The Wake

The world seems to eat multiculturalism up with a spoon. The University of Minnesota has the multicultural kickoff every year, McDonald’s has a website dedicated entirely to it’s Asian customers. All this fuss over everyone being included, Being a minority pretty much kicks ass. But this story is not about that, my friends. This is about my plight: the plight of someone only half multicultural. I am not white enough to join the yacht club, not Asian enough to be a manicurist. Neither negative stereotype works, and that’s a sad state of affairs. I am terrible at math, I did not enjoy the 11 years of piano I was paid to endure, I get mistaken for Jewish more than acknowledged for my Filipino and Chinese roots. Yet when applying to college, I mark “Asian/Pacific Islander.” I figure crying at The Joy Luck Club is enough to mark myself as such.

This inherent whiteness separates me from my mother’s impressive Filipino family, the Ngs. My sister looks almost completely Asian, and was accepted as a Ng immediately. I cannot discuss the hardships of being Asian in a white dominated society (at least not at a personal level,) and am thus largely forgotten at the dinner table. My ignorance of Filipino current events, past events, or events at all, also worries my large extended family. As sincerely interested as I am now in learning of my heritage, when I was seven years old, I wanted to watch Grease and eat Dunkaroos…they just expected too much of me.

My grandmother and her family lived through the war in Manila. They lived in a bombed out church for two months. They know people who died on the Death March. My mother was called yellow on her first job interview in the states. My sister experienced that ever-classic “Chinese eyes” taunt in elementary school. One uncle said that my mother marrying my father “muddied the waters.” I guess he was right. Here I am, having never been called a chink, or yellow, or given the “Chinese eyes.” I’ve been missing out.

I have two physical features that make me uniquely Asian, and I hold them with great pride. I have my cartoonishly large lips, and my dark skin. All other features are my fathers, and I curse him on a daily basis. My sister, on the other hand, has graceful slanted eyes, think straight hair, and is constantly told how she looks “just like a Ng.”

I don’t even get the perks of being a stereotypical Asian. As mentioned before, I got a D in math at least one quarter of every year in high school. I can’t tell Asian jokes without first explaining that I am, in fact, Asian. I don’t speak Tagalog, (and admittedly had to look up how to spell it) so I can’t even gossip with my mother in a secret language.

But somehow, I have always secretly wished to be more Asian. My sister got the classic Asian beauty. She inherited my grandmother’s inherent grace and her rice-package model looks. I have my father’s bulbous nose and hair that is a strange amalgam of white and Asian. It’s thick, wavy, and Satanic. I feel like a fraud when I say I am Asian. People don’t believe me. My family doesn’t believe me. I don’t believe me.

I am forced to accept that I am pretty much white, and while you hear stories of minorities wishing to be white, to me it is a curse. It is my failing. It allows my sister to say that “I haven’t been through the same things.” It’s like my not being excluded makes me at fault. My wide eyes are at fault for not being a part of the Asian club. I’m apparently not allowed to play Mahjong.

There is, however, an Asian that lives inside me, possibly one of those mythic Ancestors…or Mr. Miagi. On certain occasions, when someone questions my roots or Asian suffering, I pretty much kill them with words. The stories my family has told me suddenly come back into my brain, having been previously lost amid shoe prices and gossip. I remember the hotel my family owned, the war, the bombings, losing everything, the bombed out house. It is all there, and the poor soul who questioned me will hear every single detail. My mother calls me “Asian when provoked.” I suppose it’s true.

My senior year, a particularly stupid boy told me that the Asians didn’t really suffer in America. The boy was talking from his spot on top of society, inherited from a family of bankers. I told him we built his goddamned railroad and if he was going to bitch at me maybe he should take a tip from my ancestors and drive a golden spike into his ass. While in college, I was told that I was “like .02% Asian…so whatever.” I told the girl that I was half-Asian, and that she was a fat whore. I then walked away.

Having spoken to several other “mutts” in my position, there is a general consensus that if forced to choose, most would go with their minority counterpart. This fascinates me. With each generation comes more and more children of mixed decents, and I’m sure, more little Sam Crewses who will curse their white father for their bulbous nose.

With age, I have come understand that as long as I understand what my heritage is, I shouldn’t give a rat’s ass what other people think. It doesn’t matter that I didn’t care about my family when I was seven, what matters is that I find out now that I do. I love the fact that I come from a powerful Filipino family. It’s a classically heartbreaking story that we lost it all. Although I look at it as though watching a movie, it’s my movie. What matters is that I stand up for myself when I’m told I’m not Asian enough. Because I can be a goddamn manicurist if I want.