Claudine Chiawei O'Hearn

    I was walking down the street the other day, on my way home from the gym, when a large woman with wiry hair run amok approached me, mumbling to herself and looking somewhat deranged, as only New Yorkers can look. As she neared me, she looked me in the eye and barked, "Half-breed bitch." I had already passed her by the time I figured out what she had said. Shocked, my first reaction was a mix of surprise and even pleasure: "How'd she know? What gave it away?" It wasn't until a block later that I became enraged and thought of a witty retort.

    I stopped being American when I first came to the States to live eight years ago. Growing up in Asia, I knew being mixed set me apart, but I didn't have to name it until people began to ask, Where are you from? My father was raised in a working-class Irish American family in Fall River, Massachusetts. My mother was born near Shanghai, China, but when she was seven, on the eve of the communist revolution, she and her family fled to Taiwan. They met, romantically, and I think aptly, on an airplane (my mother was a flight attendant) and soon married--though not without first encountering resistance. My father's family were familiar with only stereotypes of Asian women, and so were not eager to invite China into the O'Hearn fold. My mother's family felt the same and took it a step further by hiring a private detective, who fortunately was unable to dig up anything incriminating about my father. Both sides eventually got over it, so we can laugh about it now, and frequently do. Following my mother's example, both of her siste