The Po Show

Happy Belated Asian American Heritage Month!!

Yes, May has come and gone, and it was Asian American Heritage Month, just as it is every May. Bet you didn't realize that, but then why should you have? It gets no "press." Activities do take place in the AA community (at least, they did when I lived in L.A.), but for the most part I am not even sure why it exists. It's on the level of National Baked Beans Month, or something like that.

I grapple with my identity as Asian American, as I have my whole life. I still can't figure out how significant it is to me. It was made an issue for me when I was a child. People constantly asked me if I was Chinese or Japanese (those being the only Asian nationalities people were aware of back then, in my part of the world). Kids would occasionally make slanty eyes at me and taunt me with "ching chong" type chants. "American" meant white. People would see pictures of my sister and her caucasian husband and say "Oh, your sister married an American." Ummm, that just confused the hell out of me.

Oh, and we weren't Asian back then, in the '70s. We were Oriental, like rugs. Oriental kids were supposed to be smart, and I was, so that was somehow self-fulfilling. I wonder now how it would have been to NOT be smart. People used to tease a kid I knew in high school, that he was the only dumb Japanese kid in town.

But it was my mother who really made an issue of it. She would tell me not to antagonize people, because they might have prejudices against Japanese. When I was learning to drive, she told me that if I ever got pulled over by a policeman, not to talk back to him because he might have been in WWII.

We were the Model Minority, no trouble, hard-working, quiet. But I wasn't. I had a big mouth, I talked. I wanted to be an actress, but where were the parts? Other than the nurses on M*A*S*H or Mrs. Livingston on the Courtship of Eddie's Father, where were my role models? There weren't any, and that pissed me off. I played Liat in South Pacific not once, but twice. She had virtually no lines.

In college, I got used to often being the only Asian in a group, and I did not fit the stereotypes. I was not an engineering or math major; I was a political science major. Once Ross was playing hacky sack outside one of the "liberal arts" buildings on campus, and he mentioned to one of the guys that he was waiting for his girlfriend to get out of class. The guy asked what I looked like and Ross said I was little and Asian. The guy told him, "You're on the wrong side of campus!"

Then I moved to Japan, and things really got topsy-turvy. Then I REALLY couldn't possibly be American, because Americans have blond hair and blue eyes (basically, they look like Ross), but I didn't speak Japanese, so no one knew what the hell to think of me, what category to place me in. It was kind of awful, actually, to be so casually stripped of my identity.

In grad school in Hawaii, I set out on a quest to figure this stuff out. I was an American Studies major (and again, people would chuckle when they heard that Ross was an Asian Studies major and I was an American Studies major, like that was so cute and ironic, because, like, he's American and I'm Asian??) and I did a lot of research on ethnic identity and Asian American history. I learned a lot, but mostly from the undergrads I met while working as a teaching assistant. These were kids *who had never been a minority*. They didn't have a clue as to what it was like to be the only Asian in a room. I envied them so much, because they'd never had to worry about being Asian American.

That's another problem, the moniker. Asian AMERICAN is just so clunky; it takes too long to say. Much like African American just doesn't get used as commonly in conversation as black, because it just takes too damn long to say. So we just say Asian, and again, where is the American? It's implied, but is it REALLY there?

These are issues that come up for me again now that I have bi-racial children. Matthew gets incredibly pissed when kids call him Chinese at school, and I don't blame him. It's not only inaccurate, it somehow takes away his membership in the group ethos. When he was little, Matthew used to think we were all white (since we weren't black or Hispanic, I guess). He still is figuring out what Asian is, though that got much clearer this year when his class studied Japan in social studies.

Tessa still sees people in terms of having pink skin or brown skin, but things are becoming more complicated for her as well. Earlier this year she asked me, hesitantly, "Where am I from?," and I knew she meant nationality-wise. I thought, "Oh man, some kid at school must have called her Chinese!" I told her, "You're American, and you can tell people that!"

So then I found out that her class was preparing for UN Day at school, and as part of a parade, all the kids were going to make flags of the country of their origin! I felt like such a dipshit, that I automatically expected this to be about prejudice, and wrongheadedness, instead of celebration. I didn't find out in time to remind Tessa that her people came from Japan, and from the Netherlands (also known as Holland; that's always complicated when I try to explain it!). She made, and waved, an American flag.