The Curly Cue
He's 100 percent Asian American. But in a profiling culture, mass confusion is only a thatch of ringlets away.

By Kevin Sintumuang
Sunday, November 12, 2006

It started on my first day of kindergarten, at Lindeneau School in central New Jersey. I was sitting on the floor stacking building blocks with the other kids and shamefully pretending to drink out of a carton of milk (I'm lactose intolerant, a common condition among Asians) when my teacher, the rotund yet cheerless Ms. S., came and took me by the hand. She escorted me from her classroom and into another one with decidedly less "Romper Room"-esque decor, where a second teacher sat me at a desk and started quizzing me with a series of flashcards. What color is this? What kind of animal is this? Can you count to 10?

I answered all of the questions correctly. This kindergarten stuff is cake! Bring on first grade! Then I looked around. There were older kids here -- first- and second-graders. About a dozen of them. All Latino. All speaking Spanish.

This was an ESL class. I'd been brought here to be tested on how well I could understand English -- which happened to be my first language. Another Asian American kid might have wondered why he alone -- not, say, any of the Korean Americans in the class -- had been shuffled off for testing. But I, even at age 5, looked around and knew.

It was my hair. Tightly curled, like that on an idealized Greek statue or, frankly, a poodle, it had clearly said "Latino" to my kindergarten teacher. Or, at the very least, it had stated, "Not Asian!" and left Latino as a default. (Why that automatically meant a trip to the ESL room, I'll leave for someone else's essay.)

I hadn't even taken a nap yet, and my hair was already causing identity havoc. It couldn't have been the first time. And it certainly wouldn't be the last.

At a college party, someone once described me as looking "vaguely pan-ethnic ." In fact, both my parents are from Thailand, which makes me 100 percent Asian American. But riding public transportation, I've seen enough people staring above my forehead to gather that most don't expect to see Shirley Temple locks above an Asian-looking face. At parties, my hair is often a topic of discussion -- an ice-breaker. Not a month goes by without someone asking permission to feel it, what hair products I use or whether I've gotten it permed. My hair is fairly novel -- even to me. Until I was 7, the only other Asian with curly hair I knew was my father. Then I met my grandfather.

If I were white, Latino or black, the texture of my hair -- curly, wavy or straight -- wouldn't be such a defining feature. But a big part of being identified as Asian is being plunked into a box labeled "You guys all look alike." My slight deviations from what people expect -- eyes slightly rounder than those of most Asians, skin slightly darker and, most visibly, the hair -- have been enough to turn me ethnically ambiguous in people's eyes. About 25 percent of the time, when they guess my ethnicity, they're completely off the mark: They think I'm Latino or native Hawaiian. Another 65 percent of the time, they figure I've got to be mixed: half black, half Asian, for example. Only 10 percent of the time has anyone pegged me for Thai.

Of course, it wasn't always this way.

Back in the late '80s and early '90s, when people were less ethnicity-savvy, they seemed to have no doubts about what I looked like: I looked Chinese American, just like Asian celebrity du jour Michael Chang.

At the time, Chang was burning up the tennis courts. In 1989, he was the first American to win the French Open since 1955. He was everywhere. I'm sure any Asian American guy doing anything athletic back then was, at some point, called Michael Chang by his friends. That I didn't mind. What I did mind: when people said I actually looked like Chang.

"It's a compliment. Michael Chang is very good-looking," a friend's aunt explained. That would have been reassuring -- had I looked anything at all like Michael Chang.

The real Chinese American kids in my community seemed to agree with me. I'd say one-third of my high school class was Asian, with the Chinese and Korean kids forming pretty tight cliques. But I was never really accepted in them. I only had one Asian friend growing up. As for Edison, N.J.'s, Thai community -- at the time, my family was the Thai community. There were no other Thais for miles.

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.

In the past few years, I've been traveling a lot, and one thing to note is that in many places outside of the United States, the big "You guys all looks alike" box is still the norm. In Poland, schoolchildren on a field trip made slanty-eyed faces at me as I walked past them. In Cuba, they called me Jackie Chan; one kid threw a rock at my head. In Belgium, I was billed for a Japanese person's hotel room -- the manager apologized and explained that it was an honest mistake, because we all look the same.

All of these things made for one very angry Asian. That big box is depressingly deep, narrow and hard to climb out of. For that reason, today, I've found that it's more comfortable for me to be misidentified as multiracial or Latino than it is to be labeled entirely Asian. Not only do fewer people throw things at my head, but my world feels as though it has more flexibility. I've gotten comfortable being unique. My sister thinks the celebrity I most resemble is New York Yankee Bernie Williams. I get John Legend a lot, too. Both comparisons feel much less reductive, more mysterious and ripe with possibilities than arguing over a Japanese man's hotel bill.

If we're being honest, cutting my hair short would probably put an end to all the confusion. But then I'd just blend in; I wouldn't be noticed as much. And if I'd cut my hair, I would have never landed my first date out of college.

In 2001, when I lived in my first apartment, I used to pass a movie theater on my way to work every day. At a party a few months after I moved in, this cute, arty girl with black-dyed hair came up to me and said, "You're that guy who walks past the movie theater every morning."

It turned out she worked there; she saw me every day. So how did she remember me out of hundreds of other passersby?

Just as back in kindergarten, I knew instantly.

It was the hair.

Kevin Sintumuang is an associate editor at GQ Magazine. He lives in New York City.