Among the most beloved of my childhood books were those written by Laura Ingalls Wilder. I read them all many times—so often that to this day, fifty years later, I still know countless phrases and passages by heart. As an adult, I have met numerous immigrants and children of immigrants who, like me, adored the Wilder books. My theory is that we saw them as providing a kind of road map to becoming American. We believed—mistakenly, as I would later learn—that if we made maple-snow candy and a nine-patch quilt and a corncob doll (and named it Susan) just as Laura had, we might, one day and somehow, be as American as she was.

Of the eight Wilder books published during her lifetime, the last four are set in De Smet, South Dakota. As a child, I would lie in bed night after night, imagining that I, too, lived in De Smet in the 1880s, and that I was Laura’s best friend.

I had to do some pretty fancy mental gymnastics to get myself to De Smet during that era. There were no Koreans in the US at the time; the first group of Koreans to immigrate here would not arrive until the early 1900s, and they would land in Hawaii, not on the continent. There were, however, thousands of Chinese immigrants, most of them on the West Coast. They had arrived in two main waves: during the Gold Rush years of the 1840s and ’50s, and to help build the transcontinental railroad in the 1860s. Census records of 1875 show a population of Chinese in Deadwood, South Dakota, about 350 miles west of De Smet.

There were certainly people in China at the time who were half-Korean. So during those nighttime imaginings, I became an Asian girl living in De Smet—a Chinese girl with some Korean blood.

The Wilder books were set in the Midwest, the very region in which I lived. The stories I invented were a pre-internet version of fan fiction. They were usually rosy romances. In Wilder’s These Happy Golden Years, Laura is courted by Almanzo. They get engaged and finally marry. Meanwhile, I was being courted by Almanzo’s handsome friend, Cap Garland.

Even at the height of my passion for those books, there were parts that I found puzzling and distressing. The character of Ma was the most problematic. Her values of propriety and obedience over everything else seemed to me both misplaced and stifling.

And Ma hated Native Americans. In several episodes throughout the series, she expresses that hatred. While I could not have articulated it at the time, I harbored a deeply personal sense of dismay over Ma’s attitude. Ultimately it meant that she would never have allowed Laura to become friends with someone like me. Someone with black hair and dark eyes and tan skin. Someone who wasn’t white.