In high school, if I had read an essay that ended with me folding dumplings, eating dim sum, experiencing my biracial quota of microaggressions, transfixed by my deliriously unreadable face in a mirror, etc., etc., I would have loved it. In high school and college, I gorged myself on these kinds of essays—the first entries in an empty archive that we and many others had been shut out of. I had become so acclimatized to reading about the personal lives and observations of white men named David that I felt jolts of recognition each time the essayist gestured toward a mixed-race experience we
...more
