her right hand rose from the armrest of the wheelchair.

How it quivered. How it trembled.

“She wants to hold your hand,” Mom Pat said.

I reached out. Tentative.

“It’s okay,” Mom Pat said. “Aunt Jeanie loves everyone.”

But she did not look like love. This wasn’t a type of love I had seen before, one so frail, like a hollowed-out egg.

Aunt Jeanie groaned again. She was so old and frightening I could not imagine her as young. I assumed this was how she had looked her entire life; this was how she emerged from the womb, thin skin covering a skull, face and arms full of liver spots, legs with burst veins.

“She loves you,” Mom Pat said again.

What love prompts such fear?

“Hold her hand.”

And I thought of the Beatles song, “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” and I thought about my days at day care when I danced with Dawn Simmons, my first of many white loves, and how we boogied down to that song, how she spun, her blonde hair swirling and swirling, her dress twirling and twirling, and how we were the show during those afternoons because all the kids stopped what they were doing, stopped playing with blocks and fire trucks and dolls and teddy bears to watch us. Because Dawn and I had become colorless. Or perhaps we were full of color. In the speed and momentum of our spins we created something new, a whirl, a kaleidoscope.

It was Dawn’s face I imagined when I touched Great-Aunt Jeanie. It was Dawn’s hand. And I smiled because Dawn made me smile—her cherry cheeks, her thin lips, her pert nose.

“Aunt Jeanie loves you, sweetie,” Mom Pat said. “Don’t you, Aunt Jeanie?”

A groan.

Tom became the closest thing I had to a brother. During the days we stayed in Duluth, I stuck to him like Velcro. It didn’t matter that I was eight years younger. It didn’t matter that he could have spent his time hanging out with his own friends instead of the Thai boy come to visit. It was as if he were there for me and only me, which made me feel wanted and loved and less lonely. I don’t think in all my life I have met a more perfect boy.

In the mornings, I would find him—sometimes still asleep in his room—and we would spend our days swimming in lakes or climbing trees or riding bikes. I was not a swimmer or a climber, but Tom urged me in a way that made me less afraid of drowning or breaking an arm from a fall. He wasn’t like the boys at school who would call me a wimp or taunt me for not wanting to jump off a diving board. “It’s okay,” he’d say. “Take your time.”

There was a school parking lot close to the Dunlaps’ house. In the early afternoon, Tom and I would ride bikes there, the lot empty because it was summer. On weekends, according to Tom, people used it to teach others how to ride motorcycles. “It can get loud,” Tom said. “All those Harleys revving up. My mom hates it, but what can you do?” At the end of the lot was a small hill. It wasn’t large by any stretch of the imagination, more like a mound. Still, if you rode your bike down, it gave the sensation of flight. The speed. The wind. The way sound becomes a rushed whirl. Tom rode down the mound without hands on the handlebars. It was as if he were controlling the world, his arms to the side of him. Sometimes he’d look at the sky. From behind, he appeared like a moving cross, speeding away, faster and faster. No matter how hard I pedaled, I could never catch up. I tried taking my hands off the handlebars one time but skidded hard on the ground, scraping my knees. I didn’t cry. I didn’t cry because I was with Tom and Tom said the scrape could be a cool scar some day and scars are cool.

Once, when we were heading toward some tennis courts, Tom taught me how to handle horseflies. I have not encountered anything more vicious than the Minnesota horsefly. And Minnesota mosquitoes. They stormed me. My legs and arms were riddled in bites. At night my mother took to counting and covering the bites with salve. At one point I had over sixty bites on one leg. No one else was bothered by them. Mom Pat said it must be my sweet Thai blood that attracted them. “Honey,” she said, “you must taste just right.” This was Mom Pat’s favorite phrase, “just right.” Her plump heirloom tomatoes were just right. The amount of sugar she spooned into her sun tea was just right. Our wonderful family was just right. Because I was always attuned to language, Mom Pat’s just right entered into my lexicon, as did Tom’s way of letting the word cool sound dreamy and long out of his mouth, and the Duluthian way of ending a sentence with the word then, like when I helped my mother wash the dishes after lunch and Mom Pat said, “You’re a good boy there, then.” Their talk intrigued me. And it wasn’t just the weird way they spoke. It was how different their speech was from the white people in our part of Chicago, where the language was one of understatement and caution.

That day on the way to tennis, the sunlight angled down the path, and the birds were singing something fierce. We strapped our wooden rackets to our backs like samurai swords. I told Tom this, and he laughed. “I’ve never been called a samurai before,” he said. “Pretty cool.”

Tom stopped on the trail. There was a halo of gnats around his head, and the horseflies were buzzing in my ears. “Stupid flies,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said, swatting one away from my face. “Stupid.”

“Let me show you how to kill these things.”

I loathed the horsefly, but I wasn’t sure I ought to kill one. At temple, monks instructed us to be merciful to all living things, even the ones that annoyed us. At school, during recess, the other boys murdered ants without mercy. Stepping and smearing them into the concrete. I cringed at their every stomp.

“I’m not sure I’m supposed to kill,” I said.

“But they’re the worst,” Tom said.

“Buddha,” I said. A rush of red. As if I were imparting an embarrassing secret. I never talked about him to anyone outside the family, especially someone who was white. Especially to someone who said prayers every night and before every dinner. I didn’t want Tom to think I was a weird kid. I looked down at my sneakers, kicked at a pebble.

“Cool,” Tom said. “We don’t have to kill any, but watch.”

Tom raised his hands into the air, connecting both thumbs and index fingers to form a triangle. “Horseflies aren’t the brightest. They buzz and land.” One did buzz around the triangle of his hands and then landed before flying off again. “They won’t bite right away. It takes about twenty seconds. Count.”

I started.

One. Two. Three. . . .

The light made everything golden. The grass was gold. The leaves in the trees were gold. We were on a gold path. Tom’s hands that were raised above him were gold.

. . . Eight. Nine. Ten. . . .

This is what I remember, all that gold.

. . . Thirteen. Fourteen. Fifteen. . . .

The gnats were hovering golden flecks. And the fly was gold, the one circling Tom’s hand, the one landing and taking off again, landing and taking off, then landing and staying.

. . . Seventeen. Eighteen. Nineteen. . . .

Tom shook his hands and turned to me with a toothy smile. The fly flew away.

“Did it bite you?” I said.

“No,” he said. “But it wanted to.”

My father did not fear white people, not like my mother, though I watched him interact only with a few. Because he worked at a textile factory in south Chicago, I rarely saw him for much of the week. His initial life in America—he having come illegally—had been shaped by the white working class. When he met my mother, he obtained legal status and soon after was promoted to factory supervisor. He wore a button with the word supervisor in capital letters proudly on his pressed shirts.

Once, a couple years after the trip to Duluth, my father took me to the factory. I had been to the hospital my mother worked at before, been there so often I knew all the nurses by name. The factory, however, was a nebulous wonder, a place I had imagined as vitally important, where men were men and did men things. It was a direct contrast to my mother’s world of white uniforms and white walls and the pervasive antiseptic smell. I don’t remember much except that my father walked through the factory with me in hand, saying to anyone who would listen that I was his son and wasn’t I big and strong; wasn’t I built like a football player? I was eight or nine, and big white faces in big white bodies smiled and nodded and said, “He’s like his Papa, right, Monty?” Monty—short for Montri—laughed into the high ceilings, the churn of the factory swallowing the sound.

My father then brought me into a locker room—my first locker-room experience. White men stored their things, like jackets and lunches and shoes. Some emerged with towels around their waists, wet from showers. These men possessed fleshy bodies. My father was a sliver in comparison, about 5’6” and 140 pounds. His rib cage showed through his undershirt like rungs on a ladder. I remember my fascination with these big bodies and with lockers. I kept putting my fingers in the diamond-shaped holes. Kept peering into the dark of them, hoping to find some secret treasure.

That’s where the memory ends.

My mother must have picked me up. I must have gone home and did what my younger self would have done, which was probably play pretend or watch Jack Nicklaus’s Golf My Way, which was eternally in the VCR. My recall of this day is not filled with white people, white men, or whiteness. I think of my father and how he stood tall, spoke loud, laughed even louder. I think of how tight he held my hand. And I think that afternoon with him was a way to show his coworkers I was his. This boy was his. You could have whatever else in the world, but he is mine.

In Duluth, my father took me to the driving range. If we were home, we’d be on a golf course. We’d be perfecting my swing, working endlessly on my short game. He was sculpting me into a golfing marvel. We played obsessively, talked golf obsessively. It was the one thing we shared. But on this trip, my mother instructed him to give me a break. She wanted me to spend time with the Dunlaps. Because my father loved my mother—and feared her, too—he agreed.

Except this once.

Just to make sure I didn’t forget my swing, he said.

Only for an hour.

I hit balls off a green artificial mat; they soared out into a wide-open field surrounded by a net. The field undulated with small mounds. Different colored flags marked distances. I liked the sound of the club when it made contact with the ball. It was different from the thud on grass—sharper, louder. My father told me to keep my left arm straight and not look up until I heard that delicious noise. Already, at six, I could hit the ball farther than a lot of the people at the range. Some of them stopped and watched, and my father nodded and smiled, as if to say, Yes, he is better than you.

After I hit the last ball, my father gathered my clubs and put his hand around the back of my neck. He told me my swing was pristine. Told me I would beat anybody. Told me I would be a star. My father said this after every practice, and I never tired of his praise. It made me want to do more. To play harder. Hit farther. Be the success he dreamed for me.

As we made our way back to the car, a white gentleman called us over. His face was weathered from the sun, darker than even my father’s, and looked gnarled like tree bark. The only thing that told me he was white was his yellow hair, yellow like a banana peel, yellow like the golfing polo he wore. A toothpick played between his lips.

“He’s got a good swing there,” the man said.

Like my mother, wary of any stranger, I kept my eyes on a blue flag a hundred yards away. It flapped and stilled. Flapped and stilled.

“This boy, he’s six,” my father said. I heard it in his voice. Pride.

“No kidding,” the man said. He took out an iron and began cleaning its grooves with the toothpick. It must have been a wedge. I could tell by the angle of it, by the copious amount of artificial green that stained the sole of the club: this man was a digger. I had noticed his swing—noticed all the swings around me—and his awkward knee dip that sent the club hard into the mat in a thunk instead of crisp chop. I noticed his toothpick, even before this encounter, waving between his teeth after every swing.

“Where are you from?” the man said.

“Chicago,” said my father. “Long drive here.”

“That’s not what I meant.” The man put the toothpick back in his mouth. “What are you?”

I would have this conversation numerous times in the years to come.

“Thai,” my father said.

“Taiwan?”

“Thailand,” said my father. I heard it in his voice. Weariness.

“Is that near China?”

In Asia, everything is near China, my mother would say. My mother would also say bye and pull me away and tell me never to talk to men like this.

“No,” said my father.

“Is there a lot of golf in Thailand?”

“Yes.”

“Lots of courses?”

“Yes.”

“Been seeing a lot of Orientals out here, then.”

“We like to play.”

“I’m sure.” The man nodded at me, his toothpick like a pointer.

“Does he speak English?”

My eyes moved to another flag, 250 yards away, yellow like the man’s hair, like the man’s shirt. Like the racial slurs we’d hear in Chicago. Get your yellow ass out of here. You and your yellow family need to go.

“Born here,” my father said.

“A proper citizen then,” he said. “And a golfer. That should be your nickname, Citizen Golfer.”

“Yes,” my father said. He grabbed my hand and pulled me toward him. “Nice to meet you.”

The man returned to cleaning his club with the toothpick.

Throughout the conversation, the white man never smiled. Never broke his gaze on us. This unnerved me. This has always unnerved me. In that gaze, I’ve learned, is hatred. In that gaze are all the perceived wrongs my family have done to this country and are doing. In that gaze are two hands ready to strangle, to suffocate.

Maybe I make too much of this. Maybe it was in my head.

When I was an undergraduate in college, I remember a rant by a white evangelical on campus who said we (people of color) imagine racism when racism isn’t there. He was adamant that racism died after the civil rights movement. What we (people of color) experience is an “imagined” racism, and because of this we (people of color) teach our children this imagined racism, perpetually reinforcing this “toxic” mentality. It is our (people of color’s) fault for this imagined construct of racism.

So that afternoon, perhaps, I imagined it all. Perhaps the man with the toothpick wanted to compliment me on my swing and had no ill intent. Perhaps there was no toothpick. Perhaps there was no man. Perhaps my father and I didn’t drive back to the Dunlaps in a smothering silence, with the rattling AC of the rental cooling our damp faces. Perhaps he didn’t grip the wheel so tightly his knuckles paled. Perhaps none of this happened—this: the racial slurs, the pranks, the bullying, the one time our driveway in Chicago was vandalized with the phrase Go home in sidewalk chalk that disappeared slowly, ghostly, in the rain. Perhaps it did happen—all of it—but it wasn’t racism, just mean things done by mean people who happened to be white, and the recipient of these mean acts was a lonely family who happened to be yellow, living in a lonely country.

When we arrived back at the Dunlaps’, Tom fished in the pond, Mom Pat watered flowers, and my mother sat in the sun looking at the cloudless sky. There was something isolating about this place, a world unto itself, much like our home in Chicago. Here I felt safe. Here I was insulated from the dangers outside. My father felt it too. He let out a sigh when he parked the car.

I ran to my mother, ignoring the fish Tom was trying to show me, one as big as his arm. I sank into her chest. She whispered What happened, in Thai, but I didn’t say anything because I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t put into words—English or Thai—what shook in my chest, what made my mouth tight, what fisted my hands, or why I needed her arms.

“How was it, then?” Mom Pat said.

“Good, Mom,” my father said. “Perfect day.”

It was easy to forget. To cast aside. To catalog what happened with the many other things that have happened. But when we are confronted, when we are tested, everything rushes back, all the microaggressions, all the moments of discrimination, all the times that made us feel othered, made us feel as if we didn’t belong, made us feel we shouldn’t belong. That was the worst of it: my family thought it was our fault. We were different, after all, looked different, did different things. We didn’t conform to the whiteness surrounding us, and here, in this world in which we found ourselves, white was the default way of being.

But what if we did conform? What if my family adopted this white American lifestyle? What if we became Christians and were good churchgoing folk and erased our accents and shopped at the Jewel instead of the Asian grocery store on the north side of the city? What if? Nothing would change. While we lived in a country that equates color as difference, color as hierarchy, we would never fit. We would become “that good Asian family,” those nice “yellow folk,” never able to escape the color of our skin.

Nor did we want to.

I think our time in Duluth, however, our time with the Dunlaps, who by all accounts were good white folk, the best of white folk, was our way, temporarily, to see what this white world was like. But we were visitors; we were guests. Our passport on this trip was our gracious hosts, Mom Pat and her family and Tom, whom I fell in love with, the way a child falls in love with someone who makes him see what he couldn’t otherwise.

Our days in Duluth unspooled slowly. In the afternoons Tom and I sat with Great-Aunt Jeanie, me holding her hand and Tom reading the newspaper to her. I was becoming slowly accustomed to Great-Aunt Jeanie, even though I still feared her. What scared me most was not what she looked like, but what she represented, what we were all heading toward. Once, Tom pointed to a framed photo on the living-room wall. It was a black-and-white picture of a girl with flawless skin, hair tied back into a bow, a coy smile on her lips.

“Who’s that?” I said.

“Aunt Jeanie.”

“Really?”

“She’s pretty, isn’t she?”

I nodded.

“I love her,” he said, but it was less to me and more toward the picture. “When she was younger, she used to bounce me on her knee. She used to sing me songs.”

“Really?”

“When I look at her, I don’t see who she is now. I see who she was then.”

I didn’t know Great-Aunt Jeanie then. I only knew her now. The way her body crumpled into her chair. All the folds that creased her face. Her thinning white hair. Her grunts and groans. The photo on the wall was not Great-Aunt Jeanie. Tom, however, was teaching me the complexity that exists in all of us. He was telling me about time, how it plays and shapes memory. How Great-Aunt Jeanie was both the person in the sunroom, eyes aimed at the pond outside, and the smiling woman in the photo, her hair full, her figure fuller. And my father was a happy-go-lucky goof and also the head supervisor of white coworkers at the tile factory and a man who dreamed hard. And my mother was a woman who distrusted the world and also the girl who paddled a canoe to school every day in central Thailand with the fearlessness of a tomboy. And Tom was this wonder of a friend, who would grow and become a wonder of a father. And I, I was a timid boy, who would become a teacher who danced on tables to wake his students up.

And my family was yellow.

And the Dunlaps were white.

This would never change.

My mother spent her days helping Mom Pat in the garden. Her face was caked in dirt. She brought in baskets of vegetables we would later eat for our meals. This wasn’t the Thai mother I knew. This wasn’t the one who couldn’t stand a small stain on her blouse, who was fastidious about her appearance, always trying to hide her face from the sun and using whitening cream on her skin. Here, she bathed in the sun every day. Here, she worked alongside Mom Pat without complaint, with an ease I had never seen her have with anyone else besides family, not even other Thai nurses and friends. Sometimes I helped, but mainly I liked holding the squiggly worms I dug up.

My father disappeared for most of the afternoons, especially after that day at the driving range. He tried to golf every course in Duluth, returning in the early evening for dinner.

I found him one day leaning against the minivan. On the hood was a KFC box and small can of soda.

“Boy,” he said. “Have you been good?”

I nodded.

My father gnawed at a drumstick.

“Mom Pat said dinner’s almost ready,” I said.

He laughed, holding the drumstick like a club. “Do you like white-people food?” he said in Thai; the sound of it was strange from his mouth.

I shrugged. “It’s okay,” I said in English.

My father dug into the KFC box and offered me a chicken wing. “You like wings,” he said.

“Dinner’s almost done,” I said. I couldn’t help licking my lips.

“One wing,” he said. “With your daddy.”

“The potato salad’s just right,” I said.

My father laughed again, but it didn’t sound joyful, not like when he laughed at temple over a dirty joke, or when I hit a golf ball beyond two hundred yards. Then he stopped, looked into some unknown part of the green hills around us. In the distance, silos rose like a metropolis. “It’s time to go home,” he said. “Don’t you want to go home?”

I didn’t. I was in love with Duluth. I was in love with this white family. I was in love with speaking English. I was in love with climbing trees and swimming in lakes. I was even in love with the horsefly, the mosquito. I was in love with the dolls in the doll room. I was in love with Great-Aunt Jeanie, who managed a smile each time she saw me. I was in love with everything that my family was not. I was in love with being white. Feeling white. Doing white things. Taking part in white traditions. Being part of a white family. Nothing set us apart. Not our language. Not our food. Not our customs. With this white family, I forgot I was Thai, forgot what it meant to be aware of my otherness, forgot about the fears my family carried with us day in and day out.

I forgot it all. I wanted to continue forgetting.

“Boy, home?” my father said.

I opened my mouth to say something when Mom Pat’s voice rang out.

“What are you doing?” She pointed at my father’s drumstick. “Why are you eating?”

He quickly hid it behind his back.

“You’ve gone and spoiled dinner, then.”

“Mom,” my father kept saying and smiling, “Mom.”

“We got barbecue and potato salad. A feast.”

“This is only a snack,” my father said. “I’ll eat everything.”

“I just don’t understand why you are out here eating by yourself.”

“I’m sorry, Mom,” my father said, but he wore a cocky smile. A smile that said all of this is bullshit. All of this means nothing to me. “I’m sorry,” he said again.

Mom Pat turned to me. Her cheeks were flushed. Her hands wrung the edges of her flowery blouse. “Get yourself cleaned up,” she said, then turned to my father again. “The two of you.” She stormed off toward the white garden gazebo in the distance.

“Everything is crazy,” my father said in Thai. He raised what was left of the drumstick to his mouth and crunched down.

Seven years ago I did a reading at a Minneapolis bookstore. After the reading a man walked up to me. He wore a baseball cap and loose-fitting jeans.

“This is a good book,” he said. He had a copy of my memoir in his hand. “I enjoyed it.”

I said thank you, fidgeting, uncomfortable with compliments.

“Do you remember me?”

I told him no. “Should I?”

“When you were a kid you came for a visit. In Duluth.”

A flash of memory. A boy. A golden horsefly. “Tom?”

He smiled. It was the same smile. On the same face. Just older. “In the flesh,” he said.

We stood there enclosed in rows of books, catching up on each other’s lives, what thirty or so years had done to us. Tom was a lawyer, a father of two. I told him about all the memories I carried with me. Those swimming spots, those bike rides, those premeal prayers.

“How are your parents?” he asked.

I told him that they were both back in Thailand, divorced, retired, and happy.

“My mom really loved you guys,” he said. “She spoke of your visit up until she died.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

He smiled. “She went peacefully a few years ago.”

But I was apologizing for something more. I was apologizing for burying this trip in the back of my memory. My family never spoke about our time in Duluth. It was as if this vacation was a blip into some interdimensional time warp. As if it never happened. Or it happened to some other family. Not this Thai one. We went back home and feared the white world again. We went back home, and there were no white boys like Tom, only the rough-and-tumble ones, only the ones I bruised my knuckles against, only the ones my mother continually warned me about. “White people. Don’t trust them.” But she trusted Mom Pat, and it was her kindness that made my mother’s transition to this country bearable, made her say on the last day of our visit that not all white people were bad.

Tom told me I was welcome to stay with him whenever I was in Minneapolis. Even now. And though I didn’t have a place to stay yet, and though staying with Tom would have been wonderful, I didn’t take him up on his offer. Not because I didn’t want to. I wanted my memory of that summer to remain untouched. I wanted to remember the Duluth of that time. The Duluth that was more family than place. I wanted to remember not the man in front of me—though he was every bit as generous and kind—but the boy on our last night in Duluth, the Fourth of July.

Tom had a learner’s permit, and Mom Pat let him drive the old Chevy convertible, this silvery, sleek soft-top she kept covered in the garage. Tom would take us to the fairgrounds for fireworks. I had never been in a convertible. The combination of fireworks and convertible made my heart thump something vicious. I fastened myself in the back, next to my mother. Mom Pat sat in the front, a wide-brimmed hat on top of her head, tied around her chin. My father followed behind in the van.

“Ready?” Tom said to me.

I nodded.

“Let’s go then.”

He turned on the car, and it was deafeningly loud, made even louder as Tom drove dusty roads, the wind howling in my ears. The radio was turned on, but I couldn’t hear it, only the light undertones of melody and song. The air was hard on my face, the tips of my hair whipping and stinging my forehead. A bug flew into my laughing mouth, and I went through a sputter of coughs. My mother covered her nose with her shirt, eyes tightly closed, as if she were praying. She was miserable. The drive was miserable. But I couldn’t stop smiling, couldn’t resist raising my arms up into the air and letting the wind play with them, couldn’t help but open and close my hands, as if I could catch the coming night and put it in my chest.

Read more from Issue 16.2.