I look a lot like my father. This was something that my mother often told me when she was trying to withdraw herself from the equation; it was, in her mind I suppose, a much nicer way of saying, “You’re not my son.” But even from an objective distance, I look a lot like my father. It just is.

Over the years, my ethnicity has repeatedly come up as a topic of interest. I’ve been told my features are ambiguous, that I seem to have several physical traits common in biracial people. If you can think of a random country in which brown-skinned folks might live, then you can play along, too: I’ve been told that I look Middle Eastern, Sicilian, Indian, Native American, and even Inuit — as if anyone I know has ever actually come face to face with an Inuit person. I’ve been mistaken for a Mexican or a Puerto Rican countless times, but mostly by well-intentioned white people who think all Hispanics are either Mexican or Puerto Rican. I was also called a “nigger” several times during the years I spent in Massapequa in the 1980s, but I’m not sure that those people actually believed I was African American as much as they simply felt that the word might sting worse than “spic.” It did, but not for the traditional reasons.

It stung because I look a lot like my father.

It’s not like I didn’t know my father. He didn’t abandon my mother when she got pregnant or pack his bags and disappear in the middle of the night. He slept in the room next door to my bedroom and drank his coffee in a robe on Saturday mornings while I watched The Smurfs. He occasionally kicked the soccer ball around with me. On Sundays, when he worked as a deli manager at the local A&P supermarket in Woodside, Queens, he let me hang out in the back and fed me with five slices of salami on a piece of wax paper whenever I got bored.

But the truth is, I didn’t see my father very often. He worked three jobs — which makes little sense to me considering how the four of us shared a two-bedroom apartment in a neighborhood that is still ridiculously cheap to live in today and we still filed for bankruptcy — so whenever he was actually physically present, there was a good chance his mind was elsewhere. I learned very early on not to bother my dad while he was in one of his fugue states. Before long, I learned to stop bothering him with anything.

The only thing I know for sure about my father is that he kept secrets from me, and one of those secrets goes to the very root of who I am and where I fit into this world. I know, for example, that my mother was born in Colombia, and that my maternal ancestry can be traced back to Spain and Portugal. I know that her father was a writer, and that her mother kept house. But on my father’s side, I can only say for sure that he was born in Chile. The lineage stops cold in Santiago.

I asked my father, more than once, about his parents — whom I’d never met — and about my paternal ancestry, but these inquiries were shrugged off as unimportant. Petty. Frivolous. Dad would tell me it’s not important where I come from, and Mom would swear that he kept this information a secret from her as well. And yet I felt as if I had a right to know, as if knowing might help me feel like a part of something even when isolation seemed like the default position. Not knowing made me feel less connected to the world, but also less connected to my father. He said it himself: It’s not important where I come from. Dad included.

One day in 2003, while I was working in the back room of a record store in Berkeley, one of my co-workers peeked his head into the office and demanded I come into the store for a moment. He didn’t tell me why; all he said was that I’d know it when I saw it. I looked around the store when I realized that there was a young man shopping for records who looked exactly like me. He looked a lot like my father. I studied him carefully as he chose his records, as he walked through the aisles. I tried to make eye contact, to see if — upon seeing me — he, too, would be dumbstruck by the resemblance. He was not.

I stood by the cash register and waited for him to check out. It was inconceivable to me that this kid was not as freaked out as I was, but he quite calmly placed his records on the counter and waited for me to ring him up. I made sure to say hello, to make small talk, to do anything I could short of screaming, “You look like my fucking twin brother!” But he didn’t register any sort of response. Finally, I asked him how he wanted to pay.

“Credit,” he said, and he handed me a card with my father’s last name.

At that second, I lost all restraint. I asked if he was Chilean, and he said yes. I asked if he had any family in New York, and he said no. I asked if it was possible that we were related because, oh, I don’t know, we look exactly the same and we have the same last name.

He gave me a once-over, his right eye cocked, and then said, “Maybe. But probably not.”

I never saw him again.

When you don’t know who you are, everyone looks different to you. These people are not strangers anymore, but possibilities. Everyone you meet becomes a potential conduit to a sense of history and heritage that you don’t have, that you may never get. It’s a void you’ll fill with other things, but it’s never quite satisfied and always quite hungry. That void is the only thing my father ever gave me, besides the way I look.