by Tricia Park, Open Study Researcher
When I was in fourth grade, Tally McMasters came up to me and asked:
“Are you Chinese?”
I was waiting for my turn at double dutch. “No,” I said, eyeing the line.
“Are you Japanese?” she asked, peering at me intently.
“No,” I said, again. The line was getting shorter. I glanced at her face and saw confusion. She’d run out of options.
“Well, then.” Tally jammed her hands against her hips. “Are you Norwegian?”
~ ~
I was one of two Asian kids at Sacred Heart Elementary School. Sally Wu was Chinese. Everyone knew what that was. Everyone liked chop suey and sweet and sour pork. And everyone liked that joke: “my mother is Chinese, my father is Japanese and I’m in-between.” Pulling the corners of their round blue eyes up, then down, then one of each, making a diagonal slant across their faces.
My mother made me beautiful lunches then, packed in a Hello Kitty doshirak box. A puffy heap of white rice, surrounded by tiny mounds of side dishes that glistened like jewels. Glossy anchovies, candied in soy sauce and sugar, freckled with toasted sesame seeds; crisp bean sprouts with vibrant, yellow heads; grassy watercress, steamed bright green; a perfect stack of roasted seaweed, shiny with sesame oil and sprinkled with salt; a juicy Asian pear, cut into precise quarters.
“What’s that?” Suzy Lawson stood, pointing.
“It’s my lunch,” I said, covering it with my right arm, like I’d covered my math test earlier.
“It looks weird,” she said. Suzy was mean and popular and never talked to me. Everyone was either afraid of her or envied her or some combination of both. Lacy Stevens and Jennifer Lewis dressed just like her in Guess jeans with zippered ankles and wore glittery, jelly bracelets but they weren’t as pretty. You always knew that Suzy was the best one.
“Hey, guys.” Suzy’s voice got loud and the din of the lunchroom stopped to listen. “Look at the new girl’s weird lunch.”
The scraping of chairs against linoleum and the squeaking of sneakers as a crowd gathered around my table in the corner.
“Ew, look, you can see their eyes! Disgusting! What are those things, worms? Look, they have yellow heads! Seaweed? Oh, ew, seaweed feels like alien slime on your legs! Oh my god, the smell. C’mere, smell this!”
Fingers poked and prodded at my lunch, over my protecting arms. The tiny, perfect compartments were extracted as they crowded in, spilling and grabbing at my lunch. I tried to get away but the table was surrounded, the laughing and jeering continuing until nothing was left. The rice was smashed onto the table, anchovies dumped on the floor, seaweed scattered like a deck of cards. Through a blur of tears, I packed up the doshirak, the small, geometric containers empty now. One of my Twin Stars chopsticks was missing.
Over the weekend, I asked my mother to pack me SpaghettiO’s and Oreo cookies for my school lunch. Puzzled, she asked, “don’t you like your bap? I saw your doshirak was empty.” I pulled away from her stroking hand on my hair.
“No,” I said, a new note of irritation in my voice. “I hate it. I want a normal lunch.”
I’d never spoken to my mother that way.
On Monday morning, I opened my book bag at the bottom of the stairs. My SpaghettiO’s were in a plaid Thermos and a stack of six Oreos was nestled in Saran Wrap. There was also, hidden under a napkin, a small container of anchovies. I crumpled the plain brown bag, zipped up my backpack, and walked to the bus stop.
When I was a kid, there was this show called Stand-Up Spotlight on VH-1. Rosie O’Donnell was the host, before she had her own show. Back then, she wore dresses and her hair was permed and feathered. The nineties were early and still recovering from an eighties hangover.
I wasn’t actually allowed to watch VH-1 though it would have been worse had I been watching MTV. I wasn’t allowed to watch TV at all on weekdays and certainly not in the afternoon when I was alone, sent home early from school to practice my violin. To this day, I’m not sure what my parents had to do to make it okay for me to skip school. It probably didn’t hurt that I was a good student; quiet, Asian. I was getting straight A’s, so what could they say, really.
That particular afternoon, Rosie O’Donnell stood on the small stage, the black curtain behind her strung up with white holiday lights, even though it wasn’t Christmas. It was a cheap set but the logo on the corner of the screen shone like a spotlight. ‘Welcome now to the stage, a very funny woman. You’ll be hearing more from her after this, I’m sure. Put your hands together for Margaret….Cho!’
I was only half watching – my hand aloft between my mouth and the bowl of rice I was having for lunch, my chopsticks holding some of the myeolchi that my mother had made – until I heard Rosie say, Cho. A Korean name. The last name of the first boy I ever had a crush on.
Now, Rosie had my full attention.
I watched as she left the stage, handing the mic over to a Korean woman wearing a dark blue dress. She was ordinary looking, almost plain. But to me, she could have been a unicorn standing in our living room. That was how startling it was to see an Asian woman on TV. Not just Asian, but Korean. Like me.
And she sounded like me, too. Back then, I was always a little surprised to hear an Asian adult speak unaccented English, since all the adults around me spoke English with a heavy coating of some Asian flavor. Whether it was my Japanese violin teacher’s swallowed consonants, the hard staccato of the Chinatown kids in AP Calculus or the guttural lilt of Konglish spoken at home, I rarely heard an Asian adult who sounded like me.
For the next seven minutes, I was enthralled. The high I felt from watching her was one of recognition. I wasn’t alone. There were others out there. Like me.
She told this story about growing up in San Francisco and sneaking out to a club and getting caught. I watched her eyes widen in horror as she transformed into her mother, exclaiming loudly that “you cannot go to da clubs! That is where, you know, you get da, you know, da drugs! And da pots! and da COCAINES!”
I felt a mix of guilt and glee as I identified with her. Not with the details – I was maybe fourteen then and wouldn’t have known where to find a “club” even if I’d had any desire in my goody-goody heart – but the pluralization of nouns was something my parents did, too. The endless errors in my parents’ English put my teeth on edge even as I wanted to protect them from the world.
As immigrants, my parents experienced mini-humiliations almost on a daily basis. The A&P grocery clerk that pretended not to understand my mom’s request for a price check on the family-sized Fruit Loops; the United Airlines gate agent who sneered and over-enunciated when she told my dad we couldn’t sit together, raising her voice like he was deaf; the Lincoln Center ushers who rolled their eyes and cackled at each other, saying “I can’t even deal” as they yanked the Yo-Yo Ma tickets out of our hands, taking for granted that we wouldn’t understand. But I understood and it cut me, even as I silently also wished my parents were different. Wished them better.
The experience of racial discrimination in America differs from race to race. And being Asian in America is a peculiar experience. The underlying drive of racism is to oust, shame and eliminate that which is different. The motivation is to erase the quirks and particularities of different cultures and races in the interest of creating a dull, smooth homogeneity.
In my experiences of racism, the cuts are small and insidious.
Asians in America are the prototypical “model minority”. We are smart and studious. We are good at math. We are quiet and docile. Louis CK jokes about his relief when an Asian doctor enters the examination room and we laugh. We are obedient. We are bad at sports. We are blind followers of authority. We lack creativity.
The racism occurs in tiny, daily abrasions.
“You wear a sunhat? Oh, how cute. That’s how you Oriental women keep your skin so perfect and porcelain. That’s why you never age.” It’s a humid, August afternoon in Vermont and we’re sitting on the porch, sipping gin and tonics. He’s a friend and he uses the term “Oriental” with some irony, smearing the t, to rhyme with “kennel.” But I can feel the jeer underneath the “just kidding” snicker, even as I laugh weakly and adjust the brim of my hat. I watch the lime float in my drink and I boil a little hotter underneath the afternoon sun. In silence.
“You know what? You’re actually really smart. I had no idea. You do this quiet, sweet Asian girl thing and hide who you truly are.” This time the friend is white, an artist, the mother of a bi-racial child. In the plush candlelit confines of this downtown social club, the insult here is, once again, framed by what seems like a compliment – you are smart. But if ever there was a backhanded compliment, here it is. It feels like getting slapped, knuckle-side up.
In one misguided Dear Abby-esque swoop, this woman insults my intelligence, gender and race, in less than thirty seconds. And, of course, the question I long to spit back at her is, why are these things mutually exclusive? Why does my demeanor – perhaps understated, perhaps subdued – negate the possibility of intelligence? I like being quiet. I like my softness. I like my gentleness. I like my girliness.
I like my Asian-ness.
Why does she present this seeming contradiction as a problem on my part? This paradox is a product of her own narrow-minded perceptions and yet she drapes it over me, dressing me in robes of deception and cunning. To her, I am the wily geisha, the shrewd dragon lady.
And yet.
I keep these thoughts to myself and clink martini glasses with her, even as I file away this abrasion in my mind, throwing another log on the proverbial fire of my feelings of injustice.
My rage.
Why stay silent, you may ask.
I ask that, too.
Injustices can happen on a microscopic level. One hesitates to point them out because, by doing so, one risks pulling the skin open, creating a gaping wound where before there was only a paper cut. Because what if I’m wrong? What if I’m just being crazy?
But then again, there is death by a thousand cuts.
Because if I were to, say, jump up in indignation at either of these people, it draws into the light the complicated peculiarities of racism towards Asians.
The slippery quality of insults sandwiched between compliments.
Both would likely consider what they said to me as praise, approval. Compliments. What’s your problem? Because, let’s face it, many Asians are perceived as successful. Socially and economically prosperous. We work hard. We are perceived as well-educated, well-employed, middle to upper class. We marry interracially, make beautiful Amerasian babies, live in white neighborhoods.
So what more could these Orientals – gooks, chinks, slant-eyes – possibly want?
There is a disdain, a looking down upon Asians. We achieve and over-achieve and yet we are not equal because we are a threat in an unspoken, ongoing competition. A wrestle for the top prize with a very real, worthy opponent. But, we have to be perfect. And when we’re perfect, we’re too perfect. We are conformist and boring, just a bunch of automatons. All look same.
And yet.
In my toolbox, there are at least two Asian jokes that I tell to counter my social anxiety. I tell them well–both about Asian businessmen with a penchant for flipping their l’s and r’s–and they’re funny. They succeed in getting a roaring response, without fail. I’ve had more than one first date tell me that I’m not like “normal Asian girls.” This is said to me admiringly, as he wipes away tears of laughter.
These jokes are my way in. A way towards social acceptance.
And yet. Again.
I worry about contributing to the Asian stereotype. Just as I worried, felt guilty even, as I laughed at Margaret Cho’s imitation of her mother. Because it was funny and it was true and I felt finally, finally, seen as the child of Korean immigrants, living in the in-between space of old country and new.
But how to also convey the tenderness and affection I felt for Margaret Cho and her mother upon hearing that joke? Doing that accent was a way of acknowledging a difference. Acknowledging the struggle contained within that accent that holds our real love for our mothers.
When my mother speaks English, she adds articles and pluralizes her nouns and confuses idioms and blurs her subjects and verbs. But she is also a doctor and a mother and a wife and a daughter. She is a great cook. She has such an incredible mind that she’s never kept a calendar in all the years I’ve known her because she remembers everything her family has to do every day; dates, phone numbers, addresses. She is fiercely loyal and she loves me every day like I am the only thing that matters.
And when she was twenty-five, she came to this country alone, with five hundred dollars hidden in the handle of a vanity mirror. She learned to speak English by leaving her television on all day and night, listening to advertising jingles for Tide detergent and Wrigley’s chewing gum. And she cried every night for six months, wondering if she would ever see her family again, even though she was the one who ran away.
Her accented English has a flavor all its own. And hearing Margaret Cho imitate her own mother made me feel less alone in loving my mother in the full glory of her incorrectness.
[Featured Photo by Nina Horabik]