She tells me that Asians have it really bad—the worst—in her opinion. I can’t tell if she is saying this to pander to me for the suffering she thinks I may have experienced in high school as her friend, unbeknownst to her, and that I may still experience today, or if she really believes what she’s saying. Whatever it is, I tell her she is wrong. Or, it’s more complicated than that. First of all, there are differences between the experiences of East Asians and Southeast Asians and South Asians. As for me, East Asians have it pretty good. Being light-skinned. The model minority myth. Though used as a tool against other races, it just goes to show how East Asians have privileges. Etc., etc.

But, she says, her family in Ohio really, really dislike Asian people. Like the time she took her cousins to San Francisco’s Chinatown, they wouldn’t shut up about how disgusted they were by it all—the people, the food, the smells, the cheap trinkets—isn’t that really terrible?

I say yeah, that’s racist. Your cousins sound racist.

She nods enthusiastically. She hates her cousins. She says they’re terrible people.

But, I say, the Chinese in America don’t typically face police brutality. And we have high rates of college attendance, low rates of incarceration, no history of enslavement.

But, she says, she’s never really seen firsthand as bad of racism as how her cousins behaved toward Asians in Chinatown.

It feels like we are doing a sort of dance, the steps for which I cannot and do not want to master, so I end it by retreating to the conversations I know how to have, and am left with a nagging sense of having failed at something.