When I was a teenager, I would occasionally help my sister by taking her job of delivering newspapers. One morning I encountered an older woman who shouted anti-Asian epithets at me, telling me to go back to my country. It was the first time I had ever encountered hostile racism, and I was quite shaken by these comments.

I had grown up moving every few years from one country to another, and neither Japan (if defined by race) nor any other country (if defined by nationality) felt like “my country.” This wasn’t a happy time in my life. We had moved rather precipitously to this latest country, and I did not like my school and missed where we had lived before. The incident that morning made me feel even more out of place.

That night I was still roiling inside about what had happened, furious that I hadn’t had the presence of mind to come up with an equally nasty response. I was irritated that we were living in this country because of my father’s job, and secretly I was sad because I didn’t feel that I had a country to go back to anyway!