asian or "other"

My relationship with my ethnicity is complicated. 

I was raised in rural Michigan, by a Caucasian father and Filipino mother.  I was 14 or 15 years old when I first realized I was seen as other.  I think he meant it as a compliment when my high school boyfriend told me he didn’t like me at first because I looked “different”.  I stared in the mirror for hours after he said that.   What do you mean I look different?  Different than what?  I thought I just looked like me.  

I identify as Asian.  Or did you identify me as Asian? It’s hard to tell which came first, the chicken or the balut.

My relationship with my mother has always been complicated.  As a result, my relationship with her culture was complicated in my youth.  My siblings and I did not learn my mother’s language.  She had an accent, sure, but having grown up with it, to me, it was just her voice.  It wasn’t until my childhood friend pointed it out, saying “I can barely understand your mom but her accent is cute”, that I realized that my mother was seen as other also. I wouldn’t learn until later why her comment made me feel uncomfortable and that there was an actual word for that kind of comment - a microaggression.  At the time, I just knew it made my cheeks burn.

My father is a white man.  Now, far be it for me to speak on his behalf about race and his perceptions of culture, but when I was younger, the plain and simple fact of my experience was that going to my mother’s Filipino gatherings carried a sort of reluctance and tension.  I remember my mother used to indulge in some of her favorite Filipino dishes while he was away at work and would light candles all over the house to mask the smell before he came home because there was usually a negative reaction.  We went to visit her family in the Philippines when I was 9 and he didn’t come. His personal belief was that racism does not exist, but rather it was a device concocted in order to divide. I craved his approval as is the case with most young girls and their fathers.  

“What are you?” 

“No, but where are you really from.” 

“Wow, you’re so exotic.” 

“I’ve never been with an Asian chick.”

These were greetings I grew used to hearing.  Yes, greetings.  I used to say they didn’t bother me, and I’d play along with the jokes.  The validation I needed from acknowledgement of my sexuality is an entirely different topic, however my sexuality as a young adult became inexorably tied to the perception of my race very early on.  I could be perceived as a sexual being or object because I presented as Asian, you see, but for no other reason.  This was the racism I was accustomed to, and I didn’t consider it racism because racism must be violent and hateful, right?

Growing up half Asian in an almost entirely white neighborhood created an internal dialogue within myself that to this day, I struggle with.  Over the past year, I participated eagerly in the Black Lives Matter movement that swept the country.  I marched, I cried, and I felt it, heavily.  Here we are in April of 2021 and a Filipino woman my mother’s age was attacked with racial motivation, less than two blocks from my office.  Asian Americans are being disproportionately attacked across the country, as a residual effect of many Americans’ reaction to the widespread issues caused by COVID-19 pandemic. Which is just a polite way of saying that racist Americans blamed and attacked Asian-Americans, regardless of which country their heritage belonged to.  I am angry and I am scared, but not necessarily for myself.  And I hesitate.  My words do not come as quickly as they have in the past.  I hesitate to write with the fingertips of one who doesn’t want to say the wrong thing while speaking for a group they do not belong to.  But I do belong, I have been told so almost incessantly by the Caucasian group to which one half of me belongs.  I was reminded that I shouldn’t check the “Caucasian” box when filling out a form at the DMV with eloquent taunts such as “we’re going to build a wall and you’re going to pay for it!” because I appear ambiguous enough to be neatly sorted into the box of another ethnicity that was being hated at that particular moment.  I check the boxes that say “Asian” because I know I can’t check the boxes that say “Caucasian”.  But even as I do, I wonder if I am incorrectly claiming the label of “POC” because of where I grew up and who my father is. Do I count? 

I am half Asian.  I see both sides of myself and there is an internal dialogue that does not always coincide, and this is part of who I am.  These days I live in New York, where I am no one special, as ambiguous or ethnic as the person next to me on the train.  And it’s a great feeling that I wouldn’t have been able to put my finger on had I not left backwoods Michigan. It makes a difference to feel represented and to be surrounded people that maybe have had the same experience as you have. Or at the very least to be surrounded by people that don’t look at you as just Asian or Other.  Because then you get to just be seen as yourself.  Which is all anyone wants, I think.