Summeralities: Hyphenated Me

We used to go to Lilly’s, a Chinese take-out place down the street, after school. It was 7th grade and I was going through the pre-adolescent turbulence of puberty, low self-esteem, and social confusion. My hair was cut short at the time—straight, black, with bangs in a style that I thought of as decidedly Asian. After taking my order the woman behind the counter looked at me and asked, “Are you Chinese?”

“Um. Yeah. Half.”

“I can tell,” she said. “It’s a beautiful mix.”

I shuffled awkwardly, suddenly desperate to be out. I retrieved my fried won tons and hot and sour soup. I scuttled out, muttering “Thanks.” I didn’t believe her.

When I was a child and people used to ask what race I was, I would say, “Half-chinese, half-Jewish,” and then sometimes I would clarify, “But I don’t really have much of a connection to my Chinese side.” Later, after a few years of Hebrew school, when I had learned the difference between a race and a religion and decided that Judaism was a religion, it changed. “I’m half-Chinese,” I’d say, “and half white.”

It’s strange, forgetting which things are important. For nearly a decade, race has been unimportant to me, personally. I try to be a good ally to oppressed groups when issues of racism arise, but I spend very little time considering my own racial identity. It’s a non-issue in my life.

A few weeks ago, a Facebook friend shared this article about growing up in the U.S. as a Korean-American immigrant. I was surprised to discover that many parts of the article resonated with my own experience. I’m not an immigrant, but I know what it’s like to grow up Asian in a white-oriented culture. When I reached this part, I had to pause:

Nobody I knew had ever articulated what being an Asian American really was. Having an accent was a failure. Not speaking their parents’ language was not. Having no white friends was a failure. Having no Asian friends was not. Having a white partner was a success. Having black and brown partners was not. Many Asian American kids ate kimchi at home, loved ramen noodles, had Asian parents, and had exposure to Asian culture and language. Yet, they hid and distanced themselves from Asianness. They tweaked their last names on Facebook to sound white and separated themselves from Asian kids from Asia saying “I’m from New Jersey,” “I’m from North Carolina,” and “I’m just American.”

And I remembered, suddenly, a time that I had forgotten,—a time when I felt Chinese and wanted to be white. I would never have expressed it out loud at the time, but it seems obvious in retrospect. I remembered that race used to be an important—and unpleasant—facet of my life. I remembered middle school when I felt unpopular and unhappy. I remembered my Chinese mother’s constant admonition that I should, “be a Good Chinese Boy¹” and my constant resistance.

I remembered freshman year of high school when I wrote a poem about the fear that no one would ever find me attractive (actual line from the poem: “But who thinks of an asian guy as hot?”).² It’s easy to see how silly and wrongheaded my thinking was then, but the fact was that all of my models for young male attractiveness were the white protagonists in the T.V. shows³ I watched. Boy Meets World, 7th Heaven, Everwood, Smallville. And even though I took pride in the fact that Smallville’s beautiful Lana Lang was played by Kristen Kreuk, a hapa⁴ like me, I knew that Clark Kent (played by Tom Welling) was white. I wanted to be attractive like the boys in these shows and I despaired that I couldn’t. It’s easy for me to mock myself in retrospect (“Ah, yes, the worst form of oppression: not being able to find a girlfriend.”) but doing so trivializes the depth of angst this fear of being unloved caused me at a vulnerable time in my life.⁵

The next time someone tries to claim that media representation doesn’t matter, that we shouldn’t be worried about our film, television, video game, children’s book protagonists, about the kids we see in commercials and magazines as models of attractiveness—the next time someone insists that it shouldn’t matter that all of these are overwhelmingly white⁶… Just remember that it mattered for me. It mattered, because I wanted to be white.

And then—miraculously—I guess I succeeded.

When high school rolled around, I drifted away from my crowd of Asian friends to a crowd of almost entirely white friends. I dated white girls. I had friends call me white, in earnest, without batting an eye. (And without batting an eye myself in response.) Just this year, my own mother called me, quite casually, white in an email—not as an insult or a joke, but because that is genuinely how she sees me. I did all of this without ever noticing it was happening, without even thinking about it. With the exception of the occasional moment when someone asked me, “What are you?” or someone made a comment about me as Asian, I altogether stopped thinking about race.

My high school Ethnic Studies teacher once told us that being white meant not having to think about race constantly, on a daily basis. By that criterion, for almost ten years of my life, I have been white.

“Someone was asking about going clubbing with you,” my friend said to me, just a couple years ago. “He wanted to know if you could dance, or if you you’re white.”

“What did you tell him?”

“I said that you’re white.”

It’s complicated growing up Asian-American. The vectors of oppression that operate on us are different from those that operate on the groups that are commonly meant when using words like “ethnic minorities” or “people of color.” We’re pushed to be white and we learn to think of ourselves as white. Janani Balasubramanian at Black Girl Dangerous describes this incident at an anti-oppression camp:

When we began a particular fishbowl activity where we divided into ‘people of color’ and ‘White people’, the three Asian kids, including me, joined the White folks’ group. This sounds ridiculous now, but it was what made sense at the time. Most of the camp attendees were from St. Louis, which has stark Black/White segregation. Missouri was a slave state, and St. Louis’s urban/suburban race and class structuring still hugely reflects that history. My understanding of racial privilege and oppression was shaped exactly by the immense antiblackness in my communities. When the discussion on racism began, however, all of us Asian kids broke down and cried. It was clear to us that we didn’t have White privilege, but ‘people of color’ didn’t fit either when the only other context we had for it was a group of our Black peers using it as a solidarity term.

The funny thing about being Asian and the funny thing about being half-white is that it never really makes you white. White is the default, the pure slate that culture teaches us all identities originate from. Sooner or later you find yourself defined by whatever else you are. Barack Obama, after all, is the U.S.’s first black president, not just another white guy.

A few years back I was co-producing a college improv show with my friend Amanda for a troupe I ran called the Semi-Automatic Players. During rehearsal one day Amanda leaned over to say to me, “Harris, do you realize that, without doing it intentionally, we’ve become the brownest improv troupe on campus?” I looked around to see who she was talking about and took a full minute to realize that the group she was referring to included me.

In the spring of last year, a series of racist incidents rocked the campus at Oberlin College, spawning a great deal of general conversation about race and social consciousness where I lived and worked. One of the specific topics of conversation was if Oberlin’s cultural diversity requirement was insufficient to ensure that students learned something about the dynamics of privilege and oppression before graduating. I found myself with a couple friends one night in the Feve, our local bar, arguing over this topic. When I advocated for stronger cultural diversity requirements one friend—another Mathematics major, like myself—responded, “Yeah, but isn’t that just a few departments trying to say that their subject is more important than everyone else’s? I mean, I could say that math is the most important thing and we should have stricter math requirements for all students.”

As I tried to form the words in that moment that explained why this was different, why I thought it was more important to understand privilege and oppression than math, to explain why an institution which prides itself on a progressive activist history should produce graduates who have a foundation in the salient topic in the field of social justice—as I tried to find the words to articulate all this, despite never having thought of myself as a minority targeted by the hate speech on campus, despite rarely having given much thought to my own race in the preceding decade, despite having been effectively white for so long,—despite all this, I had a momentary vision of myself, seen by any onlooker, as the minority making overwrought and self-serving arguments. These were arguments that I knew were good, were important, and were—to the extent possible—objective, but I knew that anyone who wanted could discredit them just by the fact of my race. I felt incredibly non-white and suddenly alone in a crowd of white friends.

I pay more attention these days. I find myself, in groups, counting people of color in the room. I notice when I find myself exclusively browsing profiles of white girls on OKCupid. I notice that I’ve always lived in houses with mostly white housemates, when I find myself at parties and in restaurants that are exclusively white, or when I find myself with hobbies (looking at you, social dance and folk singing) that are primarily white pastimes. I haven’t figured out yet what to do with the things I notice, but I am noticing.

Summeralities

Hyphenated Me 03 Feb 2014

Further Reading