I was 13 when someone assumed I was my father’s girlfriend

It happened at my grandma’s funeral. At the holiday party of my extended family. On vacation. At restaurants. At the aquarium. In the grocery store.

It is difficult enough to be constantly reminded that people think you don't belong. Even if they're not thinking too deeply about it, every time someone asks "Are you paying together?" or "Are you with them?" It can be a harsh reminder that they don't see what I see, that to them, I am an Asian woman beside a normal, white couple.

Then, we add to that those mortifying times when people decide you aren't travelling alone. That you do belong...as the girlfriend of your father or somehow in a menage a trois. I was in college when we went on our annual family vacation. We decided to use AirBNB, and this time, the woman who owned the house would be living there too. She watched as my mother, my father, and I entered her home with our luggage. She gave a wide smile, gave me a once over and asked..."What is she to you?" to my parents, as if I couldn't understand English. I wasn't sure what she expected the answer to be. Was I a travelling prostitute? A private chef? A life coach who went on vacation with her clients? My mom got irritated right away, firmly stating that I was her daughter. My father did nothing to defend me and answered all of the woman's ignorant questions about China. My father described how beautiful the country was, how he'd like to go back, how it was so great when I was adopted! I asked myself why he didn't come to my aid, why wasn't he as offended as my mother or myself? She made me feel completely outcast from my own family on my own vacation!

When I told him I felt that he had left me unprotected, that I wanted him to defend me as my mother had, he just got upset. He couldn't understand what he had done wrong at all. He was just being polite. Right. Social graces come above everything, but apparently, adoptees aren't afforded even a modicum of decency in the realm of common courtesy. There's no apology forthcoming, "I'm sorry I assumed these things about you." At best, someone might giggle something like, "Oopsie!" for their own embarrassment of having guessed wrong, and then the burden falls on me to forgive them, and reassure them, and make sure they don't feel bad for hurting me.

I remember each and every time someone has wrongly assumed I was with my father. Bleach my brains out. From simple errands to Staples or grocery shopping at Trader Joe's, each small outing becomes riddled with anxiety. I could just not leave the house with my father or parents, but why should I stay in the car or go everywhere alone? Why should I need to contort my life around the incorrect assumptions of others?

I was at a holiday party with loose acquaintances of my extended family. The people there were my parents' age and older. They saw me, my grandparents, and my parents enter the house. By the appetizers, a woman pointed with her finger at me and my dad, back and forth. "So...you are what to him?"

"We're father and daughter," I say, but I wonder why it even matters. Let's say, for instance, that I said I was an escort, what was she going to do? Call the police on me? Scream us out? She had her answer and I knew she was going back to her friends and husband to spread the word that this wasn't a case of 90 Day Fiancée! I was simply an adoptee. What was funny was our relatives were also adoptees, now grown, but they were white in a white family. No one questioned them and their right to belong. I stuck out like a sore thumb.

I was thirteen years old when this first happened to me: my father and I went to the aquarium. I was beginning my second year of middle school. My body: coltish, stickish, pre-pubescent. I had uneven wire glasses, and a smattering of acne. I had only learned about periods a year before. It was supposed to be a father-daughter day on Father's Day, the kind other kids can just have, but as I walked with my dad, he started putting physical distance between us. He said that I was causing him to get dirty looks from people. While I myself had not witnessed any of these dirty looks, my dad was feeling awkward. He was insulted at being labeled as a "creepy, old, white man with an asian fetish." Why wouldn't he be offended? It wasn't even true. Even so, the very presence of my Asian body was causing him to be insulted. If I were a white child, would he be getting the same looks? He didn't think of how insulting it was for me. He didn't think that perhaps even more awkward than being a creepy, older man was being a child prostitute. Maybe a mail-ordered bride or a sex slave sold into prostitution in the black market of America. Depressing. Insulting. Fetishizing and objectifying. 

I had to console myself alone. He was emotionally unavailable the rest of the trip. I had to deal with being seen as nothing more than a fetish to an outside world. I could have had an Asian mother, been half-white and half-Asian, but no one thought of that. All people saw was a family that didn't belong in a neat little box and trafficking was apparently closer to a real possibility than a multiracial family. I felt terrible, believing that if I had just been white, I could have saved both of us some humiliation.

The most grievous event was when I was in a hotel with my father. I was doing a research program in another state for undergrad college. My dad had flown down to get me and have a short vacation so we could fly back up together. The hotel was normal-- not rundown or in a seedy area. In the morning, we had a breakfast buffet in the common dining area. Only three other groups of people were eating breakfast and no one seemed to be paying any attention to us. At all. But then my father started to get uncomfortable and started making jokes about how I wasn't really his prostitute. I kept kicking him under the table, telling him to shut up.

But he continued to crack his jokes, making several mentions of my mother and how I was his daughter and how he adopted me from China, and how I absolutely was not a prostitute, just in case anyone thought that. I was mortified as I felt eyes on us. I called my mom, telling her what had happened. She just said rather unhelpfully over the phone, "You're leaving today. You'll never see any of those people again."

Why didn't anyone warn me this could happen? Why wasn't I prepped? I had to go through all that alone--learning in real time, from early teens to adulthood, that "not belonging" went beyond "where are you really from?" to encapsulate insinuations of trafficking, prostitution, predatory age-gap relationships, and Asian fetishes.

In these moments, when all you want to do is cry and hide and die, society expects you to go outside of your body and see the scene as an objective third-party. This, by the way, takes more skill, emotional intelligence, and maturity than anyone ever thinks to give you. As a child, you need to think, "Well, I suppose it is an honest mistake," even if it isn't. And then, with all the social grace never afforded to you, it's up to you to maneuver you and your entire family out of the awkward hole. This is such an unfair burden on the adoptee and rarely anyone thinks about it. People think it may happen rarely, or even if it does happen, it is coming from a good place of people watching out for suspicious behavior. Maybe, even just public shaming which might also come from a good place or a purely judgmental one-- I'm told I can't be mad at people who may be making an honest mistake, while I am stereotyped over and over. It can feel isolating and hurtful--an added layer of "difference" with a strong tinge of "wrong." 

I hope that people understand this issue from the point of view that families are all made differently and people come from all backgrounds. I wish people understood this as an issue which plagues the asian transracial adoptee community and can sit with that in our space, before instantly jumping to "but what if it was a bad situation?" "What if those judgmental passersby were correct?" Two things can be true at once: (1) Exploitation is not okay. (2) Being an Asian adoptee in a white household is not a crime and being judged, hated, or objectified feels very hurtful!