Throughout my childhood, well-meaning adults told me that my race and my heritage weren’t supposed to matter. Yet claims of “colorblindness” and melting-pot platitudes did not stop people from complimenting my English or asking where my parents had gotten me, nor did they prevent my classmates from pulling back their eyes and teaching me slurs I was usually too humiliated to report to anyone. In those years there was no one I could turn to in my confusion, no one who could answer my questions: Where, exactly, did I fit in? Did my adoption mean I was supposed to try to aspire to a whiteness beyond my reach? When other people looked at me, what did they see — an Asian girl, or an American?

When I saw Kristi Yamaguchi beaming from the cover of Newsweek’s 1992 Olympics preview issue, I took it as an encouraging sign. Maybe I hadn’t yet figured out how to be both Asian and American, but Yamaguchi, America’s Olympic sweetheart, seemed to have found her place. That magazine cover occupied a place of honor on my bedroom wall for years. The article hasn’t aged well. Frank Deford describes the rivalry between Yamaguchi and Midori Ito of Japan:

[T]he battle for the gold and all the lucre it earns sets up a duel between two young women named Yamaguchi and Ito, whose bloodlines both stretch back, pure and simple, to the same soft, cherry-blossom days on the one bold little island of Honshu. The twist is, though, that if the powerful Ito is Midori, of Nagoya, the delicate Yamaguchi is Kristi, from the Bay Area, fourth-generation American. It’s the chrysanthemum and the sword — on the ice together, worlds apart.

Comparing the two rivals’ looks, body types and styles on the ice, Deford calls it a “kicker” that Yamaguchi, while “totally of Japanese descent,” exemplified “the stylish Western ideal that the stout little Midori is so envious of.” He mentions the Yamaguchi siblings’ “hopelessly American” interests and seems almost surprised that their parents chose not to open up about the time their families spent in World War II internment camps (“None of them want to dwell on it anymore. Or, if they do, they won’t let us know”). Unsure what Yamaguchi herself thought about her potentially historic role, he concludes that her heritage might just turn out to be her secret weapon: “Certainly, deep within her, she is still Japanese — some of her must be — and if she should win it’s because, while the others have the triple axel, only she has the best of both worlds.”

You get the idea. I didn’t know I ought to bristle at the unnecessary catalog of the skaters’ physical attributes. On the contrary, I was glad the article fawned over her looks as well as her talent, because it was the first time I had ever been encouraged to think of an Asian-American woman as beautiful.

The night I watched Yamaguchi win Olympic gold was one of the happiest of my young life. In the weeks following her triumph, I became increasingly aware of a wish I’d long harbored: to be seen — not as a bookish outcast or a sidekick-in-the-making, but as someone with power and potential of her own. While I knew I wasn’t going to be an Olympian, I had other dreams. I was always cramming spiral notebooks with tales of sharp, spunky kids solving mysteries, outsmarting grown-ups and saving their friends. The characters I invented usually shared some of my interests, my mannerisms, but until now they had all been blond and blue-eyed, because that was the sort of girl I used to dream of being.