Costco is my husband’s love language. In an effort to subdue my anxiety around the continued violence against Asian Americans, he walks along the graphite-colored floors with his oversized shopping cart, choosing oversized tokens of love. Rotund cans of hazelnut pirouette wafers to pair with my daily cup of tea, a bag of flour larger than me to satisfy my lustful consumption of the Great British Baking Show, and, last year, a two-pack of pepper spray. Moved by a video of Asian American women lined up in New York City to buy pepper spray, he made this purchase to tell me he loved me, he saw me, and he would protect me, if not with his white skin, then with a discount deal.

The anxiety started after the 2016 election, when Trump’s travel ban had me double-checking my naturalization papers, when wearing a mask could not protect me from “kung flu” vitriol, and when I saw faces like mine splattered on the internet as the latest victims of hate. The tangible evidence of my Asianness was not enough to combat the intangible voices in my brain. “You’re American, just like us,” my white family would say. “Yellow on the outside, white on the inside,” I would say. And so I wondered if I had a right to claim the Asian American experience as my own. I distrusted my feelings of fear and unease around the violence and racism. I doubted my right to carry a can of pepper spray.

My husband and I took our sons, who are also adopted, to a park in Virginia around the one-year anniversary of the Atlanta spa shooting. My brain, already tingling and on alert, spotted the straggled line of the D.C. trucker convoy, with its American flags flapping, circling the beltway as we drove, and I felt a rush of adrenaline. These truckers were protesting for all kinds of reasons and none at all, but I had no doubt that my sons and I would not fit with their vision of that waving flag. The danger was not physical, but the manifestation of it in my body made it real.

My two sons sat in the backseat, excited for their day, excited to spot their adopted nation’s flag so many times, questions pouring out.

“Why are there so many flags? Why do they have Trump flags? Who’s Brandon? Why don’t they want the vaccine?” 

I held my breath, hoping their eyes did not spot the “Fuck Biden” flags too, and searched for what to say but found few words. My two sons absorbed the scene unfolding by their window, white faces, big trucks, American flags, and a speechless mother, and became confused that a flag they were so proud of a few moments before had been turned into something else. I brought them to this country, believing it was the right thing to do, and now I watched the stars and stripes in their eyes dim ever so slightly.  

I understood at that moment that I could not escape my Asian American identity, no matter how ill-fitting it feels. It is the thing that draws fingers to pull back eyes, elicits comments about my English, and misidentifies me as another Asian woman. It is the thing that prompts an Amtrak train conductor in Chicago to joke with my husband, “Once you go Asian, you never go Caucasian.” It is the code that lights up my nervous system and tells me they all are right and that I do not belong here. But it is also the thing that unites me with a rich, diverse group, who offer me community if I could just stop fighting myself.

Sitting in our home on the dryer near the back door, the Costco cans of pepper spray remain unopened but unreturned. The sense of danger I feel is something pepper spray cannot protect me from. It is the danger of never fully living in my own skin, the danger of self-hate, the danger of passing all that down to my children, the danger of being an Asian American. And so the cans greet me every day, as both a gesture of love and a physical embodiment of fear.