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.
“What’s it called, baby?”
That summer, the cicadas screamed like they were dying of love. Honey and her two best friends—Jade, whose father was Nigerian and mother was Korean, and Marisol, a Dominican girl who’d been adopted by a Black family so deep in the Valley her Spanish came out with a Tidewater drawl—formed a pact. They called themselves the BlackValleyGirls . Not a club. A declaration. -BlackValleyGirls- Honey Gold - Blasians Like I...
Every August, the Black Valley threw a block party called the Gold Rush. Fried fish, spades tournaments, and a makeshift stage where anyone could perform. That year, Honey decided she would sing. Not a cover—an original. A song about being too much and not enough, about having two bloodlines and nowhere to plant a flag.
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 Later, as the fireworks cracked green and gold
They spent their days driving with the windows down, blasting a mix of Missy Elliott and Trinh Cong Son, eating pho from styrofoam bowls while dancing to Afrobeats. They were a collision of cultures that shouldn’t have worked but did—like honey and chili, sweet and heat.
Honey Gold was the queen of them.
“ Blasians Like I .”
The boys in the Valley called her “exotic.” She hated that word. It felt like a cage made of compliments. Honey and her two best friends—Jade, whose father
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.