The following is forthcoming in Journal of the Asian American Renaissance, V. 2, N. 1, 1996

One afternoon in 1963, my father tied one end of a long rope to the leg of his bed, took hold of the other end, and stepped out of his bedroom window. He was planning to elope with my mother that night, and lowering himself to the ground seemed like a clever way of escaping his parents who were notoriously light sleepers. As soon as my father put his weight on the rope, the bed slid across the floor, slammed into the wall, and dropped him ten feet. My father decided to take the stairs.

What drove my father out his bedroom window was his parents' bitter dislike of my mother. My father and she had met in high school and decided to marry when they were only eighteen. His parents objected, largely, my father says, because my mother was Chinese. His parents disagree, however, claiming that the real issue was that she wasn't Jewish. "We're not racists," my grandfather insisted years later, when I was a senior in high school and went to Florida to visit them for the first time. "We have great respect for the Chinese culture," my grandmother added.

The reason my grandparents disliked my mother has never been fully resolved, and it is one of many mysteries in my life with race at its core. Others include the role race played in my parents' attraction to one another, and the exact racial category to which my father belongs. "I'm Jewish," he stubbornly says, "not White." To my father's mind, "White" is primarily an Anglo-Saxon Protestant phenomena, and has nothing to do with who he is, regardless of how he looks and what other people say.

Despite these ambiguities, two things are at least clear. First, I am the child of mixed-race parents. Second, I am on the leading edge of a rising demographic trend. Since the late 1960s, when the Supreme Court struck down the last anti-miscegenation laws in the US, interracial marriages have steadily increased. "The rate of married interracial couples has jumped 275 percent since 1970," one Seattle newspaper recently reported, while a national magazine announced: "in 1990 there were nearly 2 million children under 18" of mixed race in the country.

This population development has stirred up considerable interest and activity. In the last few years, academic texts have appeared talking about and defining the new "multiracial" generation, support groups have formed, Web sites have been established, and a political movement has been born. In July this past year, several "interracial" and "multiracial" organizations marched on Washington to demand that the Census Bureau include a "multiracial" category in the year 2000 Census. This proposition has created controversy, particularly over the impact a new category would have on existing Affirmative Action programs. Complicating the issue even more, some African American leaders have charged that "multiracialists" are actually Blacks attempting to escape their "Blackness," while leaders in the so-called "multiracial movement" counter charge that adherence to existing racial categories perpetuates racial separatism and blocks Civil Rights progress.

I am not sure whether I support or even fully understand the political objectives and repercussions of the multiracial movement, but I do empathize with its inception. At root, the movement exists because a growing number of people do not clearly fit into any existing racial categories. Growing up in Minnesota, I was constantly confronted by a question I did not know how to answer. "So, where are you from?" people asked me. "I live here," I said, but learned that wasn't what they wanted to hear. "No, what nationality are you?" they would clarify, or alternatively: "What's your ethnicity?" "What color are you?" "What's your race?"

Of course, a few people didn't ask, but that was because they thought they already knew what I was. "Korean, huh?" the school bus driver said to my father shortly after we moved to a rural area in Anoka County. "Excuse me?" my father said. "You got adopted Korean kids," the driver said. "I seen a few others in the next township." "No, no," my father said. "Their mom's Chinese." "Gee," the driver said doubtfully. "But they sure look Korean."

Most people, however, didn't know where I was from, and I didn't know what to tell them. In retrospect, no one meant badly by asking me to define myself, they were merely curious because I didn't look like anyone they'd ever seen, and my parents weren't like any other couple they knew. This did not, however, make my task any easier. "Tell them you're Eurasian," my father said, who generally wanted to complicate things. In the end, I said that I was half-Chinese and half-Jewish, which most people accepted without further question. Both terms seemed clear, and it made sense that I was exactly one-half of each thing that my parents were.

There is, however, an underlying ambiguity to my answer. It is rather like saying you are half hungry or half cold. What does it mean to be half Chinese? Is "Chineseness" a definite quantity which can be neatly sectioned and inherited? Does it mean that half of my features are undeniably "Asiatic," perhaps manifesting in a bizarre bi-lateral asymmetry? And how can I be half Jewish? If "Jewish" is a religious term, how can I worship half a religion? And if it is a racial, ethnic, or cultural term, what are the qualities of which I am only in partial possession?

Growing up, I never thought much about what it meant to be composed of two racial halves. Indeed, I didn't really think of myself in racial terms. True, if someone asked if I was Asian, I said "yes," but to me this simply meant that my mother was Chinese. I similarly said "yes" when asked if I was Jewish. The only time I said "no" was when someone asked if I was White, since my father insisted that he wasn't. My identity was primarily constructed around family history, not pre-defined racial categories. I was a weird, chimerical "half-Chinese, half-Jewish," and I didn't have a clear idea what else people were looking for when they asked me what I was.

I continued this pattern when I was applying to colleges, automatically checking the box for "Asian" on my admissions forms whenever I had to identify my race. Once in school, however, I began to notice that there was a disparity between what I'd checked and how I felt. The first time I went to the Minority Student's Center on campus, I was conscious that I didn't look very Asian and that I didn't feel accepted. I began throwing away the Center's weekly fliers, feeling vaguely guilty, as if I were pretending to be something which I wasn't. After a lifetime of simply accepting the term "Asian" and "half Asian" as part of my identity, I finally began to wonder what it actually meant, what purpose it served, and whether it was really true.

The problem of coming to terms with a racial identity is not confined to children of mixed-race parents. I know many Asian immigrants who have balked at being called Asian, and who are unsure of whether to accept the label or not. "I never thought of myself as Asian," a co-worker confided to me. "Back home, I only thought of myself as Taiwanese." The question of racial identity is particularly marked among Korean Adoptees, and in many ways their experiences seem to closely match my own. Born in Korea and raised by White parents in the US, mostly in the Upper Midwest, many Adoptees I know were slow to think of themselves in standard racial terms. Although they automatically assumed labels such as "Asian" and "Korean", they had no internal sense of what the term meant. As they got older and confronted other people's expectations, they finally discovered they didn't know how to define themselves. Were they Asian or Korean simply because of the way they looked and where they were born, regardless of how and where they were raised? "I don't know what I am," a Korean Adoptee friend said to me. "I've been taking Korean language classes to get in touch with my culture, but you know what? I hate it. I don't feel like turning Korean. Maybe I'm not Asian. Maybe I really am White, just no one treats me that way because of how I look."

Everything would be much simpler if there were rigid standards for what constituted each race- -if there were a Periodic Table of Races which clearly and unambiguously identified people the way atoms of hydrogen can be separated from those of helium. But race is not so concrete. It is only a label. It is a term people create to describe how they see themselves in relation to other people. One problem with such a construction is that individual perceptions are often at odds with general consensus. My father, for example, defies common opinion and labels himself non-White because he feels fundamentally different from the predominantly White and Christian population around him.

Speaking with others who were attempting to define their racial identity, I slowly realized why the process was so confusing for me. I had assumed that racial terms were real and objective, that there were rigid criteria which existed external to me. But I could not reconcile my sense of being "Asian" or "Jewish" or "White" with what other people assumed, and these things were only elements of who I was, not the thing itself. I finally realized that there was no general consensus on what I was, and that I was free to define myself as I saw fit.

Freedom to choose is the fundamental hallmark of all mixed-race children. In my experience, some people of mixed race choose to identify with a single racial label, others with more than one, and some with none at all. For myself, when people ask if I am "Asian American," I now carefully say that "I identify with an Asian American experience." I also identify with a "Jewish American experience," and even, to a degree, with a "White experience." This may seem like a semantic sleight of hand, but it comes the closest that language can to describing how I feel.

Given my experiences with race, it makes sense for me to embrace the objectives and aims of the current "multiracial movement." Proponents of the term argue that identifying as "multiracial" frees people from the narrow definition of a single racial label. The term implies that each individual is constructing his or her own identity, free from preconceptions and assumptions. The word "multiracial" is also attractive, I must admit, because it is shorter and easier to say than "half Chinese, half-Jewish".

Despite the seductiveness of the term, I am unsure whether to use it. Despite claims that "multiracial" does not confine anyone to a specific identity, I think the label has actually acquired a considerable amount of baggage and connotations of its own which I do not necessarily support. Of course, I am free to use the term as I see fit, but why should I adopt a word which is so obviously tied to a political controversy? On the whole, I do not feel any need to join the multiracial movement. I understand why it exists and share common concerns. But I feel comfortable checking "Other" on census forms and even "Asian American," if I choose. So what purpose does the movement serve for me?

My feelings about identifying as "multiracial" are mirrored by how I feel about the term "Hapa." The word refers to people of mixed Asian and White descent, and last year I learned that a Hapa discussion group was forming in the area. I didn't know what there was to discuss, but forming a group seemed intriguing, even significant, so I agreed to attend the first meeting. It was to be a potluck, so even if there was nothing to talk about there would at least be something to eat.

It was a warm, sunny day when the Hapa group met and, although turn out was light (only half a dozen people showed up), the food was good and there was plenty of mingling and conversation. Every now and then, someone asked what everyone else thought about being Hapa, but the question died each time. What was there to say? That we each had one parent who was Asian? We already knew that. That people often asked us where we were from? Yeah, irritating, but there didn't seem to be anything more to add after the first anecdote. That some of us felt Asian, others didn't, and still others only to a degree? "Don't bore me, I'm here to eat," one woman said, and there was a general murmur of agreement.

Toward the end of the evening, the landlord of the apartment building where we were meeting stopped by and helped himself to pot stickers and Three Bean salad. Then he wandered over to the barbecue grill were I was talking to another guest, a photographer and fellow Hapa. The landlord had a puzzled look on his face.

"Hey, there's something funny going on here," he said. "Are you guys all related or something?"

Several other Hapas were within earshot, and they glanced over.

"Uh, no, I'm afraid not," I said, and the photographer shook his head as well. We knew what the man was referring to, that there was a physical resemblance between all of us, but I felt a strange reluctance to explain it.

The landlord stared at us. "No, really, are you guys brothers?"
"Nope," the photographer said.

The man scratched his head and looked around at the other guests, as if pleading for some sort of confirmation. No one said anything. "I don't know what it is," he said finally.

The landlord left a few minutes later, and there was a moment of dead silence. The episode seemed emblematic. We all knew what the landlord wanted to hear. We knew that we only had to say "we're all half Asian" to dispel his confusion. But no one had said anything, and suddenly I felt ill at ease. The outside scrutiny had highlighted our similarities, but the universal response had been silence. Perhaps, after a life time of resisting other people's attempts to label us, to fit us neatly into a slot, we were opposed to any form of collective identification. We were even opposed to acknowledging something so evident and meaningless as our common physical appearance. Such self consciousness was troubling, it spoke of defensiveness and insecurity. Certainly it was worthy of comment and discussion by our group.

The photographer cleared his throat.
"So, you want another bratwurst?" he asked.

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