I am four years old, or five. It is the parking lot of a Kmart in either Bonifay, Florida or Great Falls, Montana. My mother is on leave, or between postings. My eldest sister leans down to me, her auburn hair in one shiny gold Goody barrette, and says: “This is it. Mom’s finally decided three is too many. She has the receipt in her purse, you know - Kmart will refund anything, no matter how long you’ve had it!”
It’s a twist on the classic favorite of eldest siblings the world over: You’re adopted. I know, though, that I am not adopted, because my mother wearily explains to strangers again and again that despite my stick straight black hair, despite my almond shaped eyes, despite my brown skin, I am indeed her biological daughter. She is very fair, with golden hair and grey eyes. My next oldest sister is her spitting image. My oldest sister, although she owes her coloring to her Sicilian father, all olive skin and auburn hair, is still light eyed. I am a changeling child, and so my sister has told me that in a moment of weakness, my mother bought me on sale at Kmart, tucking the receipt into her wallet next to the coupons for Campbells’ soup that she always clipped and never spent. There were no more blue eyed babies that day, my sister explains. Mom took pity on me, like I was the runt of a litter of puppies, but there is always the chance she’ll change her mind. She can always get her money back.
The storm of tears that follows banishes both my sisters to the car to sit, without the keys to play the radio. My mother leans in close and explains that you can’t buy real live babies in stores, only baby dolls. She takes me the aisle where the dolls sit, staring into endless nothing with sky blue eyes. She nudges me forward, tells me to choose a baby of my own to take home. I search and search, but there are no tan babies with dark eyes and stick straight black hair. I settle for a black baby, sculpted plastic curls atop her head, because she is the only one I can find whose eyes are not the color of ice.
I am six years old, just barely. One of my sisters has wandered off in a market in Seoul, and my mother, frantic and scared, is spitting angry words at a stall owner, who does not speak English. I am also angry, because I am tired and hungry and sick of being at the market. I am crying and blowing bubbles with my own spit, and my mother, whose patience has reached its end, turns on me and grabs my upper arm, not hard, but firmly. She shakes me once, twice, and raises her voice to say: “Dammit, Ning! Stop blubbering! Be. STILL.” The shopkeeper takes note of this and nearly hurdles the counter to sweep me behind her, shouting back at my mother. She crouches before me, concern painting her features, and she rapidfire questions me in Korean, pointing at my mother in her expensive American blue jeans. It dawns on my mother that this woman thinks she has stolen me, that my own mother has taken me from my real parents, who are plainly not blond and pink from the sun. She reaches into her bag and produces our passports, hers and mine, and points to her name and our visas over and over. My wayward sister chooses this moment to saunter from some far aisle, and my mother pulls too roughly on my hand.
I am eleven years old and my mother has been discharged from service. We are eating a meal together as a family in a restaurant in Louisville. Diners at the tables around us are openly staring at our booth. Esteban, my mother’s beau, shifts uncomfortably and starts to wave down our server. My mother looks him in the eye and very deliberately shakes a Marlboro out of the box. She lights it and we sit in silence until Ban asks me if I want dessert, let’s have dessert, I bet they have ice cream or something. So we order dessert and share plates. I hear a woman seated nearby huff a noise of disgust when Ban reaches with his spoon and eats a bite of cobbler off my mother’s plate.
I am thirteen years old and we have come to look at this house, the third or the fifth or the tenth this week. I like the lilac bushes arching over the walkway. There is a rounded window on the second floor where I imagine I can sit and read the hours away. We have barely unlatched the gate when the landlord throws open the front door. His gaze sweeps us, my fair mother, her Puerto Rican boyfriend, her half-Asian child. His lip curls. “It’s rented.”
I am sixteen years old and my best friend and I are riding a bus from Thornton, where we live, to Cherry Creek, which is where the mall we want to go to is. A man boards the nearly empty bus and sits directly behind us, behind me, and begins to mutter under his breath about fucking greasers and their wetback sisters, about how the girls will tease and tease with their dark lipstick and high heels but won’t ever spread their legs. He leans toward us and his voice gets louder. He goes on and on about the size of Mexican families and how ugly Mexican brats are. Daisy is frightened and begging me silently to do something. We are still seven or eight stops from our destination, we are in a part of town we do not know. I pull the cord - STOP REQUESTED - and the bus shudders at the side of the road. I grab her hand and as I pull her urgently through the side doors I yell, “I’m Cuban, you asshole!”
I am not Cuban.
I am seventeen and I am listening to Les Miserables on repeat. I am also obsessed with Disney musicals. I have memorized every word to The Little Mermaid, to Beauty and the Beast, to Aladdin. The best thing about Aladdin, for me, is Lea Salonga singing Princess Jasmine. Lea Salonga is the first Filipina that I can name who has made it to stardom. My dad boasts he is friends with her father, a fellow doctor. I buy Miss Saigon because she sings on it, too, and am unsettled, put out, by the fact that she is Filipina but the character is Vietnamese and this discrepancy is lost on everyone, seemingly, but me. Very soon I am twenty and she is cast as Eponine in Les Mis, and I am triumphant and I tell everyone who will listen that my dad and hers are friends, that I am a single degree of separation from this perfection. It makes me feel a little better, that Eponine is French. It makes me feel as though maybe someday I will be allowed to sing a lead role.
I resisted listening to Hamilton for months. I do not listen to hip hop, it is not my music, it is not a part of my cultural landscape. But Alexander Hamilton has been my favorite founding father since the seventh grade, and so I owe it to twelve year old me, Les Mis loving me, tanned, dark eyed me, to pay attention for a moment. I am listening to Angelica Schuyler celebrate the joy of intelligence, I am listening to Eliza write herself out of and into the narrative, I am listening to fighting and loving and yearning and burning and bleeding and living and writing and dying and I am listening to dozens of dark eyed, dark haired men and women resculpt our shared history.
When I finally look at photos of the production, I am struck by a candid of Lin-Manuel as A.Ham and Philipa Soo as Eliza, with a turning chorus member behind them as he bends over her hand. The dancer is blond. Philipa’s hair hangs straight down, glossy and black. Lin-Manuel’s dark eyes snap with humor, with wit. I imagine that somewhere, just out of frame, there is a table with three half-eaten desserts.
