Jennifer Perrine War Bride White men always want her to be a war bride. They want my father to have carried her home from Nam like a photo of a pin-up girl, creased and stained, but still pretty in that voiceless way. They want my mother to speak broken English when she speaks at all, to stumble over her letters and transpose her idioms and look confused when they laugh at her speech. They want her to shuffle her walk and wear her hair in one long, raven braid the length of her spine, like a twisting rope for my father to pull when she tries to run. But the truth is, my mother was born in northern California, met my father in a textile plant in New Jersey. Truth is, I am a second generation Chinese-American, which makes me a second generation war bride, a native of atomic power and evasive maneuvers. It means I learned early how to scream like a pinned-down girl, how to break language before it could break me, how to transpose the words that would keep me laughing and confused. It means I wear my hair shorn like a monk or a warrior, so I cannot be caught, and I twist my spine into one long stride to walk farther and farther from the wedding of whiteness, from the men who would make me their bride.