Elise Hu

It was still coming out of the period in its history where it had such racial strife around busing.

It was not a very well desegregated town.

There were the remnants of that.

And it was also a place where I had a hard time finding my community.

So Boston year.

My first week in Cambridge, a car full of white boys tried to run me off the road and spit through the window, open to ask directions.

I was always asking directions and always driving,

to an Armenian market in Watertown to buy figs and string cheese, apricots, dark spices and olives from barrels, tubes of pastes with unreadable Arabic labels.

I ate stuffed grape leaves and watched my lips swell in the mirror.

The floors of my apartment would never come clean.

Whenever I saw other colored people in bookshops or museums or cafeterias, I'd gasp, smile shyly, but they'd disappear before I spoke.

What would I have said to them?

Come with me?

Take me home?

Are you my mother?

No.

No.

I sat alone in countless Chinese restaurants eating almond cookies, sipping tea with spoons and spoons of sugar.

Popcorn and coffee was dinner.

When I fainted from migraine in the grocery store, a Portuguese man above me mouthed, no breakfast.