Return to a Golden State

I am an immigrant to the strange state of Connecticut, even though I’ve lived here for over a decade. Sometimes, I don’t know how to react to people who make assumptions about me — about my background, my race, my kids, my job, my interests. I feel like a foreigner when searching out those who have a similar background to mine, because I seldom find any hapa who were raised with the Asian side of their family, like I had been in California.

But I didn’t move directly from one “C” state to another. Before Connecticut, I lived in New York City. Cosmopolitan NYC, a melting pot of nationalities and races. And yet it was also often sharply divided by neighborhood, which was strange to me. While we might all mix together in bars and restaurants, grocery stores and bodegas, where we went home to was not always so interwoven or so colorblind.

I remember walking in Prospect Park shortly before we moved out of New York, pushing a stroller with my three-month-old daughter, and having several other moms stop to admire her. I felt on top of the world — of course my daughter was the most unique and wonderful baby ever, I thought, just like any new mom always thinks her child is the best in the world (until having the later revelation that they’re not — they’re just like every other baby at that age).

“Are you available?” one woman asked me after I smilingly accepted her compliment on my daughter.

No idea what she was talking about. “What?”

“Are you full time or part time? We’re really looking for a full-time nanny. If you’re looking for a permanent position with more hours...”

Granted, I didn’t look much like my daughter then. She initially took after her father as a baby and was blonde, blue-eyed, with very fair skin. I… am not.

What do you do in that situation? I felt guilty, embarrassed for the other woman. And yet it had been her mistake, not mine. It had been her brazen assumption that I couldn’t be the mother of this child. So I told her the baby was mine and not someone I had been hired to watch. She said “oh” and scurried off.

Yet I felt like I had done something wrong. There was a dissonance there that I didn’t belong. That I had somehow infringed on her assumption. In that moment, I felt very far from home.

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