I watch a couple more. My favorites are the cultural ones, because they have the strange feeling of being instruction manuals on becoming whatever ethnicity the person in the video is. One of my favorites has over six million views and combines the what-I-eat genres of “in a week,” “Japanese food,” “realistic,” “teen,” and “ASMR.” I watch an entire twenty-five minutes of a girl in Tokyo with dyed wine-red-fading-into-pink hair eating sausages, toast, a Japanese corn dog made with hotcake mix dipped in ketchup, demae hot sesame ramen with an egg plopped in, pizza, stir-fried udon, seaweed salad and barley rice, tapioca and black tea ice cream, soy-glazed salmon on okayu, pearl milk bubble tea. Each time she eats, the microphone hones in on the sounds of her eating—slurping, chewing, crunching. When she drinks her bubble tea, there’s a loud pop as the straw goes through the lid, and the sound of gulping. Gulp, gulp, gulp. I realize that I’m gulping along to the video, imagining that the bubble tea is blood. I click on the creator’s name and watch some of her other videos.

I often wonder what kind of food I would like if I were fully human. Would I purposefully eat Japanese food, to strengthen that part of my identity—my Japanese ethnicity passed down from my dad—or would I reject Japanese food and fill myself with as much British food as possible: vegetables and roots grown in British soil, fish caught in British seas, meat from animals kept in British fields, in British landscapes—hills covered in wildflowers and heather, slate mountains, flat yellow and green fields, little farmhouses, people in Hunter Wellington boots, with several dogs on leads they hold in a bunch, white cliffs in the background? I didn’t like looking different, growing up where I grew up. I was mocked for my appearance, which was so in between so many places that a roster of names followed me around the playground, names given to people from all over the world: nip, jap, chink, eskimo, paki, monkey, dog-eater, whale-killer. But then, there was also the silver tinge to my skin, behind the light brown, or maybe just on top of it but translucent; it makes my skin look like it has been sculpted from terra-cotta, and brushed with a clear glaze with a hint of gray in it.