I went by Jesse in kindergarten. My parents feared that my ethnic name would get in the way of me making friends, so even though I mostly played with Yumi and another mixed Japanese transnational adoptee named Ashley, I named myself after the red-headed villain of Pokemon. But no one important ever called me by that name except for the teacher.

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My family lived in an apartment for those first two years, and moved into our first house in 2003. We were still in Canton, but I transfered to Gallimore Elementary School, starting over once again. I was shy and scared riding the bus on the first day of first grade, but a freckled girl with blunt bangs sat next to me after getting on at the same stop.

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“Hi, I’m Baylee. You’re new, right? What’s your name?” she asked.
“Minji. Oh--or Jessie if that’s easier.”
“Minji? That’s cool. I’ll call you that.”

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Baylee and I turned out to be in the same class, so I felt a lot more comfortable introducing myself to my classmates. I was excited to find that a lot of popular girls were in my class. While I became genuinely close with Baylee and a Lebanese American girl named Angela, I was obsessed with joining the friend group of a girl whose name just sounded like a popular girl’s: Alyssa Alba. I followed her around, holding her things and giving her gifts so that I could be a part of her group.

I was ecstatic when she invited me to her birthday party at her house. At the top of the grand, winding steps, decorative door strings grazed my skin softly as I walked into her room. I made a note to ask my parents to buy me some, and they did about a year later.

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My mom had bought the birthday gift I would give to Alyssa. I don’t remember exactly what it was; I just remember feeling embarrassed when she opened it and didn’t understand what she was holding. I remember blaming my mom who didn’t seem to know what American kids liked. I remember not getting invited to her birthday parties again.

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Being at Gallimore without Yumi, I no longer had friends from church at school. There were other Asian kids at Gallimore, but for some reason I didn’t come into contact with any that first year. As I walked into my class on the first day of second grade, my heart jumped. I saw from the corner of my eye a girl that looked like me. And she saw me. Her name was Jess, and I asked if she was Korean, Chinese, or Japanese. She said she was Vietnamese. I had never heard of that country before. But nonetheless, a friendship formed. 

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We stuck together for a long time, two Asian American girls in a predominantly White town. We made another friend, a girl with indigenous roots named Alaina. The three of us met everyday in recess to continue our roleplay series Bats, in which we played three orphaned teenage girls who turned into spies with Bat-like powers at nighttime. Although we lost contact with Alaina, Jess sometimes still tags me in memes about bats on Facebook.

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With this new group, I started getting more and more invested in my school community compared to my church. I started attending Korean School on Saturdays and made friends there as well, but I hated going because I already went to church on Sundays and now even my Saturdays were filled with Korean stuff I didn’t care about anymore.

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“Kim Minji, you’re not going to speak in Korean?!” my mom would yell.
I’d respond with contempt: “I can’t. I forgot Korean.” Maybe if I forgot the language, people would forget my foreignness. Maybe if I stopped playing with Xenia and Yumi and Michael outside of school, I wouldn’t feel so alone in school.