Many years ago– I have told this story before, but in a previous version of this blog, I think– I had a deeply weird conversation with a second-generation Vietnamese student in one of my classes where I had to convince him that he was Asian. This was long enough ago that you still had to fill out a bunch of bubbles with a pencil in order to take a standardized test, and he wasn’t sure what he was supposed to fill out in the Race category. His first guess was that he was white, since he had been born here. And if the kid was younger I’d make an argument that I could see it; he was not born in Asia, which may in and of itself have short-circuited his brain out of choosing “Asian,” particularly if his parents only ever referred to their family as Vietnamese, which of course would not have been an option on the list.

He was an eighth grader at the time.

At any rate, no, son, fill out Asian, please, and then go home and have a conversation with your parents about whether there is anything else about your identity that they have not mentioned in the last fourteen years.

Today, out of nowhere, I had a student (Puerto Rican, I think) walk up to me during passing period and ask me if I was white. The look I gave her must have answered her question, because before I actually said anything she clarified with the following:

“No, I mean like real white. All white. White-white.”

Just in case you’ve forgotten, this is what I look like:

So … yes. Completely white. All the white. Flat White. Damn near pink, really.

I did not press the child for an explanation.