The Woman from Every Country

Absurd Geometry Field Notes No. 56

My brother took me out for ice cream at Handel’s, which should have been a simple event. We were standing there trying to compromise on flavors while still pretending to care about our figures when a woman interrupted us in visible distress.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “but I just have to ask. Are you part East Asian?”

My brother said no and told her where we were from.

This did not resolve the matter.

She had been studying his hands, which, she informed us, were exactly like her son’s hands. Her son, she explained, was half East Asian. Not similar hands. Not vaguely familiar hands. Exact hands. She kept staring at them with the kind of fascination usually reserved for religious relics or forensic evidence. At one point I almost wanted to ask if she happened to have a photo of her son’s hands for comparison.

Then she looked at me and announced, with equal certainty, that we were definitely mixed.

In fairness, she was not entirely wrong. We are mixed. We come from a long, complicated recipe. But I still did not expect my brother’s hands to become the central issue while ordering ice cream.

By the time we walked out, my brother had reached his usual conclusion.

“Every time I go out with you,” he said, “something weird happens.”

This is unfair. I do not attract weirdos. I merely seem to trigger unresolved recognition episodes in the general public.

But it did not start at Handel’s.

It started much earlier, back in the homeland, when I went to the mall with my cousin, my grandmother, and my little brother. At some point I began to notice a disturbance nearby. A group of people had formed at a cautious distance and appeared to be debating my identity.

“Is it her?” someone asked.

“She looks younger,” another replied.

“No,” a third voice insisted. “I think it’s her.”

They had apparently decided I was a famous actress from a telenovela. No one approached with enough confidence to fully commit, but no one was willing to let it go either. They followed me around the mall in a state of anxious consensus. That was the first time I realized my face did not always belong exclusively to me.

The pattern continued.

An elderly Armenian couple once approached me and began speaking Armenian with such conviction that I briefly wondered whether I had somehow forgotten an entire branch of my ancestry. When I apologized and explained that I did not speak Armenian, they did not react with surprise. They reacted with disappointment.

Then suspicion.

Then offense.

I explained again that I was not Armenian. This only made things worse. They looked at me as if I were not ignorant, but disloyal. I was then given what I can only describe as the Armenian evil eye, followed by a sentence in Armenian that may have been a curse, a reprimand, or a genealogical correction. I could not tell. What I understood very clearly was that they were not happy with me.

Then there were the two older men at a bar who approached me with the excitement of people who believed they had just witnessed a minor resurrection. One of them insisted I looked exactly like a rock star’s ex-wife. His friend confirmed it immediately. They were both so thrilled that I briefly felt I owed them an autograph. I did not know the woman at all, so I could not defend myself. so I simply accepted that, for a few minutes, I had apparently become someone’s nostalgic return to youth.

This sort of thing happens more often than it should.

A Pakistani man once told me I looked exactly like the women from a certain village in his country, specifically the light-skinned ones from a particular area. He said this with such certainty that I did not even bother resisting. I just told him I had heard versions of that before, because I had. Different people from different countries have confidently informed me that I look exactly like women from places I have never been.

In California, people have approached me out of nowhere to ask whether I am Russian, Armenian, or from some place they have already decided I belong to. One Russian person told me I actually looked like I was from Kazakhstan.

Years later, my DNA results informed me that the elderly Armenians had not been entirely improvising. Armenian ancestry appeared on the screen, and I briefly felt as though I owed two strangers an apology and Maury an envelope reveal.

Apparently, my face changes jurisdiction depending on sleep, lighting, and how much sun I’ve had.

At this point, I have been recognized by people from multiple countries, several generations, at least one telenovela panic event, and a woman conducting ethnographic analysis on my brother’s hands in an ice cream shop. I’ve concluded that I’m a geographic shapeshifter.

I only hope I never end up in a lineup, because I am fairly certain someone will point at me with absolute confidence and say it was me.