Yellow Woman

My first Halloween in America:

Standing in front of the Halloween costume wall

Princess dresses hanging like shiny promises

I point excitedly up at Belle

Absolutely not, my mother says

Yellow looks bad on our yellow skin

Asians shouldn’t wear yellow.

A period of high school angst:

Summers, my skin turns a dark mustard

Unlike my friends who are golden-bronze

Paranoid—is that a yellow sheen radiating from my skin?

Blasting Yellow, by Coldplay

Isn’t yellow an undesirable color?

Feeling a secret joy from the song’s name.

After the Atlanta shooting:

Feeling lost, I search for answers in Ornamentalism

We say Black women, brown women, white women, but not yellow women, Anne Cheng writes

Realizing: I want to reclaim the color yellow.

We are yellow women.

I am a yellow woman.

I am a yellow woman.