I have a free pass to walk the earth as if I were a privileged white woman in a white world, right? I don’t even have to try to pass.īut no one is born into a vacuum. My racial identity has become my biggest insecurity because I so often have to defend it. These little slights hurt me more than I like to admit. I’ve had a blond, blue-eyed Swede (who also happened to be hitting on my Chinese American bestie) tell me that he’s more Asian than I am because he grew up in Singapore. I’ve had people laugh in my face, thinking it’s a hilarious joke. But there is only so much skepticism I can respond to-“Wait, you’re Chinese? Really? Wow. I would never choose one side of my heritage over the other. It’s a circular way of explaining who I am. The idea that I have a Chinese mother seems plausible only later do they realize that if she’s Chinese, some part of me must be too. I phrase it this way because it’s an easier, less dissonant truth to swallow. I try to rip that band-aid off as quickly as possible. So I’ve gotten used to breaking the news to new acquaintances. Sometimes other halfies can’t even tell that I’m mixed. In the United States, I blend in with the majority, which by default is white. Depending on the location, venue, and person, I’ve been mistaken for Mexican, French, Jewish, Afghani, Italian, Uighur, German, Russian, Turkish, and Korean. But in this day and age, who isn’t?īeing racially ambiguous is sometimes like being a blank canvas. He was right-at least that’s what I believed at the time, and I felt ashamed for trying to play myself off as more than the sum of my parts. A classmate who carpooled with my family was quick to counter, “Katie, that doesn’t count.” All of a sudden I felt a burning urgency to stake a claim, to assert that I was one of them, that I too belonged in this group. In the wake of my classmates’ raucous laughter I felt acutely aware of my difference. But I didn’t speak the language and the joke was lost on me. On that particular Saturday, a joke was made in Mandarin. I liked being in on these teenage grievances even though they weren’t my own. People chatted casually about homework sets in their advanced math classes or complained about having to go to Chinese school instead of watching Saturday-morning cartoons. One Saturday afternoon in seventh grade, a bunch of us gathered at a classmate’s house to work on our project for the Odyssey of the Mind competition. In Arcadia, CA, weekends are the province of Asian-American overachievers.
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