Fractions were never my strong suit. During my second-grade fractions unit, I struggled to wrap my head around the idea of dividing numbers by other numbers and forming quantities that were not quite whole. Pink-gray eraser shavings covered my desk at home, and scribbled-out numbers filled the worksheets in my teal Everyday Mathematics journal, the seahorses on its cover smiling smugly up at me. “But how do you put a number over another number? And get only part of one?” I would ask my father frustratedly when my mathematical mind failed me.

But in many ways, my confusion with fractions began even earlier; one day at my kindergarten after-school program, deep in a Disney princess coloring book, I remarked to my friends that I was one-half German, one-half Chinese, and one-half American. My father was born in Germany, my mother in China, and I in America—so of course that’s how it added up. I was too absorbed in the blue and yellow of Snow White’s dress to notice my friends’ quizzical reactions, but the memory has stuck with me, regardless. Even then, before my later battle with fractions, something about my statement itched the moment I said it. Three halves. Was that really a whole?

Today, thankfully, I’m comfortable with the workings of fractions and the difference between ethnicity and nationality. Still, growing into my hyphenated Chinese-German-American identity, particularly in the racially homogeneous landscape of central Iowa, was far from immediately easy. On my first-ever standardized test—the Iowa Assessment, the subject of much third-grade hoopla—I breezed through long division and reading comprehension questions with ease, finally confident wielding mathematical operations and their rhetorical counterparts. But, halfway through the personal information section, I came across a problem that stumped me: in small italicized print under “Race,” a warning read, “Check only one.” The boxes next to each choice loomed on the paper before me, their hard, black lines making it clear—they wanted one checkmark. Would it be White, Asian, or Other? I didn’t want to be Other. But neither White nor Asian seemed completely true, so I checked the last box and swallowed the sourness in my throat.

***

Perhaps the Iowa Assessment was the first formal document to ask me to choose between my halves, but it wasn’t the last. Yet as each school year gave way to summer warmth, I would happily forget the demographic questioning of tests and paperwork and eagerly anticipate the adventures of the months ahead. Every other summer since I was seven, my parents would announce a visit to Shanghai or Germany, and my younger sister and I would excitedly pack suitcases full of clothes and gifts and carefully practice German and Chinese phrases. Each destination became its own corner of paradise. From our first visit, my days in China were long and muggy, filled with the savory aromas of my grandfather’s cooking and the sights of Shanghai. In Germany, I swam in the lake near my aunt’s house and spent lazy afternoons outside with my cousins. Yet as I grew older, the sweetness of these trips began to show signs of sour.

It was the summer before high school—late August in Shanghai, the time of year when the air hangs heavier and sleepier than usual, and cicadas sing an endless, hypnotic hum from their hiding places in the trees. But the city pushes through this mugginess, its streets busy with vendors selling man tou, steamed white buns softer and sweeter than clouds, motorbikes whizzing past pedestrians and cars honking at each other, and open markets selling every plant and animal under the sun.

One Saturday morning, I ventured to one of these markets with my grandfather and grandmother—my wai gong and wai po—and my parents and sister, on a mission led by my wai gong to stock up their pantry with vegetables and herbs, most of their names foreign but intriguing to me. Still exhausted from jetlag and sticky from the heat, I trudged across the bridge on the way to the market, listening to my mother chat with my grandparents in Chinese, picking up a word or two, when I felt the eyes of a passerby on us. A biker had just sped by, his basket full of recent purchases, and turned for an unflinching double take, his eyes more piercing than the day’s heat. Confused and shaken, I turned to my family to see if anyone had noticed, but no one showed any signs of recognition.

We continued to the market, and after many deliberations over the quality of lobed mushrooms and crisp bai cai—napa cabbage, a favorite in our family—we squeezed our way out of the tight rows of stalls and fellow shoppers, our arms heavy with bags full of our loot. On our journey home, we took a detour through a local park featuring shrub-lined paths and areas for exercise and tai chi, a staple of public parks across China. As we strolled through the archway leading to the street, a middle-aged couple crossed the path ahead of us and, glancing back momentarily, seemed to do an impression of the biker I’d seen before—turning back for double and triple takes so blatant I almost recoiled, wondering what could have drawn their attention so intensely. Their eyes, both searching and searing, roamed across my face, then my sister’s, then my parents’ and grandparents’. I turned behind us to check if something in the park had caught their eye, but all I saw were fellow walkers and the path winding back through the greenery. Finally disconcerted enough to voice my confusion, I asked my mother why the couple was staring.

She paused her conversation with my grandparents to glance at the couple ahead of us.

“Oh, you know, they’re probably just trying to place us.”

“Place us?”

“Well, you and your sister don’t look fully Chinese, but I do, and dad is white. They’re trying to add it all up.” She turned back to my wai po, slipping back into Chinese as we made our way onto the sidewalk outside the park.

So I needed to be added up. Placed. Why hadn’t I realized this—noticed these looks—in years past? Perhaps my appearance had grown more out of place—more clearly only fractionally Chinese—as I grew older, or perhaps it was the departure of my youth and the entrance of adolescence’s tender self-awareness that made me more sensitive to their stares.

Whatever the cause, I walked back to my grandparents’ apartment in silence, ignoring the vendors outside the corner store on their block. On a later outing to the city, the stares reappeared—but this time, I was unsurprised.

Still, the frustration remained. Fractions were never my strong suit—but maybe they weren’t anyone else’s, either.

***

August also happened to be the month of choice for trips to Germany—yet while Shanghai slumbered in its humidity, Grötzingen, the town outside Karlsruhe where my aunt lived, awoke in the summer. Crystalline skies and blooming trees seeped through the sliding doors of my aunt’s house, left perpetually open on warm days, and the smell of fresh soil and lavender from her backyard garden drifted through the kitchen and across hallways. When my family visited, our days alternated between biking to Baggersee Grötzingen, the sandy, tree-lined swimming lake always populated by locals in the summer, venturing into the city to buy Bauernbrot and Bretzeln—farmer’s bread and pretzels—and sitting on the trampoline in my aunt’s backyard with my cousins.

The summer after my freshman year of high school, our visit to Germany was particularly festive, as my grandmother—my Omi—was turning 75, and the entire assemblage of aunts, uncles, and cousins from my father’s family had turned out in Grötzingen to celebrate. Since my Omi was the mother of five and the grandmother of many more, we filled the basement of the restaurant we’d reserved for dinner one night, the kind of place with napkins with satiny edges and three forks at each place setting along the long, polished table where we sat.

I’d been seated away from my father, sandwiched between my cousins Sophie and John, so I faced the challenge of ordering for myself from a menu filled with foreign, umlauted German words. Amidst the clinking of water glasses and the chatter of my cousins, I scanned the menu for a dish both palatable and translatable. Finally, I landed on one—Tomatensuppe mit Sahne, tomato soup with cream. But I didn’t want cream. From the German I’d picked up over the years from my father, I knew mit was “with” and ohne was “without”—so Tomatensuppe ohne Sahne, tomato soup without cream. I practiced the words in my head. To-ma-ten-suppe oh-ne Sah-ne. Tomaten-suppe ohne Sah-ne.

“Do you know what you want?” John asked as he saw me poring over the menu. “I can help you order if you’d like.”

“I can order for myself,” I replied. Yes, I could order for myself.

The waitress finally made her way to our end of the table. “Und was möchten Sie essen?”

I pointed awkwardly at the line in the menu next to the photo of the soup. My internal practicing suddenly seemed for naught. “Tomatensuppe ohne Sahne,” I mumbled.

“Sorry?” she asked, leaning forward.

“Tomatensuppe ohne Sahne,” I said, more loudly.

“Tomato soup, no cream?” she asked in English, looking at me for confirmation. I felt John’s and Sophie’s eyes on me.

“Yes, please,” I replied. My cheeks reddened. The dress I had worn to dinner suddenly felt too tight, my shoes too stiff, the words that had come out of my mouth too American—linguistic imposters in the land of hard consonants and heavy vowels. No one had stared, or tried to add me up. Yet even my last name, a gluey combination of seemingly incongruous sounds and syllables, seemed to set me apart—among the Schmidts in Germany and the Hongs in China, my Schmidt-Hong self felt, somehow, within and without.

The waitress had scribbled in her notepad and moved on to Sophie, who ordered Schnitzel. I enjoyed my Tomatensuppe that night—but the next time we went out for dinner, I ordered in English.

Fractions were never my strong suit; my halves felt bloated, too swollen to manage.

***

In my junior year of high school, then a veteran of these conflicting identities, I attended a presentation for my school’s annual Asian-American Culture Day, a day-long collection of talks and panels on the Asian-American experience. Sitting in my school’s echoey auditorium, packed into a row with my English class, I listened to the last invited speaker of the day—an Indian-American author raised in Paris by an Indian father and American mother.

Her life had been defined by existence in the in-between, she explained: family reunions in India, visits to Brooklyn, disparate childhood worlds. She was an Other, too, I thought. I nodded as she shared stories, and nodded more—and then stopped.

Because she was now telling stories of the freedom of those experiences, stories of her embrace of both Hinduism and Judaism, stories of the power of dualities.

“I didn’t really mind being seen as both belonging and not belonging,” she explained. She’d attended an international school in Paris, where diversity was the norm—so her internal diversity was received in much the same way. “In some ways, I felt lucky. I could be part of two worlds, instead of just one,” she said. Two worlds, where she wasn’t an Other, but a Both.

Both. What if I’d told the Iowa Assessment that I was Both? Told the strangers in Shanghai who stared? Told my fifteen-year-old self, already resigned to exclusion, pushing away the worlds that she could have pulled in and made her own?

I left the auditorium that day much as I had entered it, hyphenated in name and race, holding my worlds in a fragile equilibrium—but where they had once shied from each other, insulted by the thought of coexistence, there was now a hazy harmony, little by little challenging calcified disharmony.

Even today, as a sophomore in college, part of me is still my high school self, uncomfortable with the uncertainty of her three halves and unsure how to balance the harmony and disharmony of her worlds—after all, fractions were never my strong suit. But more of me has begun to wonder if I, too, am lucky—lucky to have the opportunity to grow into everything those halves promise, to practice German in letters to my grandmother, to explore Chinese cuisine and culture in Boston, and to remind myself, on tests and on forms and in Shanghai and in Grötzingen, that Other can mean Both.

 

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