I’ve been training for this my whole life. I knew the day would come when the world would have something to say about my biracial child: curiosity at best, criticism at worst.

But I primed and prepped ahead of time. Shaped and changed by my personal experience of being teased and ridiculed for being Asian, I have always felt uniquely qualified to address similar challenges for my half-Asian child.

But the first real incident didn’t unfold the way I thought it would.

My daughter’s fourth-grade class made a startling discovery about her this week: She is, in fact, Asian. Met with complete surprise by many, this “bombshell” unfolded in a way befitting many elementary school experiences: in humiliating, hurtful fashion.

My daughter’s class recently learned about Lunar New Year. While chatting with a friend, she made a passing reference to her Asian ethnicity. This breaking news quickly spread and was met with a collective gasp among her classmates.

“Wait, you’re ASIAN?!”
“You don’t even look like it!”
“Hey, guys, look who says she’s Asian!”

Upon hearing about this incident after school, my reaction to her was equally incredulous:

“Wait, they thought you were WHITE?”

My child is, indeed, half Asian and half white. She is a product of my full Korean-ness and her white father, whom she has always more closely resembled. She has my husband’s fair complexion, light brown hair, and enviably long eyelashes that frame her big, beautiful eyes.

Still, the fact that her classmates had pegged her as white this whole time was news to me. As her mother, I have always seen my child as white and Asian. As for my daughter? She is understandably confused and upset that her classmates are now seeing her differently when her racial identity was never considered or remarked upon until now.

At this point in her barely decade-long life, my daughter’s ethnicity is just one aspect of her identity — nothing more, nothing less. Like many kids, she is more inclined to share other notable self-identifiers that capture who she is: an avid soccer player, a joyful singer who does her best work in the car, and a diehard donughnut enthusiast whose most objectionable quality among her peers might be that she hates ice cream.

But, again, I have been preparing for this since before she was born. I informally crafted a playbook to help counter all the greatest hits that would invariably come her way, including the classic standby: “What are you?” From an early age, I’ve led her toward a generous buffet of possible answers: American, Caucasian, Irish, White, Korean, Asian, Asian American. Mixed-race, blended-race, biracial, half this/half that. Take your pick, they all work. If simple facts don’t work to counter ignorance and insults about how you look, I advised, throw in some witty comebacks or withering looks. I’ve got lots of stuff in this starter pack.

For all my concern, however, there was always a hopeful asterisk in the plan — maybe my half-Asian kid would have it a bit easier than I did. Her “otherness” only comprised half of her identity, I reasoned. So perhaps her experience could be slightly mitigated by the fact that her name is easy to pronounce, and she doesn’t have the almond-shaped eyes that are so frequently seen as an invitation for insults against Asians.

But what happened in my daughter’s class showed me how wrong I was. I overlooked that being half of something can be even harder to navigate. As a parent, I was so busy worrying about discrimination that I never anticipated disbelief. Because, for multiracial people, there tends to be a follow-up; the ultimate insult added to the injury of the already-problematic question of “What are you?”

Prove it.

After her classmates learned she is Asian, my daughter shared that some of them scrunched up their faces and gave her “weird looks.” What followed was an uncomfortable rapid-fire volley of pointed questions: If you’re Asian, do you celebrate Lunar New Year, too? Have you ever had kimchi? What do you MEAN you don’t like kimchi? Say something in Korean. Why don’t you speak Korean? But you just said you were Korean.

I wish I could tell her that kids are just being kids, but deep down, I know this is merely a warm-up to a more intense cultural crucible that will continue throughout her life.

The one-two punch of assuming she was white and then expecting her to prove her Asian ethnicity is something I never dealt with. As a full Korean, my experience with racism was brutal but uncomplicated — the sing-song, ching-chong insult achieved its one-note cruelty every time. My otherness was never called into question because my unmistakably Asian face and “funny-sounding” name were all the credentials I needed.

My defensive playbook relied on the premise that she would be scrutinized or singled out for being Asian. It didn’t account for the possibility that the rest of the world wouldn’t see her as Asian — making her experience different from my own, and in some ways, more difficult. My one-size-fits-all, defensive posture failed to acknowledge the nuance and extra care needed in her specific situation.

I don’t have all the answers for my half-Asian child. But I do know that her lifelong journey of self-identification can be aided by how I correct my own assumptions. My job now is to teach her that she is not responsible for other people’s hot takes on her race(s), nor should she ever feel compelled to make others feel comfortable with them.

My daughter’s process of understanding her racial identity will expand and contract through her own lived experience with the inequities and gifts of being white and Asian. I’ll readjust, support and learn along the way. And my parenting will always be underwritten by what remains unchanged in how I see her, and how I hope she’ll see herself: as not half of anything, but fully whole, derived from being the best of both her father and I, of both races and cultures.

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