half asian identity

As a Half-Asian Person, I’m Over Being Reduced to My Parts

Unpacking my biracial identity and the otherness that comes with it

Recently, there has been a horrifying rise in hate crimes around the world targeting Asian people. In this series, we’re committed to telling stories that both celebrate Asian Canadian excellence and delve into the inspiring, occasionally heartbreaking experiences of Asian Canadians.

As a kid, I would endlessly stare at the left and right sides of my body, trying to figure out which “half” was the Asian half. Was one side slightly more pale like my Croatian father? Did one side have less hair like my Chinese mother? It would puzzle me for hours on end.

Confronting this duality is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, especially in the wake of the racist, targeted attacks on the Asian community. At first, I wasn’t sure how to feel, or how to talk about it. When friends reached out to check in and see how I was doing, I felt guilty about accepting their sympathy. Was I Asian enough to warrant it? My lived experience is so different from the other Asian people in my community—as I scrolled through Instagram and saw their personal accounts of the horrific slurs and aggressions that have been thrown at them, I couldn’t relate. And it made me feel like because my experiences were different, I wasn’t allowed to feel angry or scared.

But the more I stewed over it, the more I realized this internalized guilt and disassociation is part of why I should be upset. My Asianness is so deeply part of who I am, and yet I still often see myself as “other” in my own communities. I recognize that my vaguely European name and racially ambiguous features grant me a lot of white privilege that other Asian people don’t have access to, but that ambiguity can be a difficult place to live—you’re always straddling two worlds, and you feel like you don’t fully fit in either.

From a young age, I became accustomed to complete strangers constantly asking me “What are you?” and attempting to place me in their own mental racial box

In my white circles I’m “the half-Asian friend” and in my Asian circles I’m “the half-white friend.” By always describing myself as “half” I didn’t feel whole, and it was built into the foundation of how I understood myself. There were times when that sense of otherness felt overwhelming, like even my parents and closest friends couldn’t fully understand my perspective. Checking off the racial “other” box on medical forms could feel like a personal affront.

From a young age, I became accustomed to complete strangers constantly asking me “What are you?” and attempting to place me in their own mental racial box. Often, when I wasn’t immediately forthcoming, they would try to guess (I’ve gotten Latina, Hawaiian, Indigenous, the list goes on).

I notice how my white friends can brush off questions about their background with a laugh—“Oh, I’m just white! A bit English, a bit Irish, you know”—and the conversation easily moves along. Multiracial people aren’t afforded that luxury. It’s always a breakdown of percentages; halves and quarters and eighths, explanations of family history. “How did they meet?!” I’m often asked about my parents, as if that type of racial intermingling warrants surprise (they were both attending McMaster university).

The author with her parents.

As well, being biracial is often glorified in a really peculiar way that’s presented as positive but always feels uncomfortable. It’s jarring how frequently I hear “Mixed babies are always so beautiful” or “What an exotic mix!” or “Such a unique combination!” The next step is often to pry about which of my parents is Asian—this is its own specific line of questioning that feels intrinsically tied to the fetishization of Asian women. It took me a long time to realize I didn’t owe them an answer.

Revisiting these discomforts has reminded me that while I do have a lot of privilege being biracial, it’s fragile. While I am not on the receiving end of horrific anti-Asian slurs, the microaggressions I’ve grown accustomed to are an echo of a much larger problem, which is the way that people of colour are treated as they move through the world. I am justified in feeling scared and angry at how the Asian community is being treated, especially because I’m part of it.

The author (centre) with her friends Liz (left) and Jen (right).

Talking to my other biracial friends about this has been a much-needed salve. I feel lucky to have three best friends who are also half-Chinese, half-white: Liz, Jen and Sarah, all of whom I met after high school. It makes me smile to think of how easily we were drawn to each other, how quickly our friendships formed and how many little quirks we discovered were a direct result of our shared background. In university, Jen mentioned that as a baby she called milk “nai nai” and my mind was blown because I had also used this term—I thought I’d made it up! Turns out, it’s the Mandarin translation of milk. We laughed so hard we couldn’t breathe. Like me, my friends grew up with both chopsticks and knives and forks in the house; we all decorated Christmas trees in December and received lucky money red pockets for Chinese New Year a couple months later. That level of instant understanding has become such an affirming presence in my life, and I’m so grateful for it.

Through talking to my friends and seeing other half-Asian women I admire like Chrissy Teigen and Naomi Osaka speak up about anti-Asian racism, I’m reminded that I’m part of my own wonderfully unique hapa community. The term “hapa” is one that I learned recently and have come to deeply appreciate. Unlike descriptors like half-Asian (which I so often use) or Eurasian, hapa is a Hawaiian pidgin term that has been reclaimed by mixed-race people—typically, though not exclusively, those who are half-white and half-Asian—to describe themselves.

It’s been comforting to learn that the vocabulary we use to speak about multiracial people is expanding, because it gives us more ways to understand our experiences and to challenge the outdated misconceptions. Contrary to my childhood musings, I am not an even split down the middle. I carry both the privilege and the burden of every part of my background, and I’m proud to do so.

 

    More on Celebrating Asian Voices