The Best American Essays 2016 by Jonathan Franzen Read Free Book Online Page B

can walk together, in love and unharassed in this country, in this world—and for a moment I just want to be his overly made-up girlfriend all night. I want him to be my quiet, strong man. I want to hold his hand all night and have it be only that; not political, not dangerous, just that. I want the ancient reassurances legislated for by centuries by mobs.
    He puts his arms around me and I tip my head back. “Wow,” he says. “Even up close.”
    “Ever kissed a girl?” I ask.
    “No,” he says, and laughs.
    “Now’s your chance,” I say, and he leans in, kissing me slowly through his smile.
     
    My Country
     
    I am half white, half Korean, or, to be more specific, Scotch-Irish, Irish, Welsh, Korean, Chinese, Mongolian. It is a regular topic, my whole life, this question of what I am. People are always telling me, like my first San Francisco hairdresser.
    “Girl, you are mixed, aren’t you? But you can pass,” he said, as if this were a good thing.
    “Pass as what?” I asked.
    “White. You look white.”
    When people use the word passing in talking about race, they only ever mean one thing, but I still make them say it. He told me he was Filipino. “You could be one of us,” he said. “But you’re not.”
    Yes. I could be , but I am not. I am used to this feeling.
    As a child in Korea, living in my grandfather’s house, I was not to play in the street by myself: Amerasian children had no rights there generally, as usually no one knew who their father was, and they could be bought and sold as help or prostitutes, or both. No one would check to see if I was any different from the others.
    “One day everyone will look like you,” people say to me, all the time. I am a citizen of a nation that has only ever existed in the future, a nation where nationalism dies of confusion. And so I cringe when someone tells me I am a “fine mix,” that it “worked well”; what if it hadn’t?
    After I read Eduardo Galeano’s stories in Memory of Fire , I mostly remember the mulatto ex-slaves in Haiti, obliterated when the French recaptured the island, the mestiza Argentinean courtesans—hated both by the white women for daring to put on wigs as fine as theirs, and by the Chilote slaves, who think the courtesans put on airs when they do so. The book is supposed to be a lyric history of the Americas, but it read more like a history of racial mixing.
    I found in it a pattern for the history of half-breeds hidden in every culture: historically, we are allowed neither the privileges of the ruling class nor the community of those who are ruled. To each side that disowns us, we represent everything the other does not have. We survive only if we are valued, and we are valued only for strength, or beauty, sometimes for intelligence or cunning. As I read these stories of who survives and who does not, I know that I have survived in all of these ways and that these are the only ways I have survived so far.
    This beauty I find when I put on drag, then: it is made up of these talismans of power, a balancing act of the self-hatreds of at least two cultures, an act I’ve engaged in my whole life, here on the fulcrum I make of my face. That night, I find I want this beauty to last because it seems more powerful than any beauty I’ve had before. Being pretty like this is stronger than any drug I’ve ever tried.
    But in my blond hair, I ask myself, Are you really passing? Or is it just the dark, the night, people seeing what they want to see?
    And what exactly are you passing as? And is that what we are really doing here?
    Each time I pass that night it is a victory over these doubts, a hit off the pipe. This hair is all mermaid’s gold, and like anyone in a fairy tale I want it to be real when I wake up.
     
    Angels
     
    John and I are patient as we make Fred up. His eyelids flutter as we try to line and shadow them, he talks while we try to put on his lipstick. He feels this will liberate him, and tells us, repeats, how much he