Ki Mae Ponniah Heussner A Little Plot of No-Man’s-Land
The first few minutes of the bus ride were uneventful, even pleasant. I had taken a seat on the bus across the aisle from a particularly talkative classmate of mine, and found her unending stream of conversation comfortably distracting. So while Whitney and I exchanged our first-grade pleasantries, the bus made its way to school, quietly bumping up and down the length of Bedford Road. It was not until the bus rounded the corner and stopped in front of Sterling Drive to pick up two older boys that our chattering came to a standstill. Like every younger child on that bus, I too inquisitively noted the arrival of those older boys. My curiosity was replaced by apprehension, however, when I realized that they had taken the seat directly in front of mine and were peering down at me over the back of their green vinyl seat.
I was just a little girl with long black hair who had confidently boarded the school bus that morning, proud of the care she had taken in dressing herself for the first day at her new school. But all too quickly I became embarrassed, conscious that my black-and-green plaid dress looked foolishly formal next to the grubby jeans and T-shirts of the boys in front of me. And the black patent leather shoes that had been my favorites up until that moment found no friend among the rest of the sneakers on the bus. But I had not noticed any of these things until those two boys noticed me.
Under their scrutiny I felt alone. Under their wide and watchful eyes I felt dwarfed by everyone else who seemed suddenly so much bigger and tougher and better. The aisle that separated Whitney from me seemed impassable, and the back of my seat felt twice as high as it had before. I had never felt more trapped, and I had never felt more on display. And then, as though attempting to classify a bird or a snake in a pet shop, one of the boys sort of cocked his head to one side and asked, “What are you?”
“What am I?” I thought. I do not remember ever having been asked that question before, and if I had, it certainly had not been offered in the same way, with the same stare, and with the same suspicion. I did not know what he wanted to know. I did not understand what he hoped to find out. What was I? I was a girl. I was a first-grader. WHAT am I? Not who, but what, as though I had more in common with Cookie Monster than I did the human race! He must have noticed my confusion, because he continued, “You know, are you Japanese? Or Chinese? What are you?”
“Oh,” I said with pride, finally recognizing what it was that he wanted to know. “I’m part Malaysian.”
I was on familiar ground again, and could offer information that had elicited appreciation before. But he had never heard of Malaysia, and he started to reel off other races, as though I was wrong and had to pick one with which he was familiar. So I timidly clarified my answer for the confused boy, providing him with a response that characterized how I saw myself from that day onward.
“Well, I’m a quarter Chinese, a quarter Indian, and half, you know, American.”
And it was the first time in my life that I realized that I was any different from anyone else. Before that moment I had not known that people could consider me unlike them; I was not aware that there were whole worlds to which I did not really belong. At the international school I had attended until that day, the uniforms of black, gray, white, and navy were the only colors that all the schoolchildren had in common. It was only upon leaving that school and moving to my new, predominantly white Connecticut suburb that I became conscious of race.
I have been asked that question—What are you?—countless times since that day, and by now, at twenty-one years of age, I am used to it. I do not mind the question, and I have memorized my response. To be honest, there are times when I even enjoy the frequently interesting conversation that follows. But often, when I recall the height of those green vinyl seats and the width of that impassable aisle, anger and frustration replace my usual composure. I’m no longer angry at a little boy who didn’t even know that he had the power to make me feel so diminutive; he was barely older than I was, and as little as I understood about the meaning and implications of his question, I’m sure he understood far less. Any anger or frustration I feel now is directed instead toward a society that still has not learned its racial alphabet and still must search for a lexicon of acceptance. And because I quickly and quietly tucked away my personal racial questions, it is only recently that my own racial vocabulary has moved past that of the first grade.
That little boy couldn’t have had any idea that his innocent question would leave such a lasting impression. I am sure he would be surprised to discover that I still remember him and the first words he ever spoke to me. But although he may never know, the awareness and the consciousness produced by our little elementary interchange quickly stole the limelight from my stage. Before I had met that boy, I was Little Orphan Annie, always harassing my parents until they allowed me to sing my favorite song for their dinner guests. I did not sing at all that first day of school, and I did not sing for a long time afterwards, either. I became a very quiet girl who caused very little trouble.
Recognizing that my differences had the potential to create discomfort for the people around me—often the people closest to me—I invariably tried to blend in as best I could in other ways. I grew far more introverted than the Lion the stars predicted I would become, and often felt more comfortable with the fictional characters in the books I read than with the real, live children in my classrooms. While children on the playground might have noted my dark hair and different features with cries of “mutt,” and the adolescents in my classes found amusement in teasing me with whispers of “beast,” the characters in my tales and novels never said a word. As a child, I recognized that my visible differences were the source of these names and my troubles, yet I did not know how to reflect upon the origin of these differences. I never thought to blame race; instead, I just blamed myself.
Ashamed, embarrassed, and convinced that these encounters revealed truths about my flaws and imperfections, for far too long I silently kept these stories inside. It is only recently that I have begun to disentangle these tales of the bus, the playground, and the classroom for my parents. And when I do, I sometimes hesitate, wondering if they can possibly understand the experience of a daughter who has led a life so different from their own.
My mother was born in Klang, Malaysia, to my Chinese grandmother and my Indian grandfather, and although she too grew up as a racially mixed child in a race-sensitive society, I often forget that this is an experience we share. My mother recalls that the few other children of racially mixed marriages were teased and excluded by the “purely” Chinese and Indian children, yet her memory of her own childhood is not colored by the recollection of these experiences. My grandfather was the principal of the school that my mother and her siblings attended, and their status as his children elevated their standing among their classmates. Moreover, after marrying in spite of severe opposition from their church and communities, my grandparents were fiercely protective of their mixed family, and tried very hard to instill pride in my mother, my aunt, and my uncles. As the youngest of four children, my mother recognized the support and pride of her family and easily faced the crowd of her racially “pure” classmates.
In the end, her racial and cultural impurity played a significant role in setting her apart from and ahead of the crowd. Having no other common linguistic ground between my grandmother’s Cantonese and my grandfather’s Tamil, and recognizing the political value of English at a time when Malaysia was still occupied by the British, my grandparents insisted that their children speak only English at home. At that time, many Malaysians could speak English but few could claim it as their first language. My mother’s unusual proficiency in English played an integral role in distinguishing her from her university classmates in Malaysia.
While my mother was singing hymns at a college that was left as a gift to a developing country by British missionaries, my father was still tossing footballs across a high school stadium in Bay Village, Ohio. While my mother was awaiting her marriage to the first man she had really known beyond a few conversations, my father was preparing to escort his date to the senior prom. And while my mother was preparing for a life that would not take her very far from home, my father was hoping to take his intellect and athletic ability from his small midwestern town to the Ivy League.
About five years later, in Boston, only a couple of years after my father had graduated from college and my mother had left her first marriage, their different worlds overlapped at a joint lecture between their two graduate schools. As the story goes, they met one afternoon, went for a cup of coffee, and married soon after at the university chapel. Seven years later they had me, and one and a half years after I was born, they divorced.
There have been times when, perhaps out of anger, I have wondered what my parents could possibly have been thinking, to believe that two people from such different backgrounds, histories, cultures, and countries could actually remain happily married forever. There have been other times when, perhaps out of puzzlement, I have wondered if my parents were merely intrigued by the exoticness of the other. And, finally, there have been times when, perhaps out of loneliness, I have wondered if they ever thought about what it might mean for their child to grow up in a no-man’s-land between their two cultures.
At my worst, I have questioned their motivation in deciding to have me at a time when their marriage must already have begun to unravel. How dare they bring a child into the world when they were still struggling to find within it a place for themselves together? And what kind of parents could they possibly be if they failed to imagine what it would be like for their own child to grow up—inherently like them both and yet nothing like either of them?
Perhaps it is not my place to determine if my parents’ marriage broke down primarily along the fault lines of culture or love. But in seeing that the worlds my parents have entered and cultivated since their divorce exaggerate the differences that existed before they married, I think I will always blame culture, at least in part. I know that whatever tale I tell will not be able to capture completely my relationships with them and their respective worlds. And I know that even the boundaries of these worlds I imagine are not as strict and defined as I often think they are. But still, regardless of the overlap that exists, these worlds are much more antagonistic than they are compatible, as the word divorce suggests.
My parents’ split took them swiftly to their new, separate lives. And in the process, it ruptured the integrity of my multicultural world and set in motion a lifelong seesaw ride between their two cultures. I am learning to put my parents’ past behind me, yet I cannot pretend that the past does not frequently take hold of the present. When I feel inextricably caught between their two worlds—rejected by both, or too quickly accepted by one—I wish to be solely of one heritage. I do not think people often realize how much of a luxury it can be to have one group to fall back on, one to blame, or one to identify with and one to reject. Perhaps it’s easier to wear your racial consciousness on your sleeve when you know that you can always hide behind the garb of an entire race if things get too bad, or if the opposition comes on a little bit too strong for you alone. Most will never know how much more difficult it is to speak out when you feel as though you have to pick a side, even though neither side is really your own.
For as long as I can remember, I have searched my parents’ faces and their collections of old photographs, hoping to find some connection between who they have been, who they are now, who I am, and who I will be. Most children cringe when neighbors and relatives tug them closer and exclaim at the resemblance between parent and child; I stood a bit taller on the few occasions when people saw my parents in me. Even when I was in the prime of my adolescence, the peak of my rebellion, I remained the well-behaved daughter who desperately wanted to please all her parents—biological and stepparents alike. When I should have been attempting to create an identity and an ideology of my own, I still held back.
If my bus ride to the first day of school marks the first time I recognized my differences in relation to the people around me, an evening with my father a year or two later marks the first time I really recognized the significance of my differences in relation to my own family. And although the initial recognition came over a decade ago, it is primarily over the past few years that I have learned how much more painful and difficult it is to negotiate differences within a family than with the people outside it.
After a busy day spent touring another one of New York’s many cultural gems, my father, Bonnie (then his fiancée), and I found respite on the living room floor of my father’s West Side apartment. It was almost time for me to go to bed, but after flipping through the television channels, we decided to watch the end of the Miss America pageant. During one of the commercial breaks, in a good-natured attempt to compliment Bonnie, my father commented, “What do I need to watch this for? I have the most beautiful woman in the world right here.”
Instead of merely accepting his flattery with appreciation, being sensitive and female herself, Bonnie looked over at me and quickly interjected, “Dale, don’t you mean the two most beautiful women in the world?”
At first my father looked completely confused and did not understand the reason for her prompt. It was only when he followed her glance over to my face that he recognized my disappointment and revised his previous remark.
I will admit now, with a tinge of shame, how much it mattered to me that my father revised his original comment, but at the time I was too embarrassed to say a word. Perhaps it is not important for a parent to think his child beautiful, but when I was seven years old and just recognizing that I looked different from most people around me, my father’s casual comment struck a chord I did not know existed until that moment. I was not a vain child in need of praise, but I did not want to be excluded from my father’s definition of beauty. I did not want to feel any more self-conscious or be reminded yet again that I did not look like my father’s daughter.
Now I accept our lack of resemblance and no longer agonize over the reaction our differences inevitably provoke. When I was a teenager too tall for her age, however, I used to fear that, without Bonnie along, people would mistake me for my father’s girlfriend. And when my father, Bonnie, my brother Jesse, and I would wander about Westport, Connecticut, I would worry that people might assume that I was Jesse’s nanny and not his sister. In a town where most Asian women are nannies, who would expect that the one Asian female walking with a little blond-haired, blue-eyed boy and his equally Caucasian-looking parents could be related to them by blood?
Over time I have grown comfortable with the place I occupy within and between my two families, and I have come to value the unusual pictures we paint together and apart. But it is only recently that I have been able to appreciate and navigate this space that often feels very lonely. In the twenty-one years of my life, my father and I have spoken only a few times about our cultural differences. And although we frequently laugh about the unexpected family portrait we must present to onlookers in restaurants and shops, I sometimes think he underestimates the extent of those differences. Both he and Bonnie have always encouraged me to speak my mind, but I really do not know how I would begin to enumerate to them the differences between life at his house and life at my mother’s house.
When they ask for my “honest” thoughts on how they raise Jesse, how do I tell them that, because I was raised in my mother’s house, where “tough love” reigned and gifts were never used to appease temporarily, I have often wished that they were not so generous with both me and Jesse? And when I open up the trash can and see piles of still edible food and still usable plastic utensils, how do I honestly reveal that, because my stereotypically penny-wise Chinese grandmother would cringe at the amount of things wasted in their home, I tend to cringe inwardly as well? Moreover, how do I honestly express the guilt and dismay I often feel when I recognize that many of the characteristics I criticize in my father’s world have managed to find a place in me? I have no blueprint to follow, I have no paradigm to respect, and I cannot always tell if honesty is healthy or hurtful.
At my mother’s house, I am not alone in negotiating multiple worlds; my mother and stepfather’s marriage also crosses racial and cultural lines. But because my stepfather has spent almost as much time in Asia as my mother has in America, they have been able to help my sister Maylien and me to navigate the blurred cultural cross-sections that characterize our lives. Yet even so, there are times when I have to stop myself from too easily following my mother’s and stepfather’s bad habit of prematurely dismissing those who have not trodden the same ideological path they have. Both professionally and personally, their lives have taken them to more countries than most people in our town are probably able to identify, and as a result they recognize the degree of global inequity far more deeply than even our most well-traveled neighbors. Their model of justice is based on a global understanding of the injustices that they have perceived in the world, and they have passed this understanding on to my sister and me. The most difficult lesson for us all to learn is to appreciate our own experiences without detaching ourselves from those whose lives do not cross so many cultural boundaries.
Here in America, the various cultures that have found a home under one roof have, over time, integrated harmoniously to form a new whole. The cultural differences, however, between my mother’s family and the new family we have created emerge profoundly when we make our biennial trips to Malaysia and find ourselves held to the standards of a society we’re only a small part of, and that is only a small part of us.
Although my friends are fond of reminding me that I inflect the tone of my voice far more than I should, the inflection and cadence of my own voice is nothing compared to the ruckus of my Malaysian family’s conversation. When the whole jinbang is assembled, conversation is dotted with “ah!” and “Ai yo!” and phrases are punctuated with the local “lah.” What might be lacking in vocabulary is compensated for with animation. Lively hand gestures substitute for unnecessary words, and volume often trumps text. If we are lucky, Uncle Vinci will surrender and buy the delicious, grease-saturated roti chenai and chicken curry. If we are patient, we will catch the nightly stroll of the chee-chak (lizards) who emerge from their daytime hiding spots. Yet if my sister and I are loud, we, being female, will provoke the criticism of our older uncles, who will quickly remind us that we have become “too American.”
When Maylien and I linger around the dining room too long after eating dinner, our uncles artfully push us along to the kitchen sink; when we are caught reaching for another biscuit at teatime, we are asked, with a pat on the belly, if we really want another. “Ai yo, you girls,” Uncle will say, clucking his tongue loudly, “you spend too much time in that country.” Although he teases with a good-natured smile and mocks us with a disarming grin, there is firm conviction behind his words. He jokingly refers to his American nieces as lost causes, but I think he does believe that there are standards set for Asian women, and he certainly believes we should respect them. If Uncle Vinci had his way, all of the women in his life—sisters, daughters, and nieces alike—would match the image of his slim young wife. Auntie Swee Gin has the smooth, long hair, the slim build, the pale skin, and the coy demeanor of the ideal Asian woman. And although the rest of us poke fun at the adoring glances and reverent words she bestows upon my uncle, there have been times, especially when I was younger, when I wished I could escape the tyranny of my uncle’s criticisms by more closely resembling her.
In America, by contrast, the coyness and reserve of the demure Asian female are met with mixed reviews. Although I may have been too loud for my Asian uncles in Malaysia, I think I have often been too quiet for my American family and friends at home. And if I attribute the silence of my childhood to the simple recognition of race, I believe that my adolescent reticence is due to the echoes of my uncles’ warnings. I certainly did not back down from conflict and confrontation to please those uncles, but I think that I found in their model—or at least in the one they projected—the best balance to the imposing height and academic success that I sometimes wanted to hide.
I thought that if I could not change the appearance of “beast,” perhaps I could distract people with the demeanor of “beauty.” To a thirteen-year-old girl whose big red glasses covered the upper half of her face, whose height seemed to give away her presence in a crowd of two hundred, and whose dark hair and slightly off-kilter features refused to cooperate to create something pleasing or familiar to look at, any distraction that might minimize the awkwardness was eagerly accepted.
Those painfully awkward years did not last as long as I dreaded they would. I amended the mistake of the large red glasses by trading them in for a pair of contact lenses. And soon after, I somehow sufficiently grew into the features and height that had plagued my early adolescence. I was no longer the quietest girl in my class and, as I grew, so did my confidence and the strength of my voice. Yet I was far from outspoken. Even after I did not need the “ideal” demeanor to offset a less-than-ideal appearance, I still held on to the quietness and reserve that had characterized my earlier behavior.
Throughout high school I was considered a leader of my class, and I appreciated the distinction and respected the responsibility. But even though I could muster up the courage to address administrators and speak professionally with teachers, I found it difficult to interact with many of my peers with the same amount of confidence. A child of a practically TV-less home, I took a while to recognize pop culture. And as a child of a multicultural, international home, I could more easily identify the name of a UN agency than a Fortune 500 company. As a result, I would often find myself mid-conversation with little to say, searching frantically for common ground. Wanting neither to accentuate my differences by pleading cultural ignorance nor to check out of the conversation completely, I would linger at the edges, smiling and nodding appropriately, wondering when the trial would end. I was a good student and the president of my class, but when I interacted with many of my classmates, I found myself constantly questioning the cadence of my speech and the formality of my language. I created multiple voices to fit the multiple worlds I encountered in my life, and when I could not tailor the appropriate voice to a given situation, I chose silence.
For a long time, I think I believed that the integration of these worlds would come once I met someone who would let me be myself all the time. But when I was younger, I would become so enamored with someone that in his presence I would lose the capacity to speak. Although I might write pages and pages about how wonderful, unique, and perfect “he” might be, in the face of opportunity with him I would become so nervous that I would find myself unable to form thoughts and compose questions. And when our conversation eventually reached a standstill, I would be left wondering if the person I had created with my pen really did exist beyond the pages of my journal. As I grew older, confidence lent me the ability to carry on a conversation, but I still would never learn the true nature of my pen’s inspiration. As the rules dictated in this odd game I would play, the second I sensed reciprocated interest, I would completely lose interest, until, of course, I felt that interest had been lost in me.
In middle school and high school I easily excused this pattern by declaring the high standards I held for myself. It was not that I was the one who lacked the capability to get to know someone beyond a first date or a first kiss; it was more that I honestly believed that my exceptional powers of perception enabled me to sense incompatibility from a mile away. I know now that I was deceiving myself. It was not always high standards or perception that prevented me from getting too close to anyone romantically, or even platonically for that matter. I was just too insecure, and I lacked the confidence to believe that anyone could really like me; if he did, then surely something about him must be wrong.
A few months after coming to college, however, I did meet someone who seemed absolutely flawless to my freshman eyes. And although now I sometimes wonder how Jon and I managed to maintain any type of relationship at all over the years, I think, at least to a degree, that what kept us together was equally responsible for ultimately pulling us apart. While my family life has been unique, his has been quite conventional. My views are liberal, his are conservative. And my background is mixed, his is not. Now that our three-year on-again, off- again relationship has finally reached its conclusion, I look back amazed at how long we attempted to make our relationship work. Sometimes I think that had we just been disciplined enough to stop ourselves from falling back to each other, we might have developed other, more complementary relationships. But I also know that for a very long time, I refused to let go of the security and comfort my first serious romantic relationship offered, despite the many clues and conversations that indicated that our relationship would inevitably someday end.
The first time Jon forced us to confront our increasingly apparent differences, I thought it was the last time we would ever speak. We had certainly been aware of these differences from the beginning, but we enjoyed the sometimes amusing, sometimes exasperating conversations they created. Only four months after we started dating, however, those same qualities that had initially amused and intrigued us began to divide us. During the summer after my freshman year in college, when I was at home and Jon was at school, and our relationship existed over telephone lines and extended weekends, our incompatible qualities became irreconcilable differences. Toward the end of the summer, when I anxiously noted the infrequency of his calls and sensed the detachment in his voice, I asked him what was wrong. And he simply replied, “We’re just so different.”
Refusing to continue over the telephone, I drove up to school the following weekend to finish our conversation in person. Between a Saturday afternoon and a Sunday evening, we uncovered every foreseeable difference that could possibly limit our capacity to sustain a relationship. Toward the end of the weekend, when our religious, philosophical, personal, and political debate was already threatening to turn my boyfriend back into a stranger, he asked the question that I may silently remember each time I begin a new relationship. “Well,” he offered timidly, “what if I don’t know how I’d feel if my children didn’t look like me?”
At the time, his question did not unsettle me any more than the rest of the conversation had. Instead of listening to what his question revealed, I simply dismissed it with a frown and stumbled my way through a response: “I just don’t think you need to know that right now. . . . Shouldn’t we just be thinking about now? I guess I just don’t understand why we need to talk so much about the future. . . . ”
I should have appreciated his honesty, and I should have followed his inquisitive lead, but I was not prepared to consider the possibilities of such a far-off future, and I was too scared to acknowledge the questions that could threaten that and future relationships. I thought I already knew the familiar, discouraging answer, and I forced myself to ignore it.
Aside from my family, no one else in my life challenged me to confront race in such a personal way, and at times I was disappointed in the shortcomings, within each of us, that were revealed in the process. Yet three years of disagreement and reconciliation allowed us both to examine mindfully, and sometimes adjust, what we had always believed to be true.
During my adolescent years, when my journal reflected the innocent musings of a naïve teenage girl, I thought that upon falling in love I would be transformed into someone more confident, self-assured, and independent. I had hoped that one person would be able to help me integrate the different worlds I had tried so hard to keep apart. It was not until after dividing my worlds even further that I finally learned how to bring them together.
Whereas in high school I was a school leader and swore that I would someday “change the world,” I spent my first years in college more concerned with social image than social awareness. Instead of setting off on my planned path of righteousness, I sharply delineated the social aspects of my life from the ideological ones. I took advantage of the few academic opportunities I had to incorporate my beliefs into my academic studies by writing about the gender-relations and social issues that I did not tackle in my daily life. I would write papers for my English classes comparing the roles of women in various plays, or taking a feminist stance against metaphors in early American literature. I was even a member of an a cappella group devoted to spreading messages of social awareness through song. Yet I did little more from day to day than sing about issues or write about them or speak about them when the occasion arose; I did not do nearly as much as I could have actually to solve the problems I claimed to feel so strongly about. I would write about social injustice and I would sing about female empowerment, yet at the same time I became part of an organization—a sorority—that actively excluded women and a system that passively divided them.
Although I decided to attend the college I did almost in spite of its well-known Greek system, when the time came I still signed my name to the list of sophomores looking for a bid to join one of the campus’s many sororities. I was the last woman in my class to sign up for rush and perhaps one of the least enthusiastic, because I believed that I already had the most supportive “sorority” in my a cappella group. But even though it was mostly curiosity that led me to the system, it was vanity that enticed me to join. I was flattered by the offers of acceptance, and I was tempted by the trappings of belonging. I cannot go back in time and erase my name from the long list of sophomore rushees, but had I known then what I do now, I would never have threatened bonds of true friendship with the often superficial ones of “sisterhood.” Now, while I am grateful for some of the friendships formed within my sorority, I think I will always see my participation in the Greek system as more of an educational detour than a step forward in life.
It was not until fall term of my junior year that the multiple worlds in my life began to grow together and the words I sang with my a cappella group began to resonate in my classes and in the friendships that I formed. I finally felt engaged and productive in classes that provided me with the tools I could use to do something more someday than simply sing freedom songs to distracted college students. In the Education Department I met professors and students who powerfully influenced my life—socially, academically, and ideologically.
In a class discussion that term, our teaching assistant asked us to write down how our life would be different if we were a member of a different race. As my classmates furiously wrote their answers down, I just sat quietly and refused to write a word. People read their answers out loud and every answer began with “If I were [insert racial difference here], I would [insert racial stereotype here],” as though with a flip of a switch you would call yourself by another name, changing only the attributes associated with that name. If I were a different race—if I were only one race—my entire life would be different, and to think that I could be expected to enumerate, isolate, and analyze how almost offended me. To me, the question implied that you are your race, you are only your race, and your racial identification is the one that is the most important. Of course I think that people should participate in interracial discussions, but constantly defining people and groups along racial lines seems to me to be the kind of racial division that interracial discussions should attempt to move beyond.
In interracial discussions like the one my class had that day, I had always felt obliged to pick a side, as though if I did not, I would be a coward straddling a racial fence. In our racially polarized world, it often feels as though someone long ago decided that in order to have your voice count and mean something, you need to identify with one party or the other. If, of course, you attempt for some reason to identify with both and take the time to look for the middle ground, you are selling someone short, or you are not realizing all that there is in yourself, or you are taking the easy way out.
It was not until I went to China on a foreign study program the summer before my senior year in college that I fully recognized that there is no easy way out; the world’s racial spectrum is far more complex than the black-and-white one many Americans think exists. I cringe at the implication that my trip to China was a quest for “roots,” but in truth, I did go to China in search of a connection to the stories and traditions that peppered my childhood. My Chinese heritage is only a part of my cultural whole, but my grandmother’s superstitions are still a fixed part of my daily internal dialogue. When my right eye shakes, I wonder what kind of good fortune will come my way, and when the palm of my left hand itches, I wonder how much money will soon be slipping out of it. When I forget to clean my plate, I remember my grandmother’s warnings that I will then marry a pockmarked husband, and when I wear red, I immediately feel protected by the power of its lucky hue.
Before I arrived in China, and during my first days there, I hastily assumed that these superstitions, and the other relics of Chinese culture inherited from my grandmother, were enough to secure for me a comfortable connection to the Chinese people I would meet. I thought that because many of the traditions I would find in China were the ones I was accustomed to at home, I would not experience the culture shock anticipated by many of my white classmates. My motivation for traveling to China was certainly more personal than it was academic, and I expected that it would be something akin to a homecoming—if not for me, then at least for my grandmother, vicariously, through me. But I soon and sadly learned that although my family’s version of “Chinese” and the “Chinese” whom I encountered in China share many qualities, my family and I are quite alone in our cultural habits and beliefs. Although many of the words we speak, the expressions we borrow, and the foods we eat are gifts from my grandmother’s Chinese heritage, too many other cultures have added their own flair for us to recognize the truly “Chinese” in our lives.
As I walked and biked the streets of Beijing that summer, as I sat on buses and trains up and down the coast and back and forth across the country, and as I talked to and laughed with people and suffered their laughter at me, I found myself struggling to determine how I belonged to China and how it belonged to me. Visually, I blended into crowds of Chinese people better than I could ever hope to blend into crowds of Caucasian Americans. If you casually glanced my way and didn’t experience the amusement of listening to my broken, incorrectly inflected Chinese, you might think that I had lived in China all my life. But because of my linguistic shortcomings and a mismatch between what I expected to feel and what I actually found, instead of experiencing the homecoming I had expected, I felt locked out of the culture I had hoped to be welcomed into.
One night, on a train bound for a coastal town sixteen hours northeast of Beijing, when my classmates had managed to achieve uncomfortable sleep and I was left to my thoughts, I realized that the best I could ever hope for was partial cultural understanding from any person I would ever meet outside my family. And I realized that even within my family—because of interracial marriage, divorce, and remarriage among my parents, my stepparents, my aunts and uncles, and even my grandparents—individuals are sometimes left quite alone to their cultural understandings and beliefs. On my mother’s side of the family, it would be difficult to find two people other than my mother and her siblings who have an exact racial match. And although we have all benefited greatly from the synthesis of all these races, I wonder what we have sacrificed and surrendered to become a family that has had to dilute each culture in an attempt to integrate them all. And although I often relish my lack of cultural commitment, there are many moments when I would like to be able to claim one culture, commit to one culture, and be comforted by one culture only.
The more of a mix any person becomes—of experiences, of ethnicities, of cultures that are racial or not—the more she becomes connected to other people, the more she is able to understand, and the more she is offered to share. But somewhere down the line in the sharing of cultures, you realize that when each culture is done sharing for a little while and goes back to its own world, you are still left in the middle of them, dependent on them all—but alone, without any.
Most people receive their inheritance the day their parents die. I received mine the day I was born. And although I have spent much of my life running away from the little plot of no-man’s-land my parents left for me to till, I am learning to enjoy the responsibility of cultivating this familiar, untapped place. The boundaries are not as rigid as I once thought they were, and the ground is much more fruitful than I originally assumed it to be. Sometimes its solitude halts my progress for a while, and sometimes I stop for a rest someplace else, but I return to my quiet lot with pride, for my entire family, for myself, and for the vision of what it might someday be.
After graduating from Dartmouth, Ki Mae worked for a U.S. senator, a microloan fund, and then Lifetime Television before returning to school for a master’s degree in journalism. She currently lives with her husband in New York, where she writes about technology.