by Alice Stephens

I begin as Kim Sook, pliant and tender as freshly risen dough. Separated from my mother at two weeks, I am put in the care of a stranger who looks after me for money and keeps me tightly swaddled so I cannot move, so I stay in one place. The stranger only holds me at feeding time, forcing a rubber nipple past my trembling lips. It is then that she starts to come out. While I insist on crying out against profound loss, the injustice of fate, and neglect, she muffles me, prioritizing the foster mother’s comfort by keeping quiet and compliant. It is only for our protection: The less we cry, the less rough the woman is.

After nine, long months, we leave the foster mother and our birthland for a “forever family” in the US, where she is given a name: Alice. With each calling of that name, I disappear a little more. When strangers gush over how cute we are, like a little China doll, Alice puffs up bigger. It makes her feel special to be singled out for her looks, to be exoticized. Alice wants to please. When people say Alice is special and lucky and blessed, Alice preens and performs to their expectations.

I can’t blame her. It’s how we survive the brutal barrage of questions and comments that peck away at our dignity and self-esteem with every utterance—

Why did your real mother give you away?

         Sometimes, I forget you’re Asian.

                 Where are you from, really?

                         You’re lucky to be American!

                                 How much did you cost?

                                         Let me guess what kind of Asian you are.

                                                Don’t you want to meet your real mother?

—the othering that happens, the relentless soft racism, even within the family. By early adolescence, I am completely dormant and Alice takes over, pretending to happily fit into an all-white world; putting on a mask of blankness when others pull their eyes at her and speak in nonsense sing-song syllables; smiling amiably at racist jokes about flied lice and me love you long time; silently deflecting sexual advances by boys and men with yellow fever; meekly accepting that teachers and bosses pay more attention to white peers who are not as smart but much more confident.

I erase myself so that Alice can make us small, unobtrusive. She makes me into a shadow, literally, fashioning herself out of all that I am not.

I begin to re-emerge when as a teenager Alice discovers alcohol; marijuana; pills that make our heart race and feel one with humanity, and other pills that make us mellow and not give a fuck. My tongue is unfettered for the first time since the bifurcation, since before our cleaving into two, the one who tries to pass as white and the one who knows we never can; the one who craves romantic love and the one who is her own lover; the one who is silenced and the one who fills page and after page with her rage; the one who cuts herself with razor blades and the one who rubs her skin with scented lotion; the one who takes and the one who gives; the one who does the living and the one who is almost dead…

When inebriated, Alice lets me out. I make up stories, the crazier the better. Alice is a runway model in Paris—believable because she’s not close-up model flawless, but has the body of an adolescent, with a thigh gap and the delicate fetlocks of a prize racehorse. Alice’s father is a CIA agent who occasionally involves her in his spycraft —not too preposterous as we live in a prosperous suburb of DC, heavily populated with political types. Alice has recurring bouts of malaria that leave her bedridden and feverish—credible due to six years living in Africa, never mind that it was in a malaria-free country, Americans mostly don’t even know that Africa has countries.

I spin these stories to shield her, to forestall the inevitable interrogation, the who-what-where-how-why of Alice that perfect strangers feel entitled to know, followed by their smug benediction of her life. I lie to make Alice unknowable to others, because if she’s unknowable, she can’t be rejected. Shattered into pieces, I tell a story for each shard of Alice, each broken sliver.

In adulthood, Alice carries us through unfulfilling jobs, a punishing marriage, the challenges of child-rearing having never had a relationship with a biological relative, social relationships that leave us feeling sucked dry and used, the constant gaslighting from everyone. I am almost never let off my very short leash, and when I am, it only seems to increase Alice’s heartache.

But Alice is ambitious, she wants to be a writer, and she spins stories out on the page, stories featuring white people doing white things. It isn’t until middle age that I rouse like Sleeping Beauty from my poisoned slumber and recognize that Alice is slowly throttling us into extinction. Long used to being dominant, she is unwilling to give up on the tactics that ensured survival. The only time Alice lets me come out is when she wants me to tell a story to feed her ambition. Pen in hand, Alice cedes to me and I secede from her.

With each fresh revelation on the page, Alice gradually comes to understand that she is the interloper, not I.