You hand me a rag doll for my seventh birthday. Two small black beads are crudely sewn to its yellow face.

“Look, it’s just like you,” you say.

“Thanks,” I reply and offer a weak smile in return, tucking the doll underneath my arm.

When I return home, I wipe away my hot tears and throw the doll in a pile of dirty laundry. I rummage through my drawer to find my Barbie in a sparkly blue dress and pink heels, wrapped carefully in a handkerchief.

Facing the mirror in front of me in my pink bedroom, I pry my eyes open with my fingers. Wake up. But my eyes are neither blue nor big. They are not like the eyes of the Barbie which I caress in my arms. I shut my eyes because I do not recognize the reflection that stares back at me. Dark brown slits, the size of almonds, slash across my face on either side of my nose—they remind me of the yellow doll’s stupidly silent gaze.

When I am eleven, you do not look like me with your sapphire eyes and straight, sun bleached hair. Your eyes contain the angelic patience that my dull ones lack, the carefree delight that I wish to bottle up and spill into my own. You tell me to stay optimistic and smile more. So I smile. You tell me to dance. So I dance. I like to think that my eyes are the only reason why I can never be as happy as you. Perhaps I would also be able to laugh lightheartedly while dancing to “Yellow” by Coldplay at your Bat Mitzvah, rather than worrying about how yellow my skin looked underneath the neon disco lights or the jokes about my “yellow” skin earlier that day. Perhaps I would understand the complex vocabulary words that my teacher scribbled on the chalkboard during English class that you always seemed to comprehend so easily. Or perhaps I would finally be able to land the principal role at the annual ballet performance, the spotlight sweeping across my pristine white tutu.

Ask me if I can see—because it’s just so funny to lift the corners of your eyes and imitate me. Remind me that I look asleep so I don’t forget how I jab double eyelid tape into my eye sockets every morning. Call me “Hey, you” because you refuse to learn my name—so I become just one of those Asian nerds in your math class. Take pictures of my eyes (after all, they do symbolize Oriental culture and you find them unique or rather, as you would say, interesting) and plaster them over your Instagram story. Replace my Asian with your Caucasian—as you swap my Chinese qipao for your satin cocktail dresses and my black hair for your blonde hair.

And as you talk to me, you will see that the color of my eyes are muddy puddles on rainy days and rotten rose petals and dead autumn leaves. Yours are the color of surfing in azure ocean waves, clear skies, robin eggs, cotton candy. Behind your crystal irises, I can feel rippling waves of contempt strike me one, two, three times.

I will still remember to smile politely; of course, never too generously, or else my eyes will disappear, as my friends used to tell me. I will still remember to talk; of course, never too much, or else people will notice my small eyes and frown. I will still remember to answer your questions about whether I can speak English—your native language; of course, never too aggressively, or else you will laugh and accuse me of being too serious.

Even so, I want to shout in the language that I had always known as my native language. Yes of course, how could I not speak English? Let me shrivel and dissolve as I yell, a lotus slowly, softly wilting in the snow. Yet if you ask me, I could not explain why my gaze instead withdraws in placid submission every time our eyes meet. Perhaps it is because it is the only thing I know how to do when your eyes strip me bare, tame me, crumble me—until I become your china doll, your Pinkerton’s Butterfly, and my porcelain heart your exotic desire.

I am fifteen when I meet you again. Your eyes have the same glint, sparks of icy blue flame swirled in pearl gray. But you do not walk away from me as you had always done in the past. You caress my face, engulf me in praises, tell me that my eyes are beautiful, that you love my eyes. I want to tell you the same thing, that your eyes are everything I had ever desired--to be beautiful. But I am filled with an inexplicable melange of joy, skepticism, fear, then joy again.

For the first time in my life, I’m learning to love my Asian. Slowly but surely, I’m taking cautious steps to break out of the mold that you have created for me all these years. I’m learning that my eyes are the dark soil of the rice paddies where my people toiled, the iron tracks of the transcontinental railroad built by my people, the glossy black ink of Chinese calligraphy which my people invented. I’m learning that my eyes are the stories of my people, forgotten yet powerful.