I grew up wishing I were white, but there was no disguising the thick black hair, straight bangs, and slanty eyes. Most of the time I smelled like pad thai. Then again, I wasn’t exactly Asian, either. I have always fallen somewhere in between the tidy categories that people like to make.
My Thai mom left her country for America when she was in her early twenties, and she met my white, 6-foot-4 dad at the University of Florida. We celebrated major holidays—Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter—with my European side of the family. But Mom clung to everything that made her Asian, and she did a good job of making me look like a little Thai girl, especially when she put me in Asian dresses and dragged me to Asian parties.
Now that I am an adult, I embrace the Asian-ness in me. I have developed an obsession with sushi. On the other hand, I don’t look as Asian as I did as a child, except when I drink red wine and my cheeks flush and my eyes get small and squinty. Whichever way I turn, my identity is not transparent: Although my mom grew up in Thailand, she had Chinese parents. My dad’s ancestors came from England, Germany, and Ireland.
Like me, many Americans want to learn more about who they are and where they came from. In the past, people flipped through old phone books, explored overgrown churchyards, and pored over immigration records and birth certificates to build their family trees. Today the business of genealogy is going genetic, as entrepreneurial scientists hijack the kinds of DNA analysis previously used to determine evolutionary relationships and give them a personal spin.
