****

In November of 1989, I was nearly six years old when my grandmother sewed my identification documents to the inside of my shirt and took me to the Beijing airport. I crossed the world with the rubbing itch of hastily tied-off threads against my skin and no one to talk to for thousands of miles and on the other side, I managed to recognize both my luggage and my parents. They had left China years before, while their university had me as a sort of bureaucratic hostage, collateral for their return, though my parents had no such intentions. Our reunion took over three years and exactly $764 (American), including tax, a fancy camera secretly gifted to the right friend-turned-governmentfunctionary, a stamp-forger-turned-liberator. My life even now feels so clearly defined by that furtive transplantation one place to another, the bisection into before and after what was at once success and loss, discovery and displacement.

And in the weeks following, as if anticipating my arrival, footage of the Berlin Wall being pulled apart seemed to play in a loop on every network station, the world coming together again and again between spikes of static and weather disruption, people spilling over, reaching out in miraculous recognition of the faces worn away to unfamiliarity by the passage of years. Raised as I was to see all coincidence through the lens of destiny and superstition, it seems prophetic to me now that the news footage showed an endless cycle of reunion and celebration, but not the view after the flush of victory had faded. What did the world look like when your physical geography no longer bore the markers of your history?

In those first long rudderless years within an aggressively unfamiliar landscape -- the squat sprawl of apartment complexes and strip malls and other structures of uniformity -- I was raised by secret agents. Though finally in the same country, I still saw relatively little of my parents -- dishwashers and pizza deliverers with graduate degrees,
consistent volunteers for double-shifts. With no one around to enforce bedtimes, the TV had become confidant and oracle, a late-evening companion during the long, wintery nights in rural Idaho. Knees clutched underneath my chin, I watched 60s reruns full of covert operatives on missions to save the world from disorder, comforted by the repeated inevitability of favorable outcomes. I cared less that these spies were saving the world than that, however impossible the situation, they could always save themselves.

Rewatching those episodes now, they are fraught with the almost too-obvious appeals to racism and misogyny, a boys club of government agents fighting the good fight against the unarticulated threats of foreign bodies. In one episode, Maxwell saves some obscure european royalty from the aimless, but nevertheless dastardly, clutches of the Asian arm of KAOS. America neutralizes the attacked upon the western (monarchial, colonial) tradition, reified in the form of a swooning blonde princess, preserving the world against uncanny reversals of power and the spiteful malevolence of the east.

But Maxwell's advantage was not in his ability, his comic incompetence, but the very nature of his work. Episodes began with briefings, the transfer of information that left him, however inept, knowing more about his opponents than they knew of him. Spies appeared to me to live a thrilling carnival of carefully mistaken identity, wherein information acquired, remembered, withheld, became the central ingredient in the conversion of secrecy into strength. It seemed a landless utopia of well-pressed tuxedoes and other uniforms of distinguished anonymity that existed in any place they
went, however alien. Mastery was just a matter of careful observation. So the logic of my unlikely alliance was simple: my home was something likewise unruly, threatening in its foreignness, and the fantasy of being a spy had everything to do with knowing more, knowing better. Everyday I pushed further and further into neighboring sections of the town, memorizing street patterns and license plates and faces and behaviors: reconnaissance. Information seemed the best method by which to wield difference as power.

*****

My great uncle was a spy. Before fleeing to Taipei with the rest of Chiang Kai Shek's forces, he left my grandfather his military-issue binoculars, a dangerous artifact that, if discovered, might have meant any number of unimaginable penalties. But even as he burned all other counter-revolutionary trokens -- books, diaries, photographs -- my
grandfather kept those binoculars carefully hidden through the whole of the Cultural Revolution and for decades after, until his death just a few years ago.

It's hard to say whether he had meant to leave them hidden for so long, whether he left them secreted away out of habit, or of shame for compromising the safety of the family he still had for a tangible relic of the one he lost. Or if he has simply forgotten where he had left them, so thorough was his secrecy.

As I got older, the pressures of fitting in drew me further and further into narratives of captivity and subterfuge, political and literal sleights of hand. I had always been resilient, adaptable, and spies in the popular imagination and within my own history became kindred spirits and strategic advisors, offering me a way around the oppositional positioning of assimilated versus resistant, a framework where fitting didn't necessarily mean selling out. Armed with an metaphor of assimilation as espionage, I found a back door out of a system in which I was apparently so weak-willed that I wouldn't be able to tell the difference between my clothes and my history.

In fourth grade, a classmate explained to me patiently, "You could never be president because there's no way we can know for sure you aren't really a spy," and I thought, fiercely, I must be doing something right.

Alias aired when I was in high school, and by then my adaptability had shifted from a desire to emulate and master my surroundings to a refusal of the assumptions that went along with being read as "Asian." Like my grandfather, I had recognized the dangers of letting others define you by what they thought your heritage meant, and understood that keeping your origins to yourself and meant keeping them for yourself, out of the hands of those who would use them against you.

On TV, Sydney Bristow embodied a vision of individual agency, and the pleasure of watching people underestimate her was a simple, if not necessarily simplistic, feminist revenge fantasy. She fulfilled the dream that we've all had every we've been not so accidentally groped in a crowded room or had to walk home with our keys clenched between our knuckles: that we can overcome the long histories of violence and trauma and social logics that systematically privilege some people over others through personal strength, through the fail-proof combination of karate-chop and witty retort.
She was also a double agent.

As such, she became too the fantasy of a preservable sense of self, despite the demands of duty and survival. Her costumes were usually so flamboyantly unconvincing that you couldn't help but recognize them for what they were, wigs and sequins and trappings that somehow only manage to articulate the fact that she was still something undeniably, essentially Sydney underneath. And even in her ambivalence over her betrayal of her manipulated SD-6 colleagues, she never lost her brash devotion to a cause.

Through her, blending in, passing, became not a denial of history but a tactical and superficial obscuring of difference to meet your desired ends. It was an image in which Otherness, especially hidden, was not only still meaningful, but a source of incredible power, a knowledge of the motivating mechanisms of a world in crisis and a glock strapped to your thigh.

The problem, of course, is this: I am no Sydney Bristow, and I've had more than one person tell me, delighted, that I am "practically white."

The allegory of racial assimilation as espionage a nice fantasy, a neat justification, but it falls apart at the realization that unlike Sydney, unlike Maxwell Smart, my battle is not one for order, but representation. I have neither the conviction nor the comfortable naïveté to stumble through the treacherous negotiations of racial identity, safe in the
knowledge that the sacrifices will always be justifiable and the outcomes always favorable. In the struggle for visibility on my own terms, at what point is my "cunning" disappearance of opposition and difference just another disappearance? At the end of the day, does it matter if my camouflage is so convincing that it's always read as assimilation, if "practically" means "strategically" to me, but "nearly" to everyone else?

Even more troubling: the last time I was in China, I spoke with an accent, unable to spit out the slurring tightness of all my years away. How long before passing becomes being, before your secrecy becomes so thorough that you forget where you hid your history for safe keeping?

****

If I am honest with myself, I never quite outgrew the spy fantasies. Sometimes, I still imagine that I'm a sleeper agent, that any day now I'll wake up knowing 13 languages and as many ways to kill a man using a hair clip and remember, finally, who I was supposed to be all along.

Because in the end, all of this conflicted, contested, treacherous allegory of identity politics as espionage is fundamentally the enactment of wishful thinking: the fantasy that beneath all of this is something more than the sum of what I've forgotten, that I might one day be able to reassemble from the relics of memory and history, from the trajectories of departure and return, seeking and displacement, an understanding of what I have become. That somewhere in this mess, I have an exit strategy.

Xiaochang Li completed a BA at New York University in 2006, where she wrote an undergraduate thesis on narrative structure in Proust's In Search of Lost Time while also exploring various aspects of media production through internships in film production, publishing, and web design and advertising. She then spent the interim year in Germany on fellowship through the Congress-Bundestag Youth Exchange, where she spent her time working with independent film production firms in Berlin and Saarbrücken and going 220km per hour on the autobahn.

Her current research interests include the emergence of narrative forms in the digital landscape that shift our understanding of, and interaction with, the structure of texts and the relationships of gender and sexual performativity between Eastern and Western media through the lens of fan-generated content. In the future, she hopes to see Roland Barthes resurrected from the dead to author a book about YouTube that consists entirely of a series of semi-related Cat Macros.