We smiled at him in that polite way you do to strangers. As he passed, he leaned over and hissed something at us.

“What we do about this Asian scum?”

The words were like a cold punch to the stomach. Our smiles vanished.

He was gone in an instant. The moment passed. I opened my mouth to say something back — but what?

My friend and I looked at each other as we walked on. What could we say?

We walked on, toward a train station that we had passed thousands, maybe millions, of times before.

We walked on, thinking about the country our parents had chosen for us, the sunny land that we had yearned to call home.

My friends and I wondered how, more than 20 years after we set our feet in the lucky country — some of us brought here, some of us born here — it could still feel like an alien place.