“Oh, do you not speak English?” she asked.
I was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, but I lived in a multigenerational household for the first few years, where only Mandarin was spoken. I didn’t learn to speak English until I was in preschool.
But this woman wouldn’t have known that. She questioned my language skills because I look Asian, and therefore foreign. If a White girl had paused due to shyness, the woman wouldn’t have asked her the same question.
Small interactions like this gave me hints that people like me were looked at as not entirely belonging here. The same…
