Blog 13- Mixed Well

Heres my final essay, incase anyone wants to read it. Its pretty personal and surprisingly came at a time when i really needed to do some self reflection.

Mixed Well: Finding my Ethnic Identity
“What are you?” “What’s your background?” “Are you part Asian?” “Where are you from?” “You’re mixed, aren’t you?” I hardly take offense when people fire these questions at me. I am quite used to it actually; the race question almost always gets mixed into my conversations with new acquaintances. When people ask, it shows that they are interested in learning more about who I am, how I define myself and on what levels we can relate. However, the complications arise when people start asking questions so they can intentionally bump me into a preconceived, stereotypical category. The truth is that the typical aspects of my identity are not easy to stuff into one of these categories when my character consists of several dualities. I am Amanda and Ashley, Korean and White, Protestant and Catholic. I speak English and Spanish, lived in America and Argentina, reside in Pleasanton and Los Angeles. I am a dancer, a leader, a tennis player, a student, a server, a funny, compassionate and motivated person. All these words help define who I am. However, the more I mature and develop my character, the more I realize how conditional these words that describe me are. Once I get married, I can change my last name. I will not always be a student or live in my current house. As I grow older, I will gain and lose friends, maybe pick up another language or two, become too stiff to continue dancing, and might learn to be more tranquil and reserved. And although right now I am fervently passionate in my Christian beliefs, I realize that even that could change. So then the big question comes up: who am I really?
Out of all of the descriptions I have mentioned, the only one that will not physically change is my ethnicity. However, as I reflect on the past eighteen years of my life and the short time that I have spent pioneering this fresh college environment, I recognize the fact that we are constantly discovering, determining and redefining our understanding of our ethnic identity.
Besides the few years I spent living abroad in Buenos Aires, I have been raised in a quaint suburban city called Pleasanton. The population consists of predominantly white middle class yuppies that typically engage in the daily activities of mall runs, grocery shopping, hauling kids from soccer practice to piano lessons, attending weekly town meetings, hosting summer barbeques and of course, attending the annual county fair. This is the typical setting in which I grew up; although I recognized my Asian background since I was a child I considered myself simply American. You may not believe it, but racial diversity does exist in good old Pleasanton (you can even find a few black people if you look hard enough). However, suburban cities like this are covered with a false sense of unity caused by the colorblindness that blankets the neighborhood.
This environment, combined with my almost culture-less nurturing caused me to grow up very Americanized, or more commonly known as “white-washed”. Being second generation, my mother has a minimal Korean vocabulary. As a result, I have no knowledge of the language, have never visited the continent of Asia and am oblivious to many Korean traditions and celebrations. One of the only Korean cultural aspects I grew up with was Korean food, thanks to my grandma. While my mom raised us on the “luxurious” foods of the microwave, my grandmother satisfied our starving taste buds with delicious kimchee, galbi, bulgogi and naengmyeon dishes.
In high school I had a wide variety of friends. But after I made some of my closest friendships with Asian Americans, I began to notice how I acted differently when I was with these friends. Although I was not raised with a strong consciousness for Asian culture, I soon found myself relating to their appearances, mannerisms and dispositions. I felt special and distinct from the city’s monotonous lifestyle and we began considering ourselves the “novelties” of Pleasanton. I exerted strong sentiments of Asian pride by appropriating or taking fragments of the Korean ethnicity and botching them together to help define a newly discovered portion of my identity. And I clearly remember checking Asian American on all of my AP tests and SATs. I might have not felt complete by checking that oversimplified box, but I felt like I identified with that group the most. Was I in for a culture shock.
Once I moved into the International Residential College at USC, I met people from around the world. The more I began to learn about these worldly students from Hong Kong, Taiwan and Korea, my strong identification to the Asian community received a good kick in the face. Who was I kidding? I am not “Asian” compared to these people.
Soon, I became an active member of the InterVarsity Trojan Christian Fellowship, a community that is dominated by “ABC’s”, or American-Born-Chinese. Even though I didn’t share the same backgrounds and experiences with the majority, I was openly welcomed into this group. And as much as I would like to disbelieve it, I have a hunch that my physical looks contributed to my easy acceptance. Even if I do not look fully Asian, my dark straight hair and brown almond eyes have helped to shape my identity. In the book I am currently reading called Check All that Apply, biracial author Sundee Tucker Frazier claims that “our identity is affected by how others reflect ourselves back to us, what they do and don’t remark on, and the content of those remarks” (Frazier 36). What we look like and how others perceive and define us have impacts on how we are treated and how we view ourselves. For the most part, my new friends saw me as Asian, so I embraced that perception and let them submerge me into their world of dim sum, Korean soap operas, J-Pop and Chinese markets.
Although many incidences built up to the milestone in the development of my identity, I believe it was a specific moment during Spring Break that launched my major epiphany. I was sitting in my room with one of my best friends, telling her all about the diverse experiences of my college life and the wonderful friends I had made. After I showed pictures and continued talking about my experiences with different people, she began to say things like “Is he Asian?” “Is she Asian?” and “Let me guess, these people you are talking about are Asian”. My answer every time, to my astonishment, was yes. How did this happen? I had turned away from a homogenous white Pleasanton and surrounded myself with a homogenous racial group of friends. Somehow during the college adjustment I had greatly overcompensated my lack of Asian identity.
However, I was not the only one experiencing this scary Asian uniformity. InterVarsity staff members also noticed this sameness in the fellowship and called for an Asian family meeting. Here we gathered together to eat Asian food, celebrate our culture together, and discuss the unique and key role we had in the InterVarsity community. As an icebreaker, we took turns talking about our ethnic background and how Asian identity has played a role in our lives. As my friends took turns recognizing and publicly announcing major aspects of their identity, I could sense that there were a significant amount of people in the room who had never thought about this before. As the night progressed, I could practically see people removing their colorblinded lenses and realizing how unintentionally exclusive we were as a predominantly Asian fellowship.
When it came my turn, I was ready. I had finally come to the current realization of my ethnic identity. I proudly stood and told the group that I am a Korean-British-Scottish-Irish-Welsh-German-American. Not only am I fully Asian but I am also fully white. It has taken me my entire life to comprehend this, and I am still shaping my identity. As a biracial person I have the advantage of being a strong agent in how I identify myself; I almost always get to choose the category I wish to belong to. Unfortunately, this is also a problem, because in many cases I am forced to choose a category in which I do not feel completely represented.
After this exercise, we began to discuss how our Asian culture might turn others away from feeling completely accepted into our community. I had a lot of thoughts and insight on this issue, being one of the few people with a white background in the room. I was able to share how the members of Intervarsity have helped me to come into contact with my Korean ethnicity and further develop my identity. However, I have felt the exclusiveness in our group and the need to suppress my white background when people start speaking in Mandarin or looking at me with disbelief once they find out that I have never seen the Korean film My Sassy Girl. Imagine then how one hundred percent full bred European Americans feel when they check out our fellowship.
The students began to agree and expand on the issue, until one of my friends brought up a legitimate counterargument: “If other people don’t feel like they belong in this community, then why should we have to change who we are in order to make them feel welcome? Doesn’t that just mean that there is a better community for them?” It is true; we should not have to cover up our identity in order to appease everyone’s comfort. However, that is when I realized that our ethnicity is not the only component of our identity. It may be a permanent element, but there are so many other sides to who we are that our ethnic pride can prevent others from discovering the rest. The truth is, all of us are one hundred percent Homo sapiens and equal in the eyes of God. Ethnicity should be recognized and embraced, but should most definitely not hinder us from sharing God’s love with other people.
During this last semester of my first year at college I have found a sense of wholeness after struggling for eighteen years with my two halves. It has been a long process in learning how to reconcile and integrate my different cultures, heritages, and traditions with the current racial realities of society. However, as I grow older my notion of identity will continue to grow with me. It takes work to maintain a multiethnic identity in our racially polarized world. But according to Sundee Frazier, our goal as multiracial people “is to find the identities that fit and that are true to reality, to know who we are and to accept ourselves as we are so that we can live out our God-given purposes” (50).