A mixed perspective
Someone once told me I was a “weird breed.” I am Hapa, the Hawaiian term for “part”: half Asian and half white. My almond-shaped eyes are hooded, turned only slightly upwards at the ends. My face is covered in freckles, with one on the center of my bottom lip. In this case, weird probably meant unique, maybe even cool. But in the mind of a seventh grader, at the start of Covid—when xenophobia and racism towards Asians were on the rise—“weird” was far from a poorly-worded complement. “Weird breed” was synonymous with “mutt”—I felt like an unwanted dog your parents wouldn’t let you take home from the shelter.
My parents aren’t the same “breed,” but at least they can each easily label themselves—my dad is White and my mom is Asian. When faced with the race question on surveys, I often select the “other” category. I’m a mix—colonists and colonized, European and Taiwanese. My American lineage traces back to the Mayflower on one root, and begins only six decades ago on the other, following the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965. The tightrope I teeter on straddles two worlds, and over time, I have tried to fully comprehend the meaning of “mixed,” and the fact that being two different things doesn’t make me any less of each one. To this point, my dad once shared a quote from The Sympathizer, written by author Viet Thanh Nguyen about a hapa protagonist, that said, “You’re not half of anything, you’re twice of everything.”
Yet I still feel as if I’m not a mix, or “twice of everything,” but a dilution of each. I take my dumplings in a frozen bag from Trader Joe’s, and celebrate Lunar New Year with a simple, “Today is Chinese New Year?” It’s common to feel like you’re not enough of something—not pretty enough, not smart enough, not cool enough. But to feel as though you are not enough of your being—of what you are, blood, skin, and bones—is a different feeling entirely. Being mixed makes you wonder if you’re enough of your being. I can’t speak Mandarin, I barely know anything about my heritage, and Asians tend to think I look White. However, I do recognize that I’ve grown up with more privilege than my mother, one of the few Asians in her suburban white community, simply due to my whiteness. When I traveled to Taiwan, I felt whiter than ever; yet at Easter Brunch at a fancy country club in Pennsylvania, I wondered if the white second cousins and cousins once removed from my dad’s side viewed me as one of them. Regardless, it is hard to blend in when I, myself, am a blend. Constantly, I’m asked the all-too-familiar “Where are you from?” question, followed by the all-too-familiar response, “No, where are you really from.” Curiosity or ignorance, call it what you may, but there is pain when standing out equates to not belonging—especially when you already feel separated from both races.
Coined “Racial Imposter Syndrome,” many mixed people carry a heavier weight of self-doubt, as their internal senses of self don’t always match what others perceive, or expect them to be. In a series of first-person multiracial identity stories compiled by Vox, respondents frequently felt “isolated, confused about their identity, and frustrated when others attempted to dole them out into specific boxes.” Common throughout the six stories presented is the societal pressure of labeling oneself, something that monoracial people don’t necessarily experience when it comes to race. One respondent of Brazilian and Lebanese descent, who grew up in a predominantly Black and Latino neighborhood, described his way of code-switching.
“I think my identity is very much like a Venn diagram, where I keep moving around those various circles and the overlap keeps changing all the time,” the Vox respondent said. “The one thing I have kept constant is some sense of mixedness.”
Being mixed-race has given me the strength of multiple perspectives, having grown up viewing the world from two different lenses. Oftentimes the way we are treated is dictated by how we look, and I have experienced that firsthand. I see the difference in how my two grandmas are treated, one acquiring more respect from others seemingly because of the absence of an accent. It makes you think about why we treat each other in the ways we do. And being forced to think so much about my own identity—what exactly I am, or who I should be simply because of stereotypes and expectations—has given me a stronger sense of self. At the end of the day, I am not 50 percent white or 50 percent Asian, but 100 percent mixed.