Being an American-born US citizen and hearing “go back to your country” repeatedly as a child and an adult so shook up my sense of self I had to write a whole novel about it, pushed by that kind of naive artist’s insistence, I need you to know how this feels.

I grew up in northern Minnesota, where our family was the only family of color in a small mining town. It was a town rich with immigration – its “ethnic days” boasted more than 100 nationalities (but always somehow forgot us) – all European. I still subscribe to our hometown paper and see that now, as then, a Finnish club continues to meet at the public library every week, the Sons of Norway (yes, still “sons”) club is so active it has won national awards from its main organization.

Being dark-haired, dark-skinned, dark-eyed made it impossible to hide. A small town makes it impossible to ignore the fact that the people driving by our house, faces grotesquely twisted and yelling “CHINK!” at us, were our neighbors, skating instructor, teachers and people we saw at the First Presbyterian church of Hibbing.

But racial epithets were almost more understandable than, when some logical seeming adults, explained to me, “You don’t have the same heritage as us.” As if there was some kind of cultural authenticity tape-measure for which we, as a family, fell pitifully short with no chance of ever catching up.

I most often heard:

“Go back to China.”

“Go back to Japan.” (Korea seemed not to appear in people’s idea of Asia)

Most frequently, people avoided even guessing and spit:

“Go back to your country.”

It was a comment I’d hear in school, out shopping. The county fair, which we went to en famille. The accompanying look on their faces was that the sight of us – non-blondes – was somehow injuring them. Our existence was an affront.

As a child-nerd, when I heard “go back to your country” from classmates, I’d professorially explain to them that I was born in Hibbing, which automatically made me a citizen, and also they were born in Hibbing, too, so by the theory of transitivity, I was JUST LIKE THEM. I might have even added that indeed my parents were “originally from Korea”, and of course we looked Asian. I wished I had known the word “phenotype” then.

When I was in school, my classmates and teachers heard other students say “Go back to your country” and stayed silent. In second grade, I had a teacher I found unpleasant, so tall she seemed far away. Unlike the younger teachers, she didn’t smile or act playful, nor was she attracted to my studiousness, which other teachers routinely praised. She paid no attention to me, I thought. But one day, when she was the supervisor for recess, a kid said “go back to your country”, and she grabbed him by the scruff of his neck and yelled at him so hard that another kid who’d been egged into joining him, pivoted on his cowboy boots and pre-emptively apologized. I remember him holding my eyes in his seriousness – whether it was the earnestness of his apology or a merely an earnest wish to not receive the same scruff-grabbing and yelling from this teacher, I don’t know. But he was scared straight for life, I am sure.

I live in New York City, where I still encounter racism and think about race constantly – but where there are also enough people like me that I don’t feel alone. I was recently just two hours outside of New York City, upstate New York, having lunch with white friends in a cafe.

That’s when I noticed a white man, baseball cap, clothes adorned with various American flag motifs, staring at me. Growing up in Hibbing, I am used to this. People stare at me in Nantucket, for instance. When I meet their stare, they sometimes smile in embarrassed acknowledgment (very New York thing), then look away. Others look away to pretend they weren’t staring. Once, my father and I had a mother and small son staring at openly at us at a ski lodge, the mother looked away when she saw I noticed, the son said “ching-chong!” and then both left.

This man, however, didn’t stop. Glaring without stopping until I had to notice him looking and then I felt mad at myself that I let him know I noticed him, because he was clearly trying to intimidate.

Go back to your country.

You don’t belong here.

The very sight of you offends me. I only want to see people who look like me.

You don’t need words to say this. It just so happens our sitting president said this to sitting members of Congress and almost everyone is looking away. Just words. We like to think Trump is so dumb he doesn’t realize that even for Bronx-born Representative Ocasio-Cortez, being Puerto Rican, she comes from a long line of Americans. It’s more insidious than that. Trump knows this is a white-nationalist call to make people who do belong, who have a right to belong, to feel like they don’t, to feel unsafe, to feel unmoored. For me, remembering my second grade teacher’s voice, “What did you say to her?!!!!” Or the two “burnout” classmates I’d rarely spoken to who quietly went up to a pair of girls who were calling me a chink, whispered something, and somehow got both to tearfully apologize: having people stand up not because they had a social obligation to me but because it was the right thing to do. Because of them and of course because of my dear friends who always defended me, instead of cutting ties to my home town, I have great affection for Hibbing and embrace the good and the bad. That is what has made the difference for me, and I have to ask: who is going to make the difference for our country?