An Acceptable American

"China is a large and suspicious country"

"If we go to war with China, I'm joining the army!" Gavin, a white boy built like a linebacker, standing at his locker, declared to everyone in the packed hallway of our high school.

My ears flushed. As an Asian American—Chinese by culture, Taiwanese by birth—this was not good news. Here we were, in April 2001, the spring of my junior year, right on the brink of the next world war.

"Don't listen to him, Jake," my friend Mustafa told me, "he's an asshole."

I nodded.

The previous day, a US Naval intelligence plane had collided with a Chinese fighter jet over the South China Sea. The Chinese pilot was killed, and the American aircraft was damaged and forced to land in China, where the Chinese detained the American aircrew. Now the world watched—and waited.

"If there's a war," I breathed, "I'm screwed."

"But you're Taiwanese," Mustafa pointed out, "You're the good Chinese."

"Like racists know the difference," I said wryly. I remembered my friend Janice telling me about how her great-grandfather had changed their family name from "Ehrhardt" to "Hereward" during World War I because of the prevailing anti-German sentiment. I hoped that I would never be forced to make a similar choice.

"Anyway," I said while motioning to the crowd around us, "I doubt it'd make a difference to them."

We were lost in a sea of lily-white people in our Cleveland suburb of Dover Beach. Mustafa is Turkish, well-built with close-cropped, curly, black hair, olive skin, and thick eyelashes. I am Taiwanese, thin, with long, shaggy hair, pointed nose, and narrow face. To most of our peers, however, Mustafa was Arab, and I was some kind of Japanese with magical karate skills. He and I had been friends since middle school, when once a month he would turn homeroom into presentation time to dispel fears and ignorance about his family's Islamic faith. Instead of finding his presentations to be informative, however, most of our classmates just found them to be annoying.

Gavin saw me and ran down the hallway to catch up. "Hey, Alvin!" he said to me, putting a hand on my shoulder, trying to be a bro.

"I'm Jake," I said, attempting to correct him.

Alvin was the other Taiwanese guy. With his buzz cut, flat nose, and round face, trust me, we looked nothing alike. We were just both Asian.

"Uh-huh." Then Gavin teased, "so, how's Tamlyn?"

I gritted my teeth. People often assumed that Tamlyn and I were an item because we were both Taiwanese. We were just friends.

"She's fine," I said gruffly.

***

"China is a large and suspicious country." I heard a late night TV show host say as I did homework. "We have every right to spy on it. Besides, the Chinese pilot was named Wrong Way."

The dead man's name was Wang Wei.

My ears burned. I turned off the TV.