When I Wanted to be Rich & White - 10/13/21

The middle and high school years are rough on most kids, especially kids of color, or in my case, many colors. You are trying so hard to find out who you are and how you fit. You realize your parents are not the heroes you believed they were and the world is not filled with unicorns and rainbows.

The anxiety around these years is heightened if you grow up being bullied for not looking like everyone else. This was certainly my case. I am a card-carrying member of the Mixed Baby Club. Mom is Japanese and Dad was Black, Native American and White. This meant that there was no way I would be able to pass as White, which was and is the majority race in my area. But that didn’t stop me from trying to assimilate into White culture. Someone once called me a banana – yellow on the outside and white on the inside – and as hurtful as that slur was, it wasn’t that far from the truth. Maybe that’s why it hurt so much. I so desperately wanted to fit in. But, with my cocoa skin, almond eyes and hair that resembled a lion’s mane on its best days, fitting in was not going to happen.

I knew I was different and I was not receptive to anything that would make me stand out even more, so celebrating my heritage was not going to happen. In fact, I was ashamed of my heritage and had no interest in learning anything about Japan. I started going after what I thought would make others accept me like getting good grades, looking and acting White and being involved in school activities. I think this mindset began in late elementary school. It was like the scales fell off my eyes and I realized I was pretty much the only multi-melanated kid in the class that year and many more to come. One year there was a Japanese exchange student and a half-Asian kid in my class, but I counted that as a one off. Everyone wanted to be friends with the cool exchange student and the biracial chick passed as white.

Shame about my heritage showed itself mostly in the relationship with my mother. Frankly, she embarrassed me. I hated her very Asianness. I despised her lack of English skills and total ignorance of American culture. I hated that I had to walk the tightrope between her Asian ways and my American ones. I was her language and cultural translator. I could not relate to her and she could not relate to me.

I was often embarrassed when my mother attended teacher conferences because she barely understood and spoke English. I also cringed whenever Mom had to be around me and my friends because you never knew what she was going to say or how she was going to say it. One time, she royally embarrassed me after a school dance when she decided to chime in while my friends and I discussed the boys we liked. I won’t go into the details of that cringey moment, but let’s just say that I wanted to melt into my seat and onto the road. Other embarrassing moments occurred when Mom spoke Japanese around my American friends, when I brought in a strange, Asiany food to lunch thinking I was so cool and sophisticated (didn’t go over well), and when the racial bullying started.

Aside from the shame, I also felt a fair amount of confusion about who I really was. At the time, I didn’t know Dad was multiracial, so I was bewildered about why I didn’t look like my half-Asian friends. I really thought he was White. If you would’ve seen a picture of my Dad when he was younger, you wouldn’t come to that conclusion as he had Afro-ish hair and dark skin, but his skin got lighter with age so by the time I knew him, he was definitely White passing. As the warmer months approached, I often wondered why I looked so much darker than my biracial friends who also had White dads. Why was my hair so kinky and frizzy?  I didn’t find out the truth of Dad’s racial make-up until I was well into adulthood. Dad didn’t like talking a lot about his past so I never got the chance to talk in depth about what it was like for him to grow up as a mixed baby in the 30s and 40s. I’m sure it wasn’t pleasant.

I felt like I didn’t belong anywhere, but that didn’t stop me from trying. 80’s big hair styles for someone who has thick, frizzy and long hair was not a good look though I tried to do wonders with my trusty curling iron. I coveted Gap and Jordache jeans and pretended I was wearing them with my knockoff Palmetto jeans. I tried the tying the sweater around the shoulders thing but I could never get the knot to lay in the right way, so it looked like I had another head growing out of my chest. Cheap white sneakers from Hills were made to look like Keds. I found a sweater that looked like an Izod one and one of my Dad’s old oxford shirts to wear underneath, flipping up the collar and all. A discount store extraordinaire trying to be one of the cool kids.

Attention to appearance also extended to what I told others about me. I did not mention anything related to what was going on at home. No one but my closest friends knew where I lived. People were curious though and would try to pry out the answer, but I always deflected or gave a vague answer, describing my neighborhood by general location only – “Oh, I live in XYZ Township,” was my stock answer. I had two reasons for this – 1. As a trauma victim, I did not trust people. I had been betrayed many times and had a negative view of mankind. There was one indelible incident that immediately came to mind as I write this (more on that in a moment). 2. I was ashamed of where I lived.

Every time I hear the phrase ‘trailer trash,’ I cringe a little as a core memory rises to the surface. I spent the majority of my childhood living in a trashy trailer park. It bothered me that I might become a victim of association because most of the kids who lived there were always in trouble. It doesn’t strike me as coincidental now that the majority of them are either dead by nefarious circumstances or in jail.

I did have an inkling that money was tight for my parents, but it still bothered me that it didn’t appear either of them wanted to exert any effort to make our home nice. Mismatched and ill-fitting furniture, clutter, and weird knick-knacks surrounded me. If something broke, it stayed broken. By the time I left home for good, part of the floor of our only bathroom was so rotted that you could see the ground underneath. It’s a wonder we didn’t have critters coming in all the time.

My shame about where I lived crystallized into that high school event I alluded to earlier. A school friend somehow found out where I lived. I don’t remember telling her, so maybe she heard it from someone else. Anyway, this is someone I was considering letting into my inner circle. We had a lot in common and our personalities clicked. Then, one day she came up to me in school and said we couldn’t be friends any longer. I asked why and she said her mother disapproved of her hanging out with me because of where I lived. There was a comment made about “being around people like me.” I remember feeling my throat and chest become warm and my ears ring as I realized my fear about association had come true. I don’t remember what I said in response, but I do remember feeling ashamed and angry - angry at myself for having to live in a trailer, angry at my parents for not being able to afford something else, angry at my friend’s mother for her snobby judgement and angry at my friend for not standing up for me. It took everything within me not to punch the girl in that moment.

I also remember realizing the absolute absurdity of her comment. Her father also worked a blue-collar job like mine and she lived in a simple, two-story house. Technically, the house was nicer than mine, but it wasn’t like she lived in a mansion. Yes, I’m still a little salty about this so many decades later. The petty part of me would just love to see the expression on her mother’s face (if she’s still living) after hearing that I now live in one of the nicest neighborhoods in town.

So, feeling shame, anger and alienation, I navigated through high school in the best way I knew how by abandoning my heritage to fit in. By being so focused on appearances, I put writing on the back burner. I wrote enough to be asked to enter the Scholastic Writing Awards contest (I didn’t enter), but other than that, my activities kept me so busy that I didn’t have time to figure out what was going on around me, and truthfully, in me.  

Enter senior year and college. More on that in the next blog post.

Write & Rise, my friends. Write & Rise.