My Mistaken Identity

I got mistaken for being Vietnamese the other day. Yuuki and I went to Mr. Goodcents. Aggiville was crowded, people milling about in their cars like cows off pasture. I parked in a handicap parking spot, I still have a handicap pass through the month of April as I rehabilitate my reconstructed left knee.
A man in a white SUV called out.
“Are you handicapped?”
“Yep.”
Yuuk and I kept walking to Goodcents.
“I’m calling the cops.”
I looked back. The man was red in the face. It looked like he was sun burnt, or drunk.
“I have the paperwork,” I reassured him.
The SUV inched past us silently.
It was a good fifty feet ahead of us before the rummy faced man leaned over his silent passenger and said, “We should have never let the Vietnamese into this country!”

I was a little mad, and a little amused.
I thought about how satisfying it would have been to put a couple .50 caliber rounds through the suspension of his vehicle.
And I thought, “Well, I’m not really Vietnamese, but it was probably the first Asiatic nationality that he could think of.”
I wondered if maybe he lost a father or relative in the Vietnam war.
I thought, “The native Americans probably think something similar to that.”
I thought of Sherman Alexie.
Karma.
It took him an extra fifty feet of pavement and that was the best thing he could yell at me.

He’s lucky he didn’t park next to Goodcents when I came out. I was with Yuuki, so I wouldn’t have keyed KKK into his white SUV in front of her, probably. But I was seriously considering calling Gil and Dave and maybe Mike and a couple other guys from Fort Riley, and then we’d comb Aggiville for his car and when we found it we wouldn’t burn it or blow it up, but we would probably rotate it so it was parked on its roof instead of its wheels. That would make me laugh.

The sad thing isn’t that he was ignorant and inconsiderate. The sad thing was that one man, with one act, for an instant could make me hate white people. A couple hundred white friends, white parents, and for a moment I hated white people. And in reality I didn’t hate all white people. I hated all white people like him.

I thought about Luke. I wondered if he has ever faced something like that. I kind of wish he never has to, maybe I can work something out with God where I can be the only Schuellein boy who has to face down anything like that ever.

And I feel so out of place here sometimes. Like I don’t belong in America. Like my train of thought runs a different course. Like I have no attachment to the land. Any land.

It took me while to stop being angry. I haven’t dealt with anything like that for a while.

“Fuck you.”
I’m folding laundry in a laundry mat the middle of the day on Saturday. There are some exchange students from Pakistan. I like how exchange students dress. There was one who was wearing a steel blue shirt with writing wrapping around it on the left side in a different language. Their entire conversation was in a different tongue. The only English that I heard from them was a “fu” directed at some white guys dressed like Realworld extras who sat in front of the Laundry mat taunting them before they went to lunch.

Again I thought something about the Art of Gamman, enduring all with quite grace and honor. I asked Yuuki about it, she looked me in the eyes, "It makes us strong."
I never bother folding my whites.