-blackvalleygirls- Honey Gold - Blasians Like I... Here

My mama’s rice field, my daddy’s blues They ask me to choose, I refuse to lose Black in the front, Asian in the back They see a puzzle, I see a fact

She thought of her father’s stories of Mississippi, of her mother’s escape from Saigon. She thought of how neither of those places would claim her fully—and how she didn’t need them to. The Black Valley was a patchwork. And she, Honey Gold, was the thread that held it together.

Blasians like I—we don’t say goodbye We take both worlds and we multiply -BlackValleyGirls- Honey Gold - Blasians Like I...

But being just anything was impossible when you were Blasian in the Black Valley. The older women would cup her face and say, “Pretty, but she got that look—not quite ours.” The Vietnamese aunties at the nail salon would whisper in rapid-fire Cantonese: Too tall, too loud, too Black. Honey learned early that belonging was a language she’d have to invent herself.

She got the name from her grandmother, who took one look at her newborn skin—“like honey left in the sun, rich and slow”—and the thin gold chain that appeared around her neck the day she was born, as if the universe had already clasped it there. By sixteen, Honey had grown into the name. She was tall, with her Vietnamese mother’s sharp cheekbones and her Black father’s fierce, lioness eyes. Her hair was a crown of dark curls that she sometimes straightened, sometimes left wild, but never apologized for. My mama’s rice field, my daddy’s blues They

Later, as the fireworks cracked green and gold over the creek, Honey sat alone for a moment. The gold chain at her neck felt warm, like it remembered being placed there by unseen hands.

She smiled, pulled out her phone, and typed a caption for the video Jade had posted: And she, Honey Gold, was the thread that held it together

Honey looked down at her brown-gold hands, the chain glinting at her throat.