"Becoming My Own Half-Asian Man" was originally published in Banana Magazine Issue 004. Banana Magazine is an annual print publication dedicated to contemporary Asian culture, striving to navigate through blurred Eastern and Western boundaries while creating a voice for the new generation of Asians. You can find more information at Banana-Mag.com and purchase a copy of the latest issue here , or follow them on Instagram , Facebook and Twitter .

Until I was 12, I had no idea that I looked Asian.

I knew my identities: Taiwanese, Jewish, Cleveland-Ohioan who spent weekends visiting grandparents in Youngstown and winters visiting cousins in Taipei. But on the West Side of Cleveland, where I was born and raised, everyone around me was white, so I assumed I wasn’t much different from them.

My dad, a religious everyguy who grew up in the inner city of Youngstown, shared my naïveté. He took me to synagogue four times a week, fed me corned beef and rye bread at Jewish delis, and teased me about looking like him, even though I didn’t. He didn’t warn me what I might face as an Asian boy in the middle of the country as the storm of adolescence approached.

It was Jews, in fact, who called me “chink” for the first time. I was in seventh grade at a religious Jewish retreat. A group of older white boys—who had been acting standoffish towards me the whole time, questioning if I was “really Jewish”—pounded on my door. They screamed, “Come out, you fucking chink!” And then they ran away, hollering and laughing.

I’m not even sure I had heard that word before. I definitely had never thought it applied to me. But I felt its power immediately—it knocked the wind out of me. My dad had warned me against anti-Semitism and raised me to revere Orthodox Judaism, and here those same Jews had just called me a fucking chink.