I am an immigrant to America, though the word “immigrant” feels too easy, too administrative, as if crossing an ocean were a form to be stamped rather than a body split into before and after. I arrived carrying another geography under my skin. Another grammar of belonging.

Classrooms here orbit race. Everything bends toward it, returns to it, asks the body to position itself in relation to it. Read. Reflect. Recognize. Empathy is rehearsed like a muscle memory. Step into this history. Sit inside this wound. 

And the examples arrive from within you: small, ordinary, almost deniable. Collected in the pages of Claudia Rankin’s Citizen, documented like weather patterns no one claims responsibility for. A comment offered as praise. A question that is really an assumption. Someone reaching to touch a strand of hair without asking, as if curiosity overrides consent. Someone saying you are articulate, surprised by their own surprise. Someone leaning closer to smell a body, as if it carries information they are entitled to confirm. “You smell good” (Rankine 8). The words are framed as kindness, yet edged with inspection. As if goodness were unexpected. As if the body must be verified before it can belong inside you.

Nothing explodes. Nothing declares itself as violence. The moment passes. The conversation continues. But the body records it first, before language can decide what to call it.

Then the larger spectacles. Serena Williams. A body on a screen, magnified until it becomes a symbol instead of a person. An athlete disciplined not only for performance but for presence. Strength reframed as aggression. Confidence reframed as a threat. The body studied the way one studies weather: something powerful, unpredictable, needing containment.

Reading all these texts, I learn to watch how visibility operates. How being noticed is not the same as being recognized. How a body can fill the frame while the interior life recedes, thins, vanishes behind its own outline. Hypervisible surface. Invisible self. I remember Zora Neale Hurston writing, “I feel most colored when I’m thrown against a white background” (Rankine 52-53). Contrast creates clarity, but not understanding. The body sharpens into symbol, into difference, into something legible at a distance but unreadable up close.

You are illuminated, but not known. Seen everywhere. Located nowhere. 

These stories are presented as case studies, as necessary discomfort. We discuss them carefully, academically, as if analysis could keep the pain at a safe distance. But the distance collapses. The classroom air grows dense. No one knows where to look.

Because to study discrimination is also to realize how easily one participates in it. How often harm travels through ordinary language. Through habits so normalized they feel like neutrality.

The lesson is not only what happened.

The lesson is how it keeps happening.

But the coordinates I brought with me to America do not align. Where I come from, difference is spoken through lineage, dialect, province, the taste of a region in the mouth. We say hometown. We say ancestry. We say north, south, coastal, and inland. Race is not the first door we open. 

So I translate constantly. Not language. Framework. One system of seeing into another. Something is always lost in the crossing. Something unnamed stays behind, like luggage that never makes it onto the plane.

My roots pull backward even as everything else pulls forward. At home, I am reminded where I began. Outside, I am reminded of where I am supposed to be going. The maps overlap but never match. Paper pressed over paper. Coastlines misaligned.

Here, I am placed into a category that did not exist for me before: Model Minority. The phrase arrives polished, almost ceremonial, as if it were an award rather than a sorting mechanism. It sounds like praise, but it functions like containment. A label that pre-interprets the body before it speaks, that narrows possibilities under the appearance of approval. 

I begin to understand that race operates as a vocabulary of management. Model Minority, underrepresented, disadvantaged, diverse—these words circulate as if they describe people, but they actually describe positions inside a hierarchy. They distribute expectations. They assign distance from an imagined norm. Even the “positive” terms carry instruction: be productive, be quiet, be grateful, do not disrupt the story that justified the label in the first place.

In this way, the label follows me even when no one speaks it aloud. It shapes what teachers expect before grading begins, what institutions assume about my needs, what strangers imagine about my abilities, my temperament, my family, my future. I am read as self-sufficient whether or not I am struggling, as high-achieving whether or not I am exhausted, as included even when I feel peripheral. 

And I cannot pretend I did not benefit. Doors opened without explanation. Teachers assumed diligence instead of difficulty. Silence was read as focus, not uncertainty, not loneliness. When I struggled, it was often overlooked because the category had already declared me capable. More than capable, actually. When I succeeded, it confirmed what they believed they knew. I was trusted with responsibility earlier, questioned less, disciplined less harshly for the same mistakes that might be read differently in another body.

When a racial label opens doors for me, I do not know whether to call it kindness or constraint. The advantage arrives wrapped in approval, yet it still tells me where I am allowed to stand. Perhaps the damage does not disappear but travels, shifted onto other bodies, postponed until I step outside the role assigned to me. 

But praise is also architecture. It builds walls you are expected to live inside. No room for failure. No room for deviance.

I become visible in ways that are useful. Invisible in ways that would complicate the story.

Name has always been said to hold identity. A container for the self. A sound that gathers a life into something pronounceable. But where is my true name? 

My mother calls me 小懿.

A softness. 

A diminutive. 

A name that folds me back into childhood, into kitchens, into the smell of home. 

My legal Chinese name carries intention. 侯苏耘 . To harvest. To succeed. A future embedded inside syllables chosen before I could speak them. 

But here I am Amy.

My father chose it because I was born in the year of the mouse: the first animal of the Chinese zodiac. A for first. A for beginning. A for arrival. Amy. Simple. Portable. Easily pronounced by strangers who do not know how tones rise and fall like breath.

He gave me a name that would not stumble in foreign mouths. A name that would not need explanation. A name that could cross borders without friction.

But Amy is everywhere. 

Amy in classrooms.

Amy on attendance sheets. 

Amy in emails that could belong to anyone. 

How does a name meant to carry destiny compete with one designed for convenience? How does something ancient stand beside something interchangeable?

When someone calls “Amy,” I turn. 

But so do others. 

Which body does the name belong to? 

The original name holds history, family, language, expectation. 

The adopted name holds access. 

One roots me. 

One translates me. 

Neither feels complete. 

Together, they feel split. 

I thought I stood outside these systems of race, watching from a distance, translating but untouched. Instead, I find myself positioned inside them, useful in ways I did not choose, legible in ways that erase as much as they reveal. 

My roots did not stay behind. 

They travel with me. 

Reshaped. Renamed. Repronounced. 

The body crosses borders. 

The classifications follow. 

Neutrality is never offered. 

Only assigned. Withdrawn. Reassigned. 

Either way, the body is read first, 

long before it is ever understood. 

Sincerely, 

Amy / 小懿 / 侯苏耘 / Immigrant

Bibliography: 

Rankine, Claudia. Citizen: An American Lyric. Graywolf Press, 7 Oct. 2014.