Tamanaha, Kim, and Wang. One Japanese, one Korean, and one Chinese. We were all

good friends in elementary school, the only three Asian girls in our grade. We did not need

to share the same interests in sports or hobbies or tastes in rainbow-loom bracelets

because we had the biggest thing in common: appearance. What more reason was there to

be friends other than the fact that we looked the same? Others certainly seemed to think so.

“Are you three triplets?” A boy with his pointer finger two knuckles deep in his nose

had asked us one time.

“No, why?”

“Well, cause like…you guys look like triplets,” he told us matter-of-factly. His hand

rotated as to wiggle around the finger in his nostril. I stared at him. He stared at me. I

shrugged and walked off.

Another time, during recess, a first grader came up to me and Kim and pointed at us.

“Sisters?”

“Nope,” we replied in unison.

At the time, it seemed comical to us because both of our first names were Elise.

“What kind of parents would give their kids the same name!” we would laugh. That laughter

faded off quickly.

Sometimes I wished that I had grabbed the booger-picking boy and shook him,

screaming, “We. Don’t. Look. The. Same!” Maybe I should have cornered him when he was

playing soccer with his two other Caucasian friends and asked, “So, are y’all related or

something?” But then, would that have been hypocritical? Would that have been, in a sense,

cruel?

Perhaps Kim, Wang, and I should have leaned into the joke more and been Thing 1,

2, and 3 for Halloween instead of Disney princesses. Maybe that would have been funny.

Maybe that would have won us first place at our school Halloween costume contest.

But, why should we have to conform to other’s beliefs? Why should we have to laugh

along with their jokes and accommodate their lack of ability to tell our races apart? We are

all so uniquely different inside and out, genetically and spiritually, in ways that no one may

ever be able to tell. This, is our truth.

I never saw Wang again after elementary school, and I never saw Kim after 6th. But, I

had noticed that the older we got, the more we had started to drift apart.

Some might consider it to be a sad thing, to have had tight-knit friends who were

once so close suddenly not be close anymore. That would mean that one day, us three Asian

girls had our last lunch together, our last conversation, and our last “goodbye” to each other

without even knowing it. Eventually, there was the last time we saw each other’s faces.

I do not consider it sad. It may have been unfortunate or impromptu, but never sad.

Because as we grew up, we began to associate ourselves with different interests and

hobbies and tastes in rainbow-loom bracelets. As we grew up, we detached ourselves from

how we looked in other’s eyes and flourished into our own persons. We may have looked

the same to others, but at heart, we were always different.