Angela Qian was born in California and graduated from the University of Chicago. She has written for
The Millions
and
The Point
magazine, and was the recipient of the 2015 Norman Mailer College Prize for Poetry.
Since moving to a relatively rural prefecture in Japan to teach English, I've often been mistaken for or passed as a Japanese person, and perhaps this is no surprise. Though not fluent, I can sustain a basic conversation for at least a few minutes. But I'm not Japanese—my nationality is American, my ethnicity Chinese, and my feelings, when I am taken for a Japanese person, are conflicted.