Of all the girls I dated in college, Lisa came closest to being a girlfriend. We had dinner on more than a few occasions. We watched a heartbreaking movie together, “The Remains of the Day,” sitting in a darkened theater with tears streaming down our faces. I was Anthony Hopkins and she was Emma Thompson; like his reticent butler character, I was unable to take her hand and tell her I loved her.

But that was fantasy in more ways than one, because I wasn’t capable of loving her. As awful as it seems to say this, it was because she was Japanese. I’d been raised to be wary of the people from the Land of the Rising Sun. That’s what I was taught, by my mother.

Not all Asians get along. You might assume because we are all of the same race, there’d be a built-in kind of solidarity, and there probably is among the younger generation. But my mother was born in 1940, during the Japanese occupation of Korea. Although it ended when she was 5, her parents were affected and raised her with a deep distrust of their imperialist neighbors.

As I grew into my adolescence, I began to doubt and then reject my mother’s simplistic, racist views of the Japanese, but old habits die hard. And my latent bias emerged the night that Lisa stood me up for a dinner date at a steakhouse. This was 1994, back in the era of technological innocence, so if somebody didn’t show for a rendezvous, one couldn’t pull out a smartphone and text “where r u?” No, all I could do was wait, silent and brooding, and let my imagination worm its way through the blackness of my soul.

If the first half-hour of my vigil was in the domain of concern for her well-being, the next half-hour was spent in a pool of pure paranoia. I’d known this girl only since the beginning of the semester, a scant three months. Who was she, really? It was possible, was it not, that our friendship didn’t mean much to her at all? Perhaps she had gained what she needed from me and had moved onto her next victim.