I visit my grand-aunt’s house — “I’ve missed you, Maomao!” — she says. I am complimented on finding work so soon after graduating, on being important enough to send to China. Never before in my life have I felt so uncertain of what the future will be like, but she tells me about before, when I was five, and there were too many people in Shanghai, and I would cling to her arm, a little scared but excited, as we crossed the road.

When I talk to my grand-aunt and many other relatives, the picture painted of my mother is a bright one. My parents are always larger figures in their hometowns than they are in America. She was the best student; she had the best English; she is the hardest working person. She is everyone’s favorite daughter and cousin; she is the sweetest and most respectful. The memories of my parents, the respect people have for them in their home communities is larger than life — they remember, and they keep telling me, how hard it was to leave, “back then”. How accomplished and determined and intelligent you had to be. I keep asking myself why, now that we’ve “succeeded”, we don’t move back. There is nothing like your own country and your own people. I do not have any “one” of my own, but my parents do. I know my father contemplates returning to Ethiopia, but my mother doesn’t wish to return to Shanghai. It’s so different now, she says.

At least my mother was identifiable as something, as Chinese. I still confuse people, everywhere in the world. I explain again and again to people the story of my heritage, of my past, while thinking about where I will go next, how I will establish my future.

A taxi driver asks me why my Chinese is so good, and I tell him that my mother is Chinese. Another taxi driver asks if I’m an international student, and I tell him no, my mother is Chinese. He asks why my Chinese is so bad, then, and I tell him I grew up in America.

I take my coworker, a Chinese-American who does not speak Mandarin, to buy bubble tea, and the cashier keeps directing questions to him while I keep responding and translating.

It’s strange to feel like an anomaly. On good days I feel important, like I have a unique ability do anything anywhere in the world. On bad days, I feel homeless and shunned.

I keep meeting mixed people that I don’t actually get along with all that well — that is to say, I have rarely become very close friends with another person who identifies as mixed. This is often because mixed people share a very limited set of experiences — we understand what it’s like to feel lonely in a sharply categorized world, but it ends there. It’s always nice to come together once in a while with someone else who understands, but we do not necessarily share the same cultures or experiences, and we certainly may not have similar or compatible personalities. I meet one person who is Beninese and Slovakian, and talks about the struggle of Slovakians denying him his identity based on his skin color. But he has no attachment to Benin or the African continent, though he laments this. At the same time, he feels the same homelessness that I do, trying to overcome it by traveling many places and seeing if one sticks. “I want to go to South Africa — I’ve heard there’s the most mixed people in the world there.” I also want to go to South Africa some day, but not for this reason.

I look back at what is behind me — opium wars and tea merchants, kingdoms and coffee farmers. Hard work and ambitious dreams, that keep coming up among us, generation after generation, despite defeat or difficulty, again and again.

I look down at my hands — what has produced them? What did God see fit to bring together, to bring them here. And what might they, in turn, produce.

I look out of my window; I look up at the sky; I look straight ahead. Where am I meant to go. What am I meant to do.

I sketch a portrait of myself, an unfinished outline, uncertain of how to fill in what remains.