Why Not Take All of Me?
By Viola Ware
The local jewelry store recently closed, leaving me to use one of many pawn shops in town to size the watch I just received from an online order. The lady behind the jewelry counter measuring my wrist could not believe the size of it. If you set two quarters side by side on the back of my wrist, one will slip off. Turn my wrist sideways, and only one quarter has room to rest. They are tiny. At first the woman appeared in sour spirits, but slowly sweetened under a wash of my dry, self-deprecating humor. White and middle-aged with long ash-blonde hair, she began talking about these Navajo bracelets the shop recently received, speculating that they were owned by the same person who must have been very small as they were metal with no clasp. She looked me in the eye and said, “Do you wear Navajo jewelry often?”
As I left the shop, I texted my best friend, “Now I’m Navajo?”
My mother is Korean and my father was Welsh/Irish and Portuguese. I have dark, French-roast-brown eyes, long black hair, pouty lips, a long chin, flat face and freckles. I am horangi, a tiger, who eats cheeseburgers. Though coming from a long line of short and round, I am fine boned and the thinnest of my siblings at 5’7” and 160 pounds that fluctuates wildly throughout the year depending on my level of stress and involvement with men in a Bridget Jones sort of irony, though not as dizzy. I will be the first in my family to graduate from college.
I grew up in a house with a WWII and Korean War Veteran father who spent months on end away at sea as a Merchant Marine and a mother whose broken English we had to translate at the grocery store and for whom we patiently spelled out words as she wrote our absentee slips for school. My mother laughingly tells new acquaintances that Sesame Street taught us English. Inside the home, my mother did her best to raise me as a Korean daughter, wife-to-be, wholly lacking in desire and full of devotion, while outside the home America pummeled me with its proud and persistent individualism. When my father was home, we were not allowed to speak Korean. I grew up with two older brothers, and, much to my mother’s dismay, spent my childhood climbing trees and trying to play with their Star Wars figures, growing quickly bored with the baby dolls my mother kept buying me.
My Korean is the most invisible part of me. No one ever sees it. Everyone seems to think I am Native American. Even Sherman Alexi, upon first meeting me, asked, “What tribe are you?” White people often make racist Asian jokes or comments in front of me or even to me not realizing I am Asian. In Korea, I was picked on by other children because they always saw the White in me. Older students often tried to practice their English on me, or did not bother to hide their contempt, “We love your American movies, but we hate you.” In Taiwan it was enough to be chased from playgrounds by groups of children in school uniforms. I learned early to wait until the other children were home eating dinner before I climbed the fences to empty playgrounds. In inner city neighborhoods in Seattle, I bore the hate of the African American children who saw a middle finger when I raised a hand or rolling eyes when I looked at my brother, justification to gang up on us six to two.
White guys like me because I am an accessible Asian with big breasts. I actually caught a guy I dated bragging to a buddy of his when he thought I couldn’t hear, “Dude, she’s Asian, but she wears a D cup. I’m not shittin’ you.” That one ended about as soon as it started.
So, I’m an Asian/Hispanic/White, Buddhist, Liberal, single mother and a member of the working class. In the realm of my sexuality, I am physically bisexual, but emotionally straight because I have never explored that part of my personality. For multiple reasons, I was too afraid to. I exist in a strange place on the spectrum. I have never told anyone that as a child I wanted to be a boy. That I found women’s bodies to be sexually stimulating long before I taught myself to desire a male body. I witnessed what happened when my oldest brother was kicked out of the home for coming out of the closet. My mother openly spoke of gay men deserving to be shot on sight. No one close to me will ever know this about me. I am enough of an oddity in this small rural White community I live in where I get chewed out at bus stops for being Native American and not having to pay taxes. Despite some tentative experimentation, I suppose I have swallowed and internalized hegemonic heterosexuality.
I am privileged in the sense that I behave White. I am an American, I have no accent and my norms are typically the norms of those around me. I may be half Asian, but I am U.S.-born and partially White, knowing next to nothing of my Hispanic heritage other than my grandmother came to America on a boat with her father as servants of an immigrating family. I am one of the racial groupings that exist in that middle ground between privilege and oppression, and I’ve assimilated well.
I guess in many ways, I fit the “Model Minority” stereotype. If anyone noticed I am Asian, anyway. I wish they would because that is a big part of who I am. Unlike when I lived in Seattle, I don’t talk openly about my Buddhist beliefs where I live now in this little rural town, at least not until I know someone very well. For a place with a population of just over 19,000, there are 27 churches and no open Buddhist communities that I have been able to find. I do wear a Buddha tile on my necklace from a temple in Tibet and keep lotus symbols on my desk.
Once, several years ago while spending time with an old friend sipping drinks at her favorite bar, I made a joke using the old taxonomy, mainly for my own amusement at the sounds of the word, “So, if my mother is Mongoloid and my father Caucasoid, does that make me a Mongolocauc?” A young man who had been hanging drunkenly near us suddenly became irate, “Why do you guys always have to throw your ethnicity in our faces? What do you gain for making me feel bad about being White?” And then he went on about being so-manieth generation “Oregonian” and how he never felt the need to rub anyone’s nose in it. It drives me a little batty when White people get upset and say, “Why do we have to focus on our differences? This is why there’s a problem!” I want to rattle them and say, “But I am different, and that’s what I love about myself, because I am not you.” White people have reminded me my whole life about how I am different, and now, when I agree, when I have come to love how I am different, they get angry and want me to ignore it and embrace their standards of “similarities.”
Growing up, I spent my life as the other with my mother telling me, “Don’t be American” and my father telling me, “Don’t be Korean” (he slammed his hand on the table when I suggested applying for a scholarship as a Korean-American, “You’re American:you were born in America!”), then on top of it all feeling ashamed at being this strange girl-boy creature. I had to carve out my own little realm of identity, this in between place that I saw in the mirror every day in which I existed completely alone. There truly is not one piece of me from which I identify more than the others because I am all of them. While I have been fortunate to not have lived under the same persistent threat of violence because of my skin that marks the life experience of other women of color, I have had to live in a place where the existence of my self, in part or all of its forms, was denied existence.
I can certainly identity with Audre Lorde, who because of her multiple identities always found herself being defined as other or feeling forced into a fragmented existence. I wanted to stand up and shout when I read, “My fullest concentration of energy is available to me only when I integrate all the parts of who I am, openly, allowing power from particular sources of my living to flow back and forth freely through all my different selves, without the restrictions of externally imposed definition.”[1]
By simply smacking a label on an individual either by their race or their gender or any one piece of them and ignoring the rest denies their humanity, the complexities that define us as human and dismisses a unique contribution to the overall body of knowledge of the human condition. What would happen if all landscape painters wandered into the desert and painted only tumbleweeds on a sunny day? Would people who had never visited the desert have any indication of what a desert was like from their paintings? Absolutely not. People could develop all manner of misconceptions and miss the vast diversity of desert landscapes and the variety of life that exists there. They would never know the fearsome beauty of a desert thunderstorm. Or what if a doctor focused only on your moodiness as PMS, completely missing symptoms of diabetes? Derived from generalities, this could lead to misdiagnosis and treatment of a severe condition. A friend of mine was misdiagnosed twice, dismissed as a moody teenager and wound up in diabetic coma. Once an MIT scholar, due to major cognitive damage, she had to relearn basic math. By not taking the individual and their experiences in their entirety, no matter how complex, we commit the same sort of sin of generality and stereotyping; “the primary cause of all oppression, forgetting other distortions around difference.”[2]
Neglecting to explore multiple identities places a limit on our ability to learn and grow. Our capacity for change will be stunted. We would not understand how racism and classism interlock in supporting negative stereotypes for poor people of color. We might never know how sexism within the Asian community can affect the overall opportunities for Asian women in America who deal with a double whammy of sexism as women in American and women in their own communities. Much less, we would never bother to peer through the window long enough to see how that can be further exacerbated by racist sentiments when they are immigrants with limited ability to speak English fluently. What happens when poverty limits their ability to learn English? Or how all these can converge when dealing with an interracial marriage when a White husband imposes sexist and racist edicts with an immigrant woman who has internalized her own culture’s sexist ideology. Without knowing the full spectrum of oppressions that someone can experience, our efforts towards equality will be misinformed and, like the misdiagnoses of my friend, the potential fix in its ignorance has the potential to be disastrous.
As people of color, it is just as important that we not fall into the same good versus bad mentality even when dealing with people who are White. We have to take care not to treat White people as a homogenous entity. By focusing solely on White privilege and the image of Whites as racist ignorantly dismisses instances of racism that can actually occur between minority groups. We should not assume their existence is homogenous while resisting homogeneity ourselves. White people can experience forms of oppression, as White may not be their only identity. They are just as vulnerable to sexism, classism, ableism, and ageism. In fact, the main predictor of police brutality is class, even above race.[3]
People ask if I am offended when people assume I am Native American. Not enough to get very angry. I choose to see it with humor. That is a status I cannot escape. Besides, for the most part, it indicates that someone is curiously knocking on the front door of my identity, and, instead of slamming it in their face, I can choose to invite them in and show them around. It is a teaching opportunity that may have elements of misinformed stereotypes and even ignorance, but is most often not hostile. So I will continue to choose to not be too offended when people assume, because then I get to talk about being Korean and maybe I can tilt someone’s perspective just enough so some stereotypes slide off the table and make room for knowledge.
[1] Lorde, A. (1984). Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference. In M. Anderson & P. Collins (Eds.), Race, Class, and Gender (7th ed., p. 509). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
[2] Lorde, A. (1984). Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference. In M. Anderson & P. Collins (Eds.), Race, Class, and Gender (7th ed., pp. 506). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
[3] Walker, S., Spohn, C., & DeLone, M. (2011). The Color of Justice: Race, Ethnicity, and Crime in America. (5th ed.) Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.