Two strange things happened when my mixed-race family went to Hawaii: 1) my dad was mistaken for a local and 2) someone assumed I was related to my mom.

To clarify, my dad is not from Hawaii. His sandals were completely sandless when we landed on the tiny island of Kauai. He is a Chinese man who has been living on the East Coast for nearly four decades. There’s nothing “hang loose” about his sedentary work life and newfound need for reading glasses.

As for the second strange thing, no one ever thinks my red-haired mother is biologically related to me. Look at me: I’ve got dark shiny hair and my Chinese father’s face. At least for mainland Americans, whose default is white, a lot of people don’t initially understand I’m related to my mom. When I was little, many thought I was adopted. When I was a teenager, many thought I was the kid of some Asian friend.

So, when these two things happened in Hawaii, I was a bit taken aback. Honestly, the moment I got off the plane, I felt like I’d flown into Neverland. There were so many people who looked like me. (Well, if I had a tan.) Around 25% of Hawaii residents are mixed-race–and on top of that, one of the most common combinations is white and Asian. I was shocked. I’d spent my whole life in a place where only 2.4% of the population is mixed-race. I never expected anyone to look like me or have a family that looked like mine.

I didn’t realize this at the time, but this was all about the power of familiarity. It was all about feeling, for the first time in my life, like I could be a part of the in-group based on how I looked. It was about feeling for the first time like my dad belonged with the people around him more than my mom did. He was the one, with his tan skin and sun spots, who looked like the right color.

It’s not a secret that mainland Americans are obsessed with the matching game that is guessing strangers’ ethnicities and cultures based on how they look. The list of guesses I’ve gotten grows all the time. From Latina to Japanese to even that one time someone in Boston thought I was Hawaiian, racial and cultural assumptions affect every interaction I have. It’s all based on how I look to other people. Have we ever stopped to think that how we look is entirely incidental to who we are? Sure, sometimes people appear to embody images that many may associate with other cultures, but this impression relies on the false belief that race, culture, and phenotype are all one and the same. This is simply not the case. To assume this is to minimize the complexity of the human experience; it wrongly pretends to understand and predict the various interminglings of biology and society.

My dad’s culture isn’t Hawaiian, but that didn’t stop a newspaper reporter from assuming he was a resident and interviewing him as one at a local farmer’s market. My dad simply looked the part of a local Asian man in a worn aloha shirt shopping for groceries. And so, he was accepted as one.

My culture isn’t Hawaiian either, but it is evidently much more common in Hawaii for a white parent to have an Asian looking child than it is in the continental States. My mom and I were a familiar pairing. The store woman treated us as the mother and daughter that we are because of how familiar we looked to her. She understood us–not because we had a shared culture, but because we looked like what she was used to.

Basing our acceptance and understanding of each other on how we look is damaging and potentially misleading. Not only can we be easily fooled, like that newspaper reporter who ended up writing partially fake news about my dad’s residence, but we may also end up sabotaging our understanding of others based on shallow physical features. The flip side of my mom and me finally being recognized as what we are is that for the rest of my life it’s been the opposite. My mom deliberately refers to me in public as her daughter so storekeepers and others recognize our relationship.

How can humankind ever get to the point where everyone extends a genuine social acceptance regardless of phenotype? The thing is, this ideal is what it is–a happy intention too lost in the conceptual to amount to any real action. Even when we do try to act on our convictions, superficial assumptions are so ingrained in how we see ourselves and the world that our efforts may seem fruitless. We may even feel powerless.

However, some things are in our power. We do have the power to ask ourselves, “Do I really understand this other person?” Even more, we have the power to choose to include someone, to go out and understand someone, and make person after person in this universe feel known. It is in these actions–minute though they may be–that real change occurs. So, go out and act.

I know Hawaii has many of its own struggles with race and culture and stereotypes, yet I am thankful to say it affirmed what my own family has taught me: not all unfamiliar things are strange, and people don’t have to look alike for us to like them anyway. They don’t even have to look alike to be family.