San Bernardino, CA
December 1967

"But Sharon," said my grandmother, sitting across from Mom at the dinner table, buttering a piece of white bread, "won't your children be...." She paused, searching for the right words, "...confused?"

It was incredibly hot in the kitchen, and Mom could feel rivulets of sweat running down her sides under her pullover and in the waistband of pink pedal pushers. Heat continued to radiate from the gas oven. Mom's mind was only half on the conversation. She was thinking of the most recent letter she had received. She was thinking of Dad, who was no longer a music major at Redlands University and had narrowly escaped being drafted into the Army. They had both realized that he could have been mistaken for Vietnamese and shot in "friendly fire" if he was fighting on the ground. Enlisted in the Navy instead, he was at boot camp in San Diego, soon to be 2nd class petty officer/ machinist mate on the U.S.S. Hancock, stationed off the northern coast of Vietnam.

"Don't you think it will be difficult for your children?" Grandma held the slice of bread out as if it were a crystal ball or flattened palm in which Mom would certainly see her future.

"What do you mean, Mom?"
"Getting married to this...this...Japanese person." Grandma's thin lips shriveled as if she had tasted something bitter.
"Mom," she sighed long-sufferingly, "Michael's an American, not Japa..."
"He's dark, Sharon." Grandma hissed what she had up until that point kept to herself.
"So?" Mom said, only realizing she had spoken aloud when she saw her mother's pursed lips.
Grandma sighed, "Don't you see?"
"We've already set the date. January 26th."
"Sharon, I'm trying to help you..."
Mom stabbed at the dry roast chicken breast on her plate. She didn't look up as she said,
"The best way to help is to give me your blessing."
"Your children will hate you."
Grandma spat out the words.
Mom sat there stunned. She heard the screen door slam behind her and exhaled, not realizing that she had been holding her breath. She turned to her father.

It had been a rough day for him, working construction in Riverside County. He carefully wiped his face, bald head and neck with an old red bandanna--an indication of his reluctance to get involved--before saying,
"It's your choice."

It was my parents' choice. California was the first state, in 1948, to decide that interracial marriages were not unconstitutional. It took almost twenty years, until 1967, for anti-miscegenation laws to be struck down nationwide in the aptly named Supreme Court decision, Loving vs. Virginia.

Grandma did not "forgive" Mom for marrying my father until after I was born, until after she got to know my father and his family. It wasn't easy for her. I think she genuinely believed she had been trying to help, offering my mother "good" advice. I became the living symbol of what my grandmother had feared most -- World War II propaganda come to life -- "the enemy" marrying into the family, changing the blood, changing the future.

I am not sure if I have forgiven her yet.

I look into the mirror and try to see myself as a stranger might: dark brown eyes and hair, full lips and light skin. I can see in the slight curving of my eyes my paternal grandparents' Asian faces, my mother's Native American features. Under bright, artificial light, I can see the slight yellow cast of my skin, my irises so dark that I can only see the pupil if I look close.

In Hawaii, I grew up hapa haole, of mixed race. But in England and in Colorado, the identity hapa was taken from me; I was labeled white, rather than being categorized as other, like many of my darker-skinned friends. In California, I am once again hapa and difficult to conveniently categorize, although here, often other Asian-Americans (unless they are originally from Hawaii) do not recognize me as another Asian. Never before was my race and ethnicity an issue to me, and I have tried to discover why. How has my racial identity shifted? It wasn't a change from the inside, but rather from the outside. It is based upon other people's assumptions, differing in each of the places I have lived.

For many years, the cultural model of assimilation, "the melting pot," was touted as the only way to be an American. Yet the standard for this model was based on the politically and economically more powerful European settlers' values and cultural norms. In the 1960s and '70s, a more inclusive ideology was suggested -- "a stew" or "mixed salad" -- whereby immigrants to America might maintain their distinct cultures, languages and traditions, their ethnicity or ancestry, while at the same time recognizing their "Americanness."

Today, rising numbers of Americans are, like myself, of mixed ethnicity. Many of us are proud of this heritage and interested in our multiple ancestries. We do not fit the limiting, artificial categories of race -- White, Black or Negro, American Indian or Alaskan Native, and Asian or Pacific Islander -- outlined in Statistical Directive 15, which was adopted in 1978 by the Office of Management and Budget and used in the 1990 U.S. Census of the Population. We are "Multiracial-Americans."

Nationality is a complex and often shifting set of political, historical and socio-economic circumstances. A group of people recognize themselves as a country. They identify themselves by their country of origin. At the birth of our relatively young nation, perhaps people wanted to be known only by their new national identity -- American.

Yet saying I am simply "American" not only fails to address the complexity of my being: It nullifies the elements that make me whole. It disregards my ethnicity and ancestry and the many cultural values attached. When I am labeled white, I am not seen in relation to the other parts of myself I value. For in addition to being of several European ethnicities -- Scottish, Irish, Dutch, German, English, French, and Spanish -- I am also Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and Native American (Iroquois and Delaware).

When your veins flow with the blood of twelve nations, you belong to none, yet are encompassed by all.

Brunswick, Georgia
March 30, 1969
When Mom filled out the application for my birth certificate, she was faced with the following question:
Race of child:
__White __Black.
"But my baby's half-Asian."

The nurse, a Caucasian matriarch dressed in starched white, many shades lighter than her skin, replied, "Honey, that baby ain't Black, so she's White." And so I am, according to Georgia Department of Public Health records.

My father, too, was classified "White" on my birth certificate, but he gained none of the privileges whites at this time took for granted -- something as simple as the right to walk by or to go into a store without being stared at by others.

Lea, the middle sister, was born in Jacksonville, Florida and was classified "Malaysian," even though she has no Malay blood. This practice was apparently discontinued in 1971, when my youngest sister, Laura, was born in Lamar, California. According to my mother, she is not classified by race.

Have these slips of paper changed who we are?
A paper that says you're white means nothing when your dark-skinned, Asian father moves back to Hawaii -- where many Asian-Americans live -- taking his family with him just to feel he belongs.

Makakilo, Hawaii 1978
Defining the "Other," Hawaiian Style

Haole n. White person, American, Englishman, Caucasian; formerly, any foreigner.
v. ["To be haole"] To act like a white person, to ape the white people, or assume airs of superiority, often said disparagingly, especially of half-whites
(Pukui 58)

At my elementary school, the last day of school was called "Kill Haole Day." It was when kids of the non-white races, who were in the majority, would pick on white kids -- call them names, throw rotten eggs at them, beat them up.

I don't remember anything ever actually happening on this day; most of the white kids stayed at home, and most of the kids talking about participating were part-white themselves. All I remember was trying to fit in, being a tomboy, acting as if I were tough. I did not know that there were decades of suppressed rage behind what we were doing.

We were unaware of the implications behind racial jokes -- which in Hawaii were common but not taken seriously or intended to offend. Everybody made fun of everybody, knew all the local stereotypes -- that Chinese were pake, interested only in money; that Japanese were xenophobic and ambitious; that whites were greedy and loud; while Hawaiians were labeled lazy. In some ways, these racial jokes provided a safety valve for the unnamed feelings many of us did not acknowledge.

Our persecution of white children re-enacted on a smaller scale the resentment of some of our parents, grandparents and great-grandparents, the collective anger against generations of oppression by white lunas, overseers on the plantations, and white missionaries. We were emulating a dangerous precedent about which we knew nothing, and yet we somehow remained ignorant that this was racism -- in our own school, our own neighborhood.

Would I have held down little Aaron -- the boy whose breath was tinged with the sour odor of milk and fear -- while Kaui beat his white skin red and purple? These were the colors of our anger, of misunderstanding and revenge. For what? The fact that Aaron did better in class than we? Or that his clothes were newer and more expensive? Or was it his Southern accent that we disliked, his way of ignoring the taunts and jeers every day as he got off the bus?

Aaron does not exist. He is all the children who did not fit in, some white, some black, but more often defined as from the Mainland, a place that was too far away and alien for many of us to understand.

"Racism" was something that happened on the Mainland: Whites against Blacks. We did not think that racism could happen in Hawaii. We did not think.

Pearl City, Hawaii
Christmas 1982
Christmas festivities in my family consisted of a mixture of American tradition and several local customs unique to the region: eating kim chee and sushi with our Christmas turkey or ham, making a gingerbread house garnished with imported Japanese candy bought at Shirokiya, and sometimes having a picnic of hamburgers and lomi lomi salmon at the beach.

On this occasion, my sisters and I had decorated our living room with the usual Christmas finery. In one corner a Douglas Fir (one of the trees shipped in by the thousands from the mainland U.S. in refrigerated Matson shipping containers, the oddity of which we took for granted) wilted in its solution of sugar water. We made a construction paper fireplace where we hung our stockings. Antique hand-blown glass ornaments and handicrafts we had made in school (like the blue sequin-covered eggshell ornament which held my front-toothless 5th grade portrait) were in positions of prestige on the tree.

On Christmas morning we woke our parents up at 5 a.m. and began digging into our loot. The room smelled of Christmas pine and excitement. There are several gifts I remember from that year: a pink Barbie sportscar, silly putty and, from our paternal grandparents on Maui, dolls in costumes from around the world.

The card was inscribed, "To the girls. Value your ancestors. Love, Grandma and Grandpa Kwon."

Each doll stood about six inches tall and, as promised, was dressed in a "traditional" costume. Miss Japan wore a kimono adorned with a cherry blossom pattern and a golden obi, and she had an elaborate hairstyle. Was she from Tokyo or Osaka? The box did not specify. Miss America wore leather buckskin and beaded moccasins. She was an amalgam of popular images of Native Americans, like the Disneyfied Pocahontas would be years later. Miss Spain had a long flamenco-style dress, and in her hair there was a veil held by a miniature carved wooden comb. She was not from Galicia, the Northwestern region of Spain (once a part of Portugal) from whence our great-grandmother came. Yet we thought of her as being Spanish.

Each doll had some item of clothing that made her representative of her nation, and each doll had the appropriately colored skin and eyes to match the perceived norm of her country of origin. But each doll failed to fully represent the ethnic and cultural diversity within each country.

What I discovered later is something difficult to explain. My sisters and Iare Japanese, Native American, Spanish, etc..., but who we are as people, as "individuals," differs greatly from each of the nations represented by the dolls.

We have an identity, but it is not determined by country of origin. It is based on what our family has done together or what we have done individually -- like driving to Hanauma Bay to snorkel, or taking a Kentucky Fried Chicken picnic up to the mountains of Aiea, or helping Grandma Kwon prepare bul go gi, Korean bar-be-cue beef -- that makes us who we are.

Growing up was a mish-mash of cultural traditions. We'd watch Disney movies like The Jungle Book and Cinderella on one day and dance hula the next.Hawaii's multiethnic "culture" offered us these choices, choices we could make according to individual taste and inclination. The cultural activities I enjoyed, like the Japanese Obon festivals in the summer at the local Hongwanji to honor our dead relatives, were sometimes different than those my sisters chose to attend.

My sisters and I are individuals. Doesn't the intrinsic meaning of that word allow for difference?

Oxford, England
1992
Justin, my husband, had been working in England for about two years. He was responsible for arranging housing, excursions and social events for an American agency which brought American students to Oxford to study. Justin's father is Danish, his mother English, Irish and Huguenot French. He is a British citizen by birth but grew up in Monterrey, Mexico and Detroit, Michigan. He, like myself, has always felt "different." But for him this feeling has come from inside -- the feeling of being an observer, antsider -- a person who has adapted to living in many different countries. It is an altogether different experience when this feeling of being an outsider is imposed on you from the outside.

On a typically gray evening, Justin and I were invited to a dinner party by an estate agent ("real estate agent" in American-English) with whom Justin often consulted. The night air smelled of ivy and dampness. The estate agent and his mother had offered to pick us up.

"So, how're you adjusting to our weather?"
At first I did not realize that the estate agent was speaking to me. He glanced at me in the rearview mirror, his horn-rimmed glasses and balding pate glowing slightly red from a traffic light. He and Justin had been talking business, while I was looking out the window at the rapidly passing landscape, lights whizzing by. "Oh, yes...I am. Thank you," I replied, uncertain as to why I had become unaccountably shy and withdrawn since I had come to England -- a 180 degree turn from my usual personality.

The estate agent continued talking with Justin. His mother--a woman roughly in her sixties, wearing an old-fashioned overcoat, wool dress and stockings, whom I (knowing it was a stereotype) imagined knitted, owned a cat and never turned up the heat in her house -- offered a word or two occasionally. I tuned in and out on what they were saying: "Yes, housing starts these days...outrageous....New apartments available?...Oxford's growing too fast....students.... would be a suburb of London if not for the zoning laws...."

We spun around one of the freeway medians, which in England are circular and called "roundabouts." Suddenly, I heard the words, "...Japanese...yes, my wife is part Asian." Justin said this proudly, holding my hand. I noticed the mother's shoulders stiffen. Her son said nothing until we arrived at the house.

For the rest of the evening the estate agent's mother refused to speak with me, avoided my gaze. Her son eyed me strangely from under his bushy eyebrows.

At the time I racked my brain to discover what I might have said or done to offend them. Later, I realized it was nothing I had done, but simply who I was.

USA 1990 Census of Population Form
When it comes to the question of race, here's what you see:

United States Department of Commerce.
1990 Census of Population: Social and Economic Characteristics.
Washington: Government Printing Office, November 1993.

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