The Project was born as I was: with an Asian mother and a white father.
He tumbled into the world flailing and screaming, a tangled bundle
of soft pale limbs and round pink cheeks and fluffy dark curls, looking
just like every man who bore this surname in the past
six generations, and as he wailed incessantly
through his first hour on Earth, I joked
that he had definitely inherited his father’s temperament.
By now I’m accustomed to assumptions
and whispers that serve as scabs to cover spaces
of ignorance. From a park bench I watch my son while the world
watches me, wondering, as I do
how this fair-skinned, curly-haired boy with his fists full of soil
rampaging around the playground in child-sized sneakers
is half mine. Unable to reconcile reality, they ask me,
with barely concealed enthusiasm, how I endure being the nanny
to such an energetic little boy. I laugh because words
create only more scabs. My son stumbles
and I rush to his side with a panic only a mother can harbor.
When I tilt his head back to search him for injury,
I see the glimmer of myself in his wild eyes.
