Dear T,

Remember the story you told me about your name, how it was your grandmother’s maiden name? You were a tall, benevolent figure. Blue eyes. Skin as white as any woman from an English novel. I was twenty-four, you twenty-one. I thought you were so young, yet already you seemed to know so much more than I did.

I never shared an office with you. You always sat on the other side of the building, near all the partners. You had the perfect kind of education, one that I was familiar with, but in a different way. Private school. Princeton. You played squash. I learned from you that squash was something other than a gourd that came out of the ground.

I was lucky to be born in America. Lucky to have parents who couldn’t drive home. Lucky not to know my relatives or countries. Lucky to know people like you. Lucky to be educated here, for the opportunities granted to me. Being so lucky also meant taking in knowledge from others, the way everything accepts the moon without question.

You told me that the partners admired you because of the way your mind turned around problems. I think it was also because of your lineages, the way you walked, your beauty. The partners, all men, could tell that you had never been exiled. The way they looked at you was terrifying. I hid my envy, so eventually it stacked up in my office and the woman who came in each night to vacuum stopped coming.

Do you remember the way you looked at my necklace and asked, Is that real? knowing it couldn’t be. I don’t know, I said, knowing it wasn’t. I had bought it one night while watching QVC. Diamoniques is what the two beautiful white women called them, as if by buying this jewelry, I could be white, too, or have beautiful white all-knowing friends like them. Like you.

Well, it can’t be real, you said. I lied. I have no idea. You insisted, Well you would know if it was real. Your mother had taught you. Your grandmother had taught your mother. At that moment, I wanted a grandmother too. I wanted one to teach me how to tell if a diamond was real or not.

Later that year, you showed me how to tell if a pearl was real. You put it between your teeth, you said. If it’s grainy, it’s real. If it’s slippery, it’s fake. Mine was slippery. Fake, you smiled.

When my mother died, I pried open all her red velvet clamshell containers. I remember mother dressing up to go to parties with her Chinese friends. I remember the clamshells and the jewelry she would put on. I remember thinking that the jewelry made her look like a queen. I don’t remember when I began to think that the jewelry was gaudy. I don’t remember when I began to listen to people like you, instead of Mother.

I put all the pearls between my teeth and gnawed. Most of them slipped off my teeth. None of the diamond rings fit. And I still couldn’t tell if they were real or not. All I remember was that Mother was so anxious all the time that the entire house shook when she dreamed. My dreams are still filled with earthquakes.

All I knew was that Mother loved buying jewelry from QVC, and I remember hearing the women in the background pitch down blankets or blenders or shoes, as things piled up in her house, as she became sicker and sicker.

I also found some jade jewelry and jade animals. I’ve always avoided jade because it represented something Chinese. To assimilate meant that I rebuffed everything Chinese, especially jade, especially red.

I put a jade fish in my purse for good luck, the same fish my mother had once given me that I never took. I found a gold ring with three rubies in one of the boxes. Maybe they weren’t real rubies. Maybe the ring wasn’t really gold. Maybe it didn’t matter. Maybe there is no real anything.

I slipped the ring on my fourth finger, but it was too big. I put it on my middle finger and haven’t taken it off since. Throughout the day, I look at it often and marvel at its fakeness, that is both luminous and real.