The salon sat at the bottom floor of the developing world’s version of a gated community— a five star hotel. The hotel was precariously perched, hosting an army of foreigners working on war, while staying in business under a regime denying war crimes. As a Tamil-Sri-Lankan-American I am neither entirely foreign, nor comfortably local.

It started before a friend told me that he wanted to date white women and before another friend told me “fuck white people.” It started before two 14-year-old girls on their way to a birthday party were crushed to death on the Yangju Highway, before George Bush put North Korea on the Axis of Evil, and even before either of my parents was born.

I am in the kitchen of the house I grew up in, holding a head of cabbage stable on the cutting board with both hands, while my mother thrusts a cleaver into it, slicing it in half. The leaves are densely packed in a squiggle of translucent white and green. She hands the knife to me, instructing me to cut the cabbage into thin shreds. When my slices are too coarse, she thwaps the back of my hand with a wet soup spoon and tells me to cut them finer.