I removed the lid of the sooty eyeliner pencil and procrastinated the deed by studying the round tip of the contraption, it had a plastic coating so it saved me from having to sharpen it. I remembered experimenting with a sample Clinique mascara before, but it was my first time drawing a pencil on my eye. For a 22-year-old female in America, my predicament had to be atypical, but as I kept a firm hand and pressed the pencil to the corner of my left eyelid, I thought about my conflicted relationship with the shape of my eyes. While growing up in China, I was always told by relatives and teachers that my eyes were large and round (Almost as big as westerners!) but once my parents and I immigrated to Portugal, the shift of how others perceived the facial feature changed my self-image; on my first day of school, accompanied by my father, dozens of chestnut-haired children swarmed around us at the entrance to the playground and gestured me the sign that would annoy and later dull me; they placed the tip of their fingers to the end corners of their eyes and stretched them like a rubber band. Fifteen years later, I stood in front of the mirror of my apartment bathroom, making up my eyes to attend a networking event in Los Angeles for aspiring entertainment industry professionals of Asian descent. It was my second time and since I went to the first clear-faced, was ignored by most members, I wanted to fit in the following time. Recalling that all other women were made-up, I speculated that I had to mimic them.

That wasn't the first incident that I culturally clashed with Asian-Americans. Ironically, most of the times I feel an unfair point of privilege compared to you. From my 12 years living in Lisbon and having acquired a flawless Portuguese, I remember the frustration of my daily contact with the locals who saw me as a perpetual foreigner. I knew that they meant well whenever they gasped and gulped after hearing me speak Portuguese with the alfacinha accent, but it often vexed me that they would look at me and treat me like a foreigner (I did live there almost two-thirds of my life). I assume that most Asian-Americans have a similar experience (the ethnic slur Ching Chong does have a exotic feel). Since I came to America for college and graduate school, I realize that with my encounters with an American of non-Asian background, their opinion of me is correct, I am a foreigner in the United States. Having only lived in America for a few years, I fit into their notions of Asians being perpetual foreigners in this land.

Despite this affinity, in my freshman year in college, I sensed a hostility from Asian-American students. Since my Chinese was insufficient to join the group for students coming from my country of birth, I planned to sign-up for the group open to Asian-Americans, only to be told by the upperclassman behind the table with the nylon banner that I didn't fit the characteristics of a member. Now that I think of it, maybe I fitted the stereotype that some American-born Asians have of F.O.B. folks. My English, taught by teachers from Australia, Canada, Scotland and England, must have sounded odd to that Syracuse University student. My stripped sweater full of lint must have made him wonder if I came from a country where lint rollers were a curio. But perhaps what really gave away my just new to the Land-of-the-Free status were my unmade-up eyes.

What I said about the contrast may seem like the clash was one-sided, but I had my share of complaints about Asian-Americans. Having grown up being inculcated that my family's residence in Europe was temporary, that eventually we would return to China and start a school to teach the locals about our experiences, I never believed that interracial relationships were an option. It was an anomaly in Portugal for a Chinese young person to date, Buddha forbid marry, a foreigner. To my surprise, most Asian-American females I saw on Syracuse campus dated "foreigners;" when I went to UCLA for summer school, my Korean-American roommate had a pustulate-faced sandy-haired boyfriend. Although in Portugal I communicated with non-Chinese people in school and my parents' retail clothing store on daily basis, the interactions with these laowai were limited to the public sphere. While describing his childhood, Mexican-American writer Richard Rodriguez expressed a similar experience. For Rodriguez, his family belonged to his private sphere but the English-speaking acquaintances to the public. In my case, interactions with Portuguese were always public; in my house, my parents would only invite fellow Chinese immigrants (maybe with the exception of Portuguese men working for the telecom-water-power company who came to the house to read our counters). So, seeing Asian-American women of my age being affectionate with foreigners, inviting them to our dorm room, were, dysphemistically speaking, a penetration into my private space. In the cases of Asian-American men with foreign females, I felt an almost irrational irritation and chip off my self-esteem. Do they think we're not good enough?

Related to this sense of invasion was my perception of some Asian-American women's, I will call them, aesthetic choices. Seeing their hair dyed in colors ranging from platinum blond to fiery red made me wonder whether or not their decision implied that they thought our ebony hair was inadequate. Like sharing the private sphere with a foreigner, I felt unsettled when I saw their dyed hair; almost as if the coloring were aberrant. The way I perceived the use of eye-liners and mascara stemmed from the same logic, it was almost as if Asian-American women were ashamed of the shape of your eyes and were taking measures to correct them. (I stopped feeling this way the day I noticed that even Americans of other ethnicities put on eye cosmetics, but to this day, I still have, in the words of my hairstylist, "virgin hair.")

As you may have noticed, I have avoided calling Portuguese and Americans of European descent white people. Not only is the expression absent in the Lusitania vernacular (in fact, it is an epithet to call a person of African descent preto, black) but as a writer I see a semantic error calling European-Americans white. Admittedly one word can take multiple meanings and most people know that "white people" really have skin which can be bronze, buff, camel, copper, fawn, pink, tan, wheat; but in my opinion, calling "white people" European-Americans (Euro-Americans if you find it less cumbersome) could minimize the issue of Asian-Americans being perceived as eternal foreigners. Critics of this term may argue that it is too inaccurate for it excludes the most recent transplants from Europe to America, but since these transplants also call themselves "white," I disagree that the term Euro(pean)-Americans could make it more difficult for these people.

Maybe the reason why Americans perceive people as of being different colors is the culture's paradigm that individuals should be grouped according to their races. I know I have a bias for prioritizing individuals' place of origin because, for my last five years in Portugal, I went to an international school. You may have heard about them. At St. Dominic's International School we followed an academic program devised in the U.K. and I had teachers and classmates coming from over 50 countries. There, we recognized the students' native country before their skin color, a recognition culminating the campuswide United Nations Day festivities. Each student came in costumed after their nationality, translating into a mélange of prismatic fabrics and textured rainbows; everything ranging from crimson saris to lemon yellow-forest green Brazilian soccer jerseys. My international school background came in handy during my undergraduate years, when, excluded from Chinese and Asian-American student groups, I befriended international students coming from Latin America, South Asia and Africa.

I didn't fully comprehend the differences between my immigrant experience and of Asian-Americans until I took a literature class during the second year in graduate school. Reading the works of second-, third-, fourth-generation Asian-Americans like Karen Tei Yamashita, Russell C. Leong, Don Lee and Frank Chin, I realized that what I thought were inherent differences between Americans and Europeans of Asian descent were more simple; the cultural differences could be due to how long and how much historical memory Asian-Americans have of their ancestors in the U.S. The quarter I took the course at UCLA, I was fortunate to have been present when Yamashita and Leong talked to us. Yamashita's enthusiasm for her new book I Hotel (which post-modernly chronicles the Asian-American civil rights movement in San Francisco Chinatown) made me aware that, for multi-generational Asian-Americans, a sense of history exists in this country that the diaspora of more first- and second-generation Asians in Portugal do not share. For Asian-Americans, the Transcontinental Railroad and Japanese-American internment are events in their collective consciousness. When my parents recall their childhood and youth, what they remember is intertwined with their families, friends and the historical events in China. During Leong's visit, I found it memorable what he said about the craft of writing, but also when he accounted his experience as an American-born Chinese from San Francisco Chinatown clashing with the Chinese coming to America from elsewhere. Both accounts suggest that the main difference between the culture are the past experiences. Possibly, in the Portugal of a few dozen years from now individuals of Asian descent will have a bigger presence and they will be more conscious of their aesthetic choices; more willing to share their private sphere with locals.

My attempts to putting on the mascara were less laborious and, as expected, I fit in more successfully among the members. One of the organizers of the event, who barely talked to me last time, approached me and introduced herself again. I noticed that she felt more comfortable this time. I only congratulated the effectiveness of my attempts to fit in when another member from the organization asked if I were from Los Angeles. And I surprised him by saying that I came from that small country in Southwest Europe right next to Spain; more exactly, the capital Lisbon which I have been told has several landmarks reminiscent of San Francisco.