混血

Written by Anonymous

"identity crisis" by David Kessler

It’s so cliche; we all know how the story goes: What is your race? Multiple choice. One answer only. I fill in Asian, because to choose White seems like a complete erasure, bordering on a lie. I do not want to be another tally mark under that column, stripped of my identity, yet the scientific part of me squirms at the inaccuracy of claiming “Asian” outright.

How do you choose the greater half of a 50/50 split? By appearance? By language? By culture? By the desire to be unique? Every time I run into one of these situations, I feel like someone needs to teach survey-writers a thing or two about biology. 

This is not a trauma or even really a point of pain. More a mild annoyance—that my existence factors into so few people’s minds. Later they added “two or more races,” and now there’s sometimes even multi-select. How much progress we’ve made—that I can now be two data points instead of one.

• 
  

When I am in Taiwan, everyone can see the waiguoren blood running through me. My grandma always compliments my big, beautiful eyes, and when I ask her if she sees herself in me, she says I look so much like my father. Of course I do. She cannot see past the fact that I do not look Chinese.

In Texas, they ask me where I’m from and comment on my “beautiful,” olive-mocha-caramel-latte skin. Sometimes I preen. Sometimes I chafe at the thinly veiled exoticism. My dad tells me how lucky I am that I got the looks of my mother. 

(What he means, I think, is that everyone loves that racial ambiguity.)

I know their words are meant as compliments. But somewhere along the way “beautiful" became a euphemism for “different,” and I stopped wanting to be beautiful. I simply wanted to blend in.

• 
  

I grew up in an area that was not diverse. Classic small-town Texas suburb, full of blonde cheerleaders that sold me a single idea of pretty. My friend group was a sort of amalgamation of anyone I could find who was smart, and kind, and many happened to come from immigrant families. When I went to college, everything was both infinitely better and infinitely worse: to be around people that did not assume the default state of personhood was Christian and white, to see everyone I loved settle into groups that they had been waiting for all their life. 

I was happy for them, of course, but I would watch from afar and ache—forever feeling slightly out of place, no matter where I was or who I was with.

• 
  

Some days I wonder if my parents knew what they were doing. If my mother ever feared her baby growing into a woman who would realize the insurmountable distance created by language, if my father ever considered what it was like for his wife to see her parents age in yearly fragments as she raised children alone in this country. I wonder if they ever thought about how my sister and I would look, how we would speak, how we would feel when we were old enough to grapple with identity.

Oh, to be a stereotype. I know I am romanticizing the wrong thing, but how I wish to be in a group of people that look like me and have someone walk by and joke that we are indistinguishable—to lose myself in being a part of a whole. To have the same clothes, same music, same food, same language, same experiences as those around me. To know that my appearance accurately telegraphs my background to the world. 

Some days I want this more than I can describe. Some days it devastates me that I will never know what it is like: to be part of complete homogeneity. 

• 
  

But I have written all this as if my identity is merely a burden, as if being biracial is solely a negative. It’s not.

It’s also a superpower—knowing that others cannot place you easily, knowing that you straddle two languages, two cultures, having grown up immersed in both. It’s meeting new people and having their eyes light up in surprise when you can speak their language, an instant line of connection in a foreign sea. It’s knowing that people like you did not exist a few centuries ago, that the blood running through your veins comes from lovers all over the globe. 

It’s hearing someone say you have a Taiwanese accent, and being warmed by the fact that your voice holds your family’s imprint. It’s understanding that although strangers cannot see it plainly on your face, your history shines through for those who simply care enough to listen.

Translation Note: 混血—mixed blood