The Curly Cue

Frankly, even if there had been, they might not have offered the sense of belonging I sought. In the summer of 1993, when I was 14, I traveled to Thailand with my mother. Walking around with her, I realized pretty quickly that I wouldn't be able to pass for native. In her hometown of Chumphon, a small coastal town about 300 miles from Bangkok, a department store saleswoman asked my mother if my father is black. My mother thinks the saleswoman imagined a black American GI who had left my mother alone with a son. And when we ran into my mother's old friends, they also asked her whether she'd married a Thai.

There is one moment in my teenage years when I remember being ethnically accepted. I was shopping for a television with my father at Price Club, when one of the salespeople, who was Latina, mistook us for her peers and graciously -- in Spanish -- told us that the TV we were interested in would be on sale in two weeks. It seemed as though she was giving us the inside scoop because we were comrades, members of the same club. Luckily, I'd taken about five years' worth of Spanish, so I got the gist of what she was saying. We came back in two weeks and got the TV for 15 percent off. And it felt great.

For most of my early life , the questions about my ethnicity were pretty binary: Was I Asian or Latino? Was my father Asian or black? All that changed in the late '90s, with the ascent of Tiger Woods.

Never heard of him? Let me give you a brief bio. Aside from being a golfer, Tiger is also famous for being pan-ethnic. He's only one-quarter Thai, but there's enough fame in that quarter to make him the most famous Thai person in the world.

In 1997, Tiger had just become the youngest player to win the Masters. For me, it was the beginning of freshmen orientation at Johns Hopkins University. Orientation at Hopkins, as at other schools, was an orgy of awkward getting-to-know-you events. They included viewing and discussing a play about relationship abuse, a massive game of "Twister" (which seemed to nullify everything you learned in the play), and a humongous speed-meeting session on the lacrosse field, in which you shook hands with up to 100 people and remembered none of their names. The typical conversation I had with my anonymous classmates went like this:

"What's your nationality?"

"American. Do you mean ethnicity?"

"Sure."

"I'm Thai."

"Like Tiger! What else are you?"

Oh, the pressure. Not only did I rarely break 100 as a golfer, I was expected to be more ethnically diverse than I am.

From that time on, I've sometimes felt I was disappointing people by telling them that I'm just Thai. Making something up -- something like the globe-spanning mix of ethnicities they've come to expect from exotic fashion models and MTV veejays -- would be a relief. It would make me seem much cooler and put an end to all of my explaining: Yes, some Asians have curly hair. No, I'm not the only one; my dad and my grandfather have curly hair. No, I'm not lying.