Autumn Essay | December 15, 2021

Paper Cranes, Badly Folded

by Lola Watts

“I am convinced that any white man who likes an Asian woman can be diagnosed with yellow fever,” my roommate Catherine says. She speaks so self-assuredly, but I notice the quickness with which the words tumble out of her throat. It sounds as if she is trying to fill the silence with her own sentences as fast as she possibly can, speaking with an air of confidence that doesn’t seem concrete. Maybe it is the way her eyes flit apprehensively around our faces as we watch her talk, as if she is hyper-analyzing our expressions to make sure that she is coming across exactly the way that she wants. Maybe it's the way that she hardly opens up, unless it's to speak about how she doesn’t like our new friend from the other night because they said something in favor of modern capitalism. She will sometimes describe her opinions on her ideal socialist government; it seems like she goes on these rants as a way to prove herself, to prove that she is different. It seems staged, like perfectly rehearsed sentences spoken to build up this persona around her. Sometimes our eyes will meet for a split second and I notice this anxious flash across her face, like she’s been caught setting up the stage. By the time I blink, her eyes have already drifted away to the next person. She is tiny, not any taller than 5’2”, with wispy dark bangs that frame her angular face. She’s mixed– half-white and half-Vietnamese. I see evidence of this in her dark, almond-shaped eyes that are framed with freckles that span across the bridge of her nose, a convergence of her Vietnamese mother and white father. Catherine sits neatly, perched on the lap of a lanky, and (lo and behold!) white boy who has his eyes tilted back, barely staying open into the light shining down from our ceiling in the otherwise darkened room. The drinks from the night have painted a red haze over his features and he seems to be drifting in and out of consciousness. He is sweet; I have only seen him a few times, exchanging greetings before he ascends upstairs to Catherine’s bedroom. When we do talk I notice how she, without fail, will mention his whiteness. “Grant is a white man, we don’t like white men here” Catherine jokes as she pushes him upstairs. This is normal, and I laugh with her, for there is an air of truth in this statement and she seems to look towards me to back her up. 

After she mentions yellow fever, Catherine glances over at me to declare, “I feel like I am more Asian than Lola, but she looks much more Asian than I do.” Everyone laughs, so I press my lips up into a smile and nod my head, not so much in agreement with her statement, but to avoid disagreeing with her. Her sentence stays in the back of my head: I think about her looking at me and sizing up my inherent “Asian-ness” as it compares to the whiteness that occupies just as much space. The comment was one of the first times I had heard Catherine’s perception of me. We had been floating in and out of each other’s day-to-day lives without breaking the barrier of true conversation, and this snapped me out of the spell. Catherine’s comment about yellow fever seems to go unnoticed by the rest of my friends. We sit in a circle surrounding our rectangular coffee table, draped in paisley tablecloth, with burn marks on it from nights spent awake with joints between our fingertips. I had never heard of this version of “yellow fever” until now, a play on words for the mosquito-spread disease to describe the phenomenon white and Asian couples. The phrase felt ugly in my mouth. I hated what it signified. She talks about how her “colonizer dad” married her Asian mom, both in brief comments and in extensive conversations after sundown. We will sit in our living room on our broken black leather couch and bask under that dim light shining from the one bulb in the room, while a crime series or Lifetime-esque YouTube feature plays in the background, and Catherine will talk to me about her childhood. The more that she smokes, the more her frantic perfectionism seems to dissipate, and I begin to see what lies beneath. The show fades into background noise. There is a sense of safety to be found in the chattering hum of our television, in the sounds of drug addicts opening up with dimmed eyes on the screen flashing across from us. When we do watch the shows, I find it interesting how she will intently gaze at the television and analyze the events on the screen, yet I find my attention drifting away after they begin. 

When I say that my dad isn’t like that, whatever that means, she tells me that my family must be the exception to the “colonizer dad” ideal. My dad is white, an assortment of Euro countries, but primarily Italian, and my mom is South Korean, born there before she was adopted into the alternate universe of Texas at age six. They both have dark features. My mom has sweeping black hair that is much longer than mine, and my dad with dark-brown-almost-black hair. They’re both exceptionally tan, my mother’s skin glowing bronze in the hot Northern California summer months and my dad with a sharp farmer’s tan underneath his daily attire of short sleeved band shirts. I noticed all this, yet never in such a context as “yellow fever”. I feel the need now to defend him, for never have I pictured my family life as fitting into this larger picture, this statistical cliché that Catherine sees me sliding perfectly into. There is a certain sense of camaraderie I see expected, and returned, in Catherine’s eyes when she brings up her thoughts about being mixed. I wonder if she wants me to agree with her more, if she wants to get angry at me and call my dad a colonizer. I consider her words again, “I am more Asian than Lola.” 

Our apartment houses a chalkboard wall that lines the stairs going up to her bedroom. It is covered in an intricate sprawl of Japanese writings, I don’t know what they mean but they were drawn delicately and neatly, the products of perfect linework and a steady hand. I often come out of my bedroom to the smell of udon noodles being cooked, spring rolls being prepared on the table, or to the alarm of the rice maker announcing that it has finished its course. She tells me that she took a Japanese language class in high school, she says she knows most words. I always see her embodying these different aspects of Japan into her life and I wonder again what she means when she claims her Asian-ness trumps mine. She was born Vietnamese, yet latches onto Japanese culture much more tightly. 

I apparently look more Asian, and in Catherine’s philosophy, my dad must be a colonizer because any white man who marries an Asian woman is automatically, like clockwork, diagnosed with the famed yellow fever. I had never heard the phrase until I moved away from home. I had never been in such a racialized climate–it felt not hot, but cool to the touch. There was a sense of silent indignation growing that I was careful not to provoke. For the first time since living in the whitewashed Illinois suburbs, I felt as if I wasn’t doing enough to embrace my Asian-ness over my whiteness. I find myself trying to hold chopsticks to the same degree of perfection that Catherine does, I feel her eyes on me as I hold them the wrong way or don’t know about a certain aspect of Asian culture that she does. I hold the wrappers to the spring rolls carefully, I try to dip them in the water and fold them perfectly. They look messy and I wonder if that means I am less authentically Asian. I wonder if she sees me as letting go of my inherent Asian-ness instead of claiming it, like her friend Ruby urged her to do one day. “Don’t claim your whiteness, Catherine,” Ruby said, her emboldened voice sounding across our hallways. 

I wonder if my “more Asian” appearance makes up for the lack of Asian culture in my life growing up, or if it makes me fake–someone posing to be not white but with no true proof of being anything else. I wonder if my racial body is something that I need to prove by being immersed in Asian culture, or by going out of my way to joke about whiteness. This Asian influence showed itself in subtleties growing up: the sense of self-depreciation I felt when I noticed that I looked different from the other girls in the whitewashed suburbs of Illinois. I would see their fair complexions and the way that their eyelashes perfectly curled upwards, and wonder why I didn’t look the same when I stared at myself in the mirror. It was not until years later when I stumbled across a photo on social media saying, “Did anyone else think they were ugly growing up because they were trying to conform to the white beauty standard?” that I was able to see this inner dark thought manifested. I stopped seeing my eyelashes as needing to be naturally curled upwards on that day.

My mother grew up completely disembodied from this culture that I was expected to know. Was I supposed to learn these things from a Japanese class like Catherine did? My mom rarely spoke to me about her childhood. It was housed like a secret, locked in the basement of her psyche and pushed down every year. She was adopted young, but not young enough to forget her life outside. She has told me more about fleeting memories of her first six years in the orphanage back in Korea than about her life after. It remains enigmatic, as I imagine this life in vivid color using the sparse details she has revealed. When she talks of her childhood, the image that comes to mind is sweeping green. I imagine light green paint chipping away on the walls of her orphanage. I doubt that they had the money to worry about regular coats of paint. Outside of the window I can almost smell the forest that stretches outside. When my mom was hungry, she would go out into that world and catch frogs or dragonflies, the only source of protein she could get at times. I think of her speaking fluently in Korean, running through the trees quickly with calluses on her feet, swallowed by green. She has this heart-shaped box, clear light pink plastic, from her first six years. Inside it is filled with intricate paper cranes that she folded. They sit gently, folded tightly. It’s beautiful, yet when I tried to copy them as a child they were always folded wrong. I couldn’t seem to make the creases neat enough, it never was the same as the navy blue and red origami inside the heart-shaped box. 

This image of my mom’s life in Korea lives mostly within my mind, for I still know next to nothing about her formative years. At age six she was put on an airplane into a different world, landing in the dry heat of Texas. Her adopted mom’s hair done up in tight curls, dyed from her years working at a salon, the smell of hairspray emanating off of her as she tapped her acrylic nails. My mom’s dad, a tall towering man, holding a Cabbage Patch doll as she embarked off of the plane, a gentle smile welcoming this girl who knew no English, let alone any world outside of the orphanage. My mom lost all recollection of the Korean language. She speaks with a perfect American accent now, and has no grasp on the culture that she was born into. I see impacts of her adoption in other ways, in her mannerisms and her difficulties with vulnerability, but in no way does she have ties to Korea that could link me somehow, aside from my physical characteristics. I grew up eating pasta and veggie burgers, not kimchi and Korean pancakes. I wonder if I had, would that somehow validate my Asian-ness?

My father’s childhood was marked by sandpaper-like scratches and a tumultuous household as well. He tells me about it in much more detail than my mother, mostly at night as we sit in the steaming water of our hot tub. He describes his life in Glenwood Springs, a small mountainside village three hours from Denver. He lived in a house perched on the side of a mountain, but he mainly resided in the wooden shed outside that he’d converted into a home. He housed his band there, and he lost too many friends to count throughout his childhood. He moved away from alcoholic parents at eighteen, and hopped houses around Colorado until he met my mother. They met at a concert, she told me that she rejected him initially but ended up reconnecting with him at a later date–inseparable ever since. I see their meeting with rose-colored glasses as I imagine my teenage mother in a red strapless dress embracing my punk rocker dad with dyed hair and his diet of one pack of Marlboro Lights per day. These two lives both reside within me, but when I imagine it through Catherine’s lens of yellow fever and colonizers I feel as if this love story which I grew up on is tainted, the image shattering as I am torn between choosing one side of my history over the other. 

I don’t wish for this influence of Korea in my childhood for my own sake, however. I see my mother and I want to embrace her, I want to hold her hand and feel all that she went through as a child. She tells me that she remembers what her birth parents looked like, yet she has no idea if they are alive anymore. She says that they were tan skinned like her, she remembers her birth father’s facial hair. My father asks her if she wants to find them one day, and she always replies quietly, “Yes.” I want to embrace my father, who has shown me his childhood in a small Colorado town in extensive detail. I feel this desire to go back to the eighties and befriend that boy who wanted to escape his childhood so desperately. I feel both of their past lives within, yet they do not belong to me. I wish that my mother knew her home language, not so I can prove my own identity, but so that she can hold on to it. I think it was always hers, not mine to take. I grew up in a different world, her memories aren’t owed to me, they never were. So now I sit and struggle to hold my chopsticks, and hear the television murmuring in the background while I listen to Catherine talking, and I smile because I know that yellow fever is nothing more than a mosquito-passed disease.