INTERRACIAL VOICE

Essay

But You Don't Look Chinese!
By Demian Hess

The following first appeared in "Journal of the Asian American Renaissance," (V. 1, N. 1, 1995) and is forthcoming in "American Voices: Webs of Diversity (Prentice Hall, 1997) edited by Elizabeth Quintero and Mary K. Rummel

I've never felt particularly "oppressed." Or outraged. Or angry or upset or downtrodden or victimized. Well, maybe not "never." But I've never carried a grudge about it. I've never had an ax to grind. I've never felt I had a statement to make about the RACISM in our SOCIETY or the OPPRESSION by the DOMINANT CULTURE. Capital letters give me a headache, I guess. And I guess my friends would be surprised if I did make a fuss.

"But, what have you got to complain about?" they say to me. "You're not a minority." And when I point out to them that, in fact, I am a minority: "Oh, well, yeah, your mom's Chinese, but you're not. I mean, you don't look Chinese."

Yeah, I don't look Chinese. I've heard that before.

I remember this one time when I lived in Rhode Island. I was taking the bus home from the beach when this old woman got on board. The bus was half empty, but she chose to sit down right next to me.

"You're Jewish, aren't you?" she said, just like that, right after she sat down. I stared at her for a second and then admitted that, yes, I was Jewish. I have no idea how she knew. Maybe it was the nose. I had this tiny little bean-shaped nose until I was about twelve, and then a huge mass exploded out of my face. The family nose. The Jewish stigma.

"You can always tell," the old woman said, and patted my knee. "It's so nice to have someone to talk to, I hardly ever see anyone. My children, they never call, they never visit. It's so hard when you're old. You'll see."

Then she stopped and squinted at me. "But you're not all Jewish, are you?" she said. I shook my head and explained that my mother was Chinese. "Oh," she said, and paused. "Well, don't worry. It doesn't show."

She was right, it doesn't show. And I guess that I'm lucky it doesn't show. But I wasn't born lucky. I was born looking Chinese and I grew up looking Chinese. When I was six, I had straight black hair, this tiny little bean nose, almond-shaped eyes and yellow skin. I was very slight, not stocky-tending-to-fat like other kids. I seemed to speak differently, too, although I'm not sure whether that's actually a Chinese trait or not. Did it have something to do with the size and shape of my Asiatic larynx and nasal passages? I don't know, but to my ear I had a strange pitch to my voice, a sort of high, lilting, whistling quality that made me cringe to hear it on tape. I'm probably crazy to think there's anything Chinese about this part of myself.

Whether or not my voice was really different, my appearance certainly was, and none of the other kids in school ever let me forget it. When I was five, my folks had moved to a little farm in the Born Again Bible Belt of Minnesota. That's Hickesville, the Boonies, Red Neck City. Everyone was white. Germanic or Scandinavian, maybe a little English, but white. And Christian. My family wasn't any of those things. My parents were hippies, atheists, graduate students. And not white. Well, OK, so my father was white, but my mother definitely wasn't. The neighbors didn't know exactly what she was. Chinese? Indian? It didn't matter. She was brown. And so were her kids.

"Chin Chan, China man, get his meals from a garbage can." I heard that nearly every week from the other kids, as they danced around me during recess, making slanty eyes with their fingers. Actually, this came from the more enlightened bigots. The ones who had taken the time to study the issue and determine which racial category I belonged to and which slur was appropriate. Most didn't bother with such distinctions.

"You see this?" a student asked me one day, pointing to a small, green country on the globe. I peered at it. It was Nigeria. "See that? That says 'nigger.' That's where you're from, 'cause you're a nigger." Not only bigoted, but illiterate as well.

But the Chinese thing was only a phase, I grew out of it. One of those unpleasant things you need to get out of your system, like gawkiness, or acne, or a breaking voice. You know, growing pains. Sometime around the age of twelve, my nose exploded, my eyes grew round, my hair lightened and took on a bit of a wave. Voila, instant white.

Well, not quite white. Maybe Mediterranean--anathema at one point in history as well, but pretty much accepted, nowadays, in polite society.

It seemed natural that I should turn white. My parents had never encouraged me to be Chinese. Well, I should say that my mom never did. That was her job, right? To teach me to be Chinese? My father was more than willing to spread his Jewishness around. He wasn't religious himself, but he loved the idea of being Jewish. The history, the culture, the jokes. "Oy, the goyim," he'd say. "They got no chutzpah."

But my mom was silent about her heritage. It was the family secret. Although she'd been raised in New York in Chinatown speaking Chinese, she never uttered a word of it in the house. She said she couldn't remember any. And she let us kids bust up her family heirlooms, like the dowry swords made from old coins that came from her grandparents' wedding. My sister and I smacked them together in sword fights, the coins tinkling down around us like a metallic rainshower with each thrust and parry.

The only hint of her past came from food. We ate a lot of Chinese food. Stirfry for dinner. Soy sauce-braised carp, or grouse, or pheasant, whenever we caught any. And chopsticks. But she cooked and served it up without comment, whereas my father went through this big Jewish routine whenever he opened a box of matzo. "Bar-ruch a-ta Adonai eh-lo-hei-nu," he'd intone, ripping off the cellophane.

After I started looking white, I never thought much about being Chinese. It was out of sight, so I pretty much pushed it out of mind. This lasted until I started applying to colleges. I had to fill out all these forms and check boxes specifying which race I was. All of the schools took pride in touting the "diversity" of their students, so I immediately identified myself as Chinese American. I thought it was an advantage--a unique feature that made me stand out from an anonymous sea of applicants. I checked those boxes for "Asian/Pacific Islander" proudly. It was my most Chinese moment.

But when I got into school, being Chinese didn't seem like a good idea afterall. On the one hand, believe it or not, there was guilt. Guilt for not looking Chinese. This came up right away. During orientation week my freshman year, the minority students' center held a big get-together for its "community." I felt like I should go, having checked all those boxes on my admissions forms. I felt sort of like I'd used the organization. Already the guilt was setting in.

As soon as I walked into the students' center, I knew I'd gone to the wrong place. Just about everyone there looked really ethnic--African American, Asian, Native American, Latino. And there I was, this white-looking guy. A few other students looked kind of white, too, but at least their name tags made up for it: last names like "Chan" or "Lee" or "Wong." What's my last name? Jewish. Great.

I stood around feeling really out of place until this other student began talking to me. He was African American. "So what are you?" he asked me, right away. I was relieved to tell him my mom was Chinese, like I was explaining myself. "Oh, OK, yeah, you can sort of see it," he said, after eyeing me carefully. "But would you look at some of the guys here? I don't know what they're supposed to be." I left a little later and never went back.

It was just as well that I wasn't welcome at the minority center, because I found out that the other students on my freshman hall frowned on minorities. It wasn't a matter of racism. They weren't racist. Everyone on my hall welcomed diversity. Everyone went to rallies on the Green to protest the university's investment in South Africa. It was a question of style, of fitting in, of dressing like everyone else, being laid back, sociable, and cool. Foreign students, the ones straight from China and Korea, weren't bad because they were Chinese or Korean. African American students had every right to eat by themselves in the dining hall and have their own frats. But those students just weren't that cool. They didn't fit in with what was normal. You never saw that kind of behavior in the "Breakfast Club"-- a film all the students on my hall tried to emulate. Well, OK, maybe you saw it in "Sixteen Candles"--from that weird, geeky, Chinese guy.

Don't misunderstand. I didn't pretend that I was white. I still admitted that I was half Chinese to everyone. But I avoided doing anything that would make me stand out and get labeled "Asian American." There were a few close calls all the same. I remember the worst incident.
The summer before my junior year I was working in Pennsylvania. Every now and then I had a long weekend and went up to Providence to hang out with a house full of friends. Quite often, I'd get there to find that all my friends had ditched me to take off for New York or Boston or Maine. So it would be me alone in the house with this Taiwanese student who was subletting a room. He didn't fit in too well. He had a bad hair cut and wore sneakers with black socks all the time. He spoke with an accent and studied engineering and economics. I talked to him a little, and we went to some movies. One time his mother came up from New York, and I took the two of them to the beach in my beat-up VW bug. She cooked us dinner later. She seemed really happy that her son had such a good American friend.

One thing that really drove me crazy was that this Chinese guy was sleeping in a lawn chair because he hadn't realized that his sublet would be unfurnished. I knew that an old roommate had left her bed in the last apartment I'd lived in, and I still had a key. It turns out that she had arranged to sell the damn thing to the next people moving in, but I didn't care. I hated her guts. So I went over there, got the bed, tied it down to my Volkswagon, and drove it back to the Chinese guy. He was really grateful.

I didn't see him much after I gave him the bed. I went back down to Pennsylvania and didn't return to the start of school. I ran into him halfway through the first semester in the dining hall. He was still wearing those awful clothes and was with a big group of foreign students. He came up to me in the middle of the dining room, grinning like an idiot. He was still thanking me for the damn bed. He turned to the foreign students. "This is my friend," he said, really loudly. I smiled nervously, conscious of everyone watching and listening. "He's Chinese, too," he exclaimed. The foreign students all gave me an odd look--I couldn't read it. Surprise? Confusion? I thought it was admiration. I went crimson from head to foot. I didn't see him after that, although he gave me his phone number in Providence, and New York.

Whenever I think about the incident, I still blush. I'm embarrassed by the way I acted, embarrassed for even thinking they admired me because they couldn't tell I was Chinese. I guess, even though I don't look Chinese, I can't escape it. It keeps coming back in the way I worry and in the way I treat other people. You know, sometimes the problem isn't what others do to you, it's what you do to yourself.

On the whole, though, I feel pretty lucky that I don't have to look Chinese and deal with all that other crap as well. I know what the alternative would be. I only need to look at my uncle. That's my mother's brother. He lives in the Northeast, has a professional job, and drives a Porsche. He's always rushing around, going to the club, the office, the gym. He got married my last year in college and I went out for the wedding. I didn't know his wife, I'd only met her once: vague impression of blonde hair and blue eyes, the type my uncle always goes for.

As soon as my uncle see me, it starts. "God, you're lucky," he says. "I wish I looked like you." My uncle, he's always going on about being Chinese, like it's the worst thing in the world. I guess he's really just like me. He only wants to feel sure of himself and to fit in. But in addition to the normal human burden of insecurity is added the extra weight of being Chinese. This does not help his self image. It's not that society is "oppressing" him or that he's being turned down for jobs or that he's being snubbed at parties or anything really important. It's just that he's not white, so he's not quite "normal."

Whenever he goes to a bar, he's never that "guy standing over there," or the "guy in the expensive suit," or the "guy with the black hair," or the "good-looking guy," to any of the women. He's always "that Asian guy." As in: "Yeah, look over there at that Asian guy looking at you." It drives him crazy.

My uncle's telling me all this while we're whipping down the highway in his Porsche. We're going to get something to eat. We're heading for this Yuppie bar and restaurant he goes to a lot when suddenly he hits the brakes.

"Shit," he says. "We can't go there, I'm not dressed. Whenever I go there I try to look really nice. Good suit, tie. I can't go looking like this." So he screeches down the next exit and heads the Porsche the other way.

"Maybe we'll go to Wong's, this Chinese place," he says to me. "Yeah, that'd be good. It's open late, service is fast, it doesn't matter how I'm dressed. Yeah, maybe Wong's'd be good."

But then he hits the brakes again. No, no, no. Not Wong's. Not tonight. He's getting married tomorrow (my God, why is he getting married?), he can't deal with Wong's tonight. Can't deal, I guess, with the Chinese ambiance. Can't deal with the fact that he blends in there, that it looks like he belongs. Can't deal with it because he doesn't want to belong. That's Chinese, it's not white, it's just not normal.

So we're off at the next exit and heading back in the direction we were first going. Yeah, we'll go to the other place. It'll be OK. We'll sit at the bar. You don't have to dress up at the bar.

"You're lucky," he says to me. "Really lucky."