“Not totally white,” my mother protested. “See? Is little yellow.” We were huddled around a sea of paint swatches, which sloshed around in shades of grey and beige and, inexplicably, shades of those shades too. My father shook his head. Huffing, my mother fixed it back onto the wall.
It was a Sunday, which in our household typically means a slow, easy morning and second helpings of breakfast. But today, we had woken up much too early, grabbed three odd slices of toast, and sped to Home Depot: today was the day that we were to choose the color of our brand-new house.
The night before, we had decided to ultimately settle upon a shade of white. For years, we had occupied apartments under the condition that their walls remained a spotless alabaster; suffice to say that even now, there was no other color quite like home. And yet, as we would discover upon arriving at the paint swatch section, narrowing our search to a “shade of white” had hardly had an effect at all.
“This one?” My mother plucked a swatch from the wall.
“No, too bright.” My father shook his head again, waving at her to put it down. My mother nodded, already reaching for another.
“What about this?”
“No, too yellow.” He had a point.
“This?”
“Too depressing.” Up it went.
“This?”
“No. It’s too.. white.” My father opened his mouth again, and then closed it again with a pop.
A pause. “We want not white?” She looked skeptically at him, the swatch dangling from her hand.
“No, but,” he struggled to explain. “You know, there’s white, and there’s white.” He poked the swatch. “That’s white.”
My mother huffed again, and threw up her hands, which I took as a cue to take my leave. I drifted over to the ‘blue/purple’ section, and my brother followed, pulling out his phone. I reached out and unhooked a violet 3’ by 3’ square. Moments later, my mother emerged triumphantly from behind an employee, holding up two almost identical swatches. My father stood behind her, arms crossed in reluctant approval. “This, ‘wedding veil.’ This, ‘swiss cream.’” She beamed. “Which you like?”
I looked to my dad, who shrugged. Realizing then that our search had come to an end, I fixed my purple square back on the wall. “They look the same to me, Mom.” She then turned to my brother, eager to maintain the show of familial democracy. I exhaled. Truthfully, either of the whites would do. But there was a certain novelty to choosing the shade which would surround us in the coming years, and no one could blame my mother for relishing in it.
My brother lowered his phone to squint at both proffered swatches with his narrow brown eyes. His answer came simply, and quickly.
“Yeah, I guess it’s warmer than plain white,” he conceded, pointing to the one on the left. And so we left, the warm white of “wedding veil” gathered in our ochre hands.
—
It was too hot to think, and so we painted instead. Sweat dripped down our round mushroom noses, while our arms kneaded the brittle dough of the walls. Willingly, we drank in the sharp tang of formaldehyde and acetone, of delightfully crippling debt, of our 1918 square footed American dream — a dream which we hadn’t known we had dreamt until it gifted us the house we hadn’t known we had wanted. We drank until our heads spun just as quickly as the rollers in our hands and our eyes saw spots that floated and throbbed. Layer by layer; slow at first, and then all at once. It is in this way that we painted the walls of our house, and it is in this way that America made a great fruit out of me.
I am not sure how it was decided that a banana should represent Asian-Americans who have assimilated into American culture, for “yellow on the outside, white on the inside” seems a poor metaphor when a banana’s inside is not white, and instead a buttermilk yellow. A good look at any old banana will confirm this.
But I know that I am fooling myself, that I viciously split this buttermilk hair in the hopes of saving my core from the same, for the large array of paint swatches that my family viewed that day was something miraculous. Outside of Home Depot, the sum of the differences between buttermilk yellow and white rounds to zero; for what does it matter that I can understand spoken Korean, if I cannot speak without frequently pausing to fumble for the next word? That I finally graduated Korean School after 13 years of Saturday mornings, if my grandmother still cringes at my offensively American accent? And that I was born in Seoul, if I have only ever known Boston and its suburbs? Look, but not too closely. Don’t complicate what is simple because yellow is yellow, and white is white, and what is buttermilk, anyway?
My brother was able to discern a meaningful difference between two almost identical color swatches, but I am sincerely unable to do the same. Truthfully, the inside of a banana looks white, buttermilk be damned.
Funnily enough, my extended family was so pleased when I was born white. Historically, perfectly porcelain skin implied the sparing of its wearer from the outdoor tasks demanded of the lower class, and so Korean culture grew to associate whiteness with purity, innocence, wealth, and luxury. Today, whiteness remains treasured and guarded jealously with black sunglasses, wide-brimmed hats, and floral umbrellas in the blazing Seoul heat of July.
My mother tugs on my skin now, bronzed under this unrelenting American sun, lamenting the loss of her baby. I want to tell her to not worry, that I am still white inside, but I doubt she will find this comforting. Hold up paint swatches for western white and the white of my babyhood; even I can see that they are different.
—
The night that we finished painting the walls, it was quiet. In days previous, we had played music so loud, and for so long, that it was a wonder that our new neighbors did not complain. But as the wall thickened with white, the air thickened with a similar anticipation, and the silence seemed appropriate.
Soon, our brush strokes slowed. We dared not look at each other and confirm what we already knew to be true. Instead, we made excuses to continue painting: some patchy areas needed help, and so did under the windowsill over there, and near the closet, too.
We had painted the blank of our page, but couldn’t bring ourselves to begin writing upon it. Our reluctance in placing down our brushes was like that of a writer fiddling with the last sentence of her novel — but while a piece is never truly done, most writers will grudgingly acknowledge that at some point, it is ready to be read. And we were ready to live in our house, so at some point, we put down our brushes.
When we finally looked up from our respective walls, we found each other again and cracked plaster smiles. The paint had kissed our hair white. My father, especially, was whiter than the hood of a car left outside on Christmas, and I would have laughed louder but for the fear of inhaling sharp chemicals. Everything was white and plain: the walls, the brushes, the floor, our hands, our faces, our bodies. All around us, there was more of the same: there was nothing to see, to interpret, to process. And it was criminally comforting.
I realized then that the main comfort of homogeneity comes from the ability to belong naturally, intrinsically, unquestionably. A white car in a snowstorm; be the car, be the snowstorm — no one will know. There is no responsibility to an alien culture, no one to whom you are expected to explain your accent, your face, your name, and no reason to feel anything other than comfortable. You hold the freedom to be without being scrutinized.
Later, in the bathroom, I would scrub at the white between my fingers. It would come off meekly, in flakes, and speed down the drain. As I opened the door to leave, I caught sight of several white patches behind my ear: harsh white stains across a yellow stretch of skin. Sighing, I turn on the tap again.
These discoveries were familiar: in the useless pink of my tongue, the backhanded burn of American spice, and the pale yellow of my insides. I have almost resigned myself to this slow bleaching of my flaxen being, but then I am called from the bathroom by my father, who is admiring the living room of our new house.
And when I join the rest of my family in dancing around the space which only a living room affords, I watch as my buttermilk flakes peel away, rising with the heat of the summer beyond these walls. They spin faster and faster, like the water which boils atop a buttered pan; they are unbridled, yet also confined, bound, protected by the fresh white paint. Soon, they will flutter to the ground in isolation, and there they will stay.
Until then, my all-American family will stand in our backyard, a space which we haven’t the slightest idea how to use, and stroke the wispy red flowers of the bush the previous homeowners left behind. We will look across to our neighbor’s house, which is almost identical to ours, and note the healthy green of their grass. But we will stand with a new house to our back, and paint in our hair — because in the frayed yellowing ends of our own lawn and of ourselves, we will find all we need.