A Recipe of a Mixed-Raced Person

I’m taking inventory:
Three languages,
Two continents,
Ten piano fingers,
A brown wool cardigan,
And a dusty jar of honey peanuts.

One breath.
Two words, with a contraction,
Itching the back of my throat.
I’m mixed.
My confession. My out. My choice.
A pinch of confusion.
A scraping of my features, this time more leisurely.
Three guesses,
Sometimes four,
Of ethnicities they would have picked for me instead.

The truth is a breath, a lingering scent.
Ignored.
Well-meaning platitudes of “melting pot”
And “the best of both worlds,”
Stirred together with a nice, long internal eye roll.
Add a sprinkle of chili flakes from my grandmother’s purse, stolen from Pizza Hut,
A mild sting,
At the sight of twisted features of disbelief,
Or maybe of my lack of authenticity.
Dilute, dilute, dilute.

A conference room, but I’m not listening.
I devour the angle of eyes,
The lucky shape of nose,
The thickness of dark hair.
I wonder if I can steal features
Like packets of sugar in diners,
Or instant coffee in hotel rooms.
I wonder if I offer any clues in my own face.
I’m one of you, I want to plead.
Dilute, dilute, dilute.

Sometimes I say nothing,
But then the pain is always worse.
If I hide, they think I am one of them.
And being a spy is highly overrated.
What is the alternative?
Sensitive tongues lashing, eyes flashing
At the slightest hint of spice.
And my Chinese heart scoffs gracelessly,
For their lack of roots.
Dilute, dilute, dilute.

The flames rise from its simmer,
And an earthy steam fills my Western nose.
I may butcher three languages,
Two continents seem so impossibly far away,
And the brown wool cardigan has a bite mark from a moth.
But I have ten piano fingers,
Two Chinese characters
From one half of a poem I’ve never heard.
And a jar of sticky, honey peanuts for good measure.

One question.
Two choices.
No, three choices.
What are you?
Colonialist and colonized.
Both, and something all my own.