You find me in a pile of katanas and kimonos, browsing the sake cups we’ll toast your 21st birthday with. I’m trying on qipao for our college club’s next event. Red, for the attention I’ll collect, heads bobbing like lucky cats eager to put their paws on me. The ‘I’ you date is a mélange of Eastern tropes, a pretender with no claim to country or even continent. The clerk laughs as I push you out of the store. “It’s a surprise,” I insist, hiding the costume behind my back that will transform me into the perfect, unspecified, Asian, girlfriend.
Maria S. Picone is a Korean American adoptee and multigenre writer with work in Tahoma Literary Review, Seventh Wave, and Fractured Lit. Find Maria at www.mariaspicone.com and on Twitter and Instagram @mspicone.