The boy hated me.

The second-grade hallway smells of industrial wax and hot lunch, and I am already small before his eyes find mine. Dark oak hair cut to the scalp, his shadow falls and doesn’t move. The creases above his eyes appear and disappear.

“Are you Chinese?”

My eyes meet the bottom of his V-neck and I look further up to see his eyelashes, a hundred against the other hundred until it traps my reflection, trembling, the size of a fly.

“No,” I reply. “I’m Japanese,” My mouth twitches, as if my lips are trying to suck the words back into my throat.

“I hate you,” he says, “because of what you did to Pearl Harbor.”

What does a child do with that? I held onto the words Pearl Harbor like something I had found in the dirt, not knowing what it is, only that it was heavy, only that it didn’t belong to me.

By middle school I had a definition for the words, but something still tugged at me. Every time a teacher or student mentioned them, I felt the gravity of history pressed upon my own scalp as if I was one to blame. I had never studied the war. Not even my grandpa was alive at the time. So why did the boy hate me? I became conscious not of who I was, but of the ugliness others were able to see in me. No, it wasn’t the New Year’s rituals or the prayers before and after meals that defined my perception of being Japanese. It was the ugliness, the you don’t belong here’s, the pinched noses at the smell of my lunch, those index fingers pulling their eyes into narrow slits.

I tried to understand the boy and how his idea of me was complete before I even opened my mouth. But I could not unlearn what I experienced on the first day of second grade. The things others draw on your face don’t ask for permission, and they are almost always drawn before you come. 

I walked out of the hallway still a second grader, and I didn’t yet know what I had dug out of the dirt. But I know now that I held the pen to something more than the borrowed hatred that day, the long journey of deciding what I would do with what had been put in my palms.