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ARTICLES:
Eurasian Experience
Sticky
Rice At Yom Kippur By Emilie Hammerstein November 2002 "So…what are you?" This is a question I can always count on being asked. And this is the answer I automatically respond with: "My mother is Chinese, my father is Jewish. I'm Chinese and Jewish." Most people first guess that I am Latina, a lucky few ask if I'm part Asian, and so far, I've only heard one person say I look German-Jewish. Two summers ago, before my junior year at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, I was waiting for a train when two college-aged guys came up to me: "We don't mean to bother you or anything, but my friend and I wondered if you could settle our argument. He thinks you're Spanish and I think you're Indian. Can you tell us who's right?" I don't mind people asking me what I am. In some ways, it's flattering: I'm glad that I don't look like everybody else. I'm proud of my heritage—both of my heritages and I want to share that with the world. However, make no mistakes about it-being mixed is an experience as confusing, messy and emotional as it is beautiful. It is a blessing, but it is equally a burden. I have often felt that the world is not ready for someone like me, someone who is a walking contradiction to their cultural definitions. My brother Josh and I grew up in the suburbs of St. Louis, where we had almost no Chinese or Jewish neighbors or classmates, let alone Chinese-Jewish ones. The only time I ever thought about being different was when I was called "Oriental girl" or "Jewish retard" in school. We were the only kids who were excused from class on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur and went home to eat sticky rice and drunk chicken for dinner. But we weren't particularly religious, nor were we well-schooled in Chinese tradition. My mom made me and Josh attend Chinese school on Sundays for a while. My only memories are of snack-time and racing rolling chairs down the halls. The only words I knew growing up were pigoo (ass), lien (face), and tang-tang (candy). And to be honest, the only reason I knew pigoo and lien was so that Josh and I could call each other "butt-face" in Chinese. When I was eleven, our family moved to Pittsburgh and I started attending a very small, private all-girls' school. Out of my class of 40 girls, about one-fourth of them were Jewish. It was a shock to me to suddenly realize that I wasn't like them at all. In St. Louis, being the only Jewish girl in school was what made me different and set me apart from everyone else. That was how I identified myself. In Pittsburgh, I found out that my unusual upbringing put me at odds with my Jewish classmates. I didn't go to Hebrew school and my parents weren't planning an elaborate bat mitzvah for me. Another mixed girl in my class (she was half black, half white) hissed at me, "You're not Jewish, you're only half-Jewish." Technically, though, there is no such thing as half-Jewish. Judaism is passed on through matrilineal descent. If your mother is Jewish and your father is not, you're still considered Jewish. However, if you have a Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother, then you are not considered Jewish. When my mom married my dad, she converted to Judaism under the Reform movement, which is the least stringent faction of the religion. I was brought up as a Reform Jew. I am not considered Jewish by many people. They do not regard how I was brought up to be a factor in my identity. Nor what religion I identify with most. Nor what my family died for in the concentration camps. It didn't help that my mother had become a born-again Christian around the time I was twelve. Our home had never been particularly peaceful, but by the time I reached adolescence, my mom and I were waging a full-fledged religious war. I was uncomfortable with her new practices. The real problem, however, was that she wanted me and Josh to renounce Judaism entirely and convert. When we refused, she made a deal with my father: she would stop attending church if we stopped going to the synagogue. My father agreed, but in the end, she didn't hold up her end of the deal. From high school on, I harbored uneasy feelings that I did not belong. I started studying Hebrew in my spare time in order to feel more connected to my background and, perhaps subconsciously, to seem more Jewish to others. During my senior year of high school, my classmates and I were asked to split up into groups, according to our ethnicity for a group exercise. I asked the teacher, "What if you have two ethnicities?" "Just pick one," she answered. Inwardly, I was upset and confused. It wasn't simply the exercise. I felt that I was constantly forced to choose between my two backgrounds without actually belonging to either. By the time I entered college at Hopkins, I felt something was missing. I wanted to belong to a community, a group that understood where I came from. So, I became active in the Jewish Students' Association. I was self-conscious about being mixed and would avoid talking about my mother's background whenever possible. Eventually, though, I was known as the "Asian-Jewish girl." Then I was told by several members of the ultra-Orthodox community (and on several separate occasions) that I wasn't really Jewish and in order to be accepted, I would have to undergo an Orthodox conversion—no simple feat. In the words of a Chabad (ultra-orthodox Jew) who ran a Jewish education program at Hopkins, the Jewish community was an "extended family" and I was "not a member" of the family unless I converted. I was utterly and completely degraded. I felt both ashamed of myself and angry at those who judged me for something I could not control: Why did I have to be born mixed? Why couldn't I just be one or the other, a simple either/or? I never looked Chinese enough to fit in with the Asian crowd and I lacked a traditional upbringing that would make me feel at home among the Jewish community. If I sound a little bitter, it's because I am. You would think that college students would be mature enough to have outgrown racial stereotyping, especially at a campus as diverse as Johns Hopkins, whose reputation in medicine attracts a large percentage of international students and roughly 20% of students on campus are Asian. Unfortunately, I learned that this is not so. To a certain sector of Jewish students on campus, I was known as "Chopsticks" behind my back. One Shabbat dinner, I happened to mention that most people don't think I look Chinese. To this, I was answered, "Yes, you do. You have slanty eyes." My cousin Alice, jokes that Jews are often attracted to Chinese, especially Chinese women. When I tell people that I don't have any cousins who aren't at least half-Chinese, including on my father's side, I typically hear a response that I have come to loathe, "Ooh, your family's got an Asian fetish, huh?" People imagine the Asian wife as uneducated, subservient and exotic. They ask how my parents met, usually assuming that my father served in the armed services abroad, met my mother in a small rural village and married her. In reality, my mother is from Taipei, a city known for being modern, educated and cosmopolitan. She was the first member of her family to move to the United States after receiving a B.A. in English from University of Taipei. She didn't marry my father for a green card either. My parents met because they were both working for Time Life books in Manhattan. Even with my own relatives, I felt vaguely out-of-place. One time, my mom was talking to a Chinese cook as I stood by her side. When she mentioned I was her daughter, the chef replied, "Ah! Wo xiang ta shi waiguoren." I thought she was a foreigner. The word waiguoren is usually used to refer to anyone who is not Chinese. Literally, it means "outsider". I do feel like an outsider, even in my own family. No one would assume that I'm my mother's daughter; some people have assumed that I'm my father's wife. My brother and I don't look like anyone in our family besides each other. It hurts a little to look at pictures of my grandparents, searching for traces of myself and finding none. Furthermore, my parents don't understand why I feel rejected by traditional Asian and Jewish communities. They can't relate to my feelings about being mixed nor to the sense of confusion that stems from it. They don't understand that it can be confusing for me to constantly be asked, "What are you?" I never had to think about what I was until other people wanted to know how to define me. And, unlike generations of my family before me, I'm not always sure what I am. Sometimes, I feel more connected to one heritage than the other and vice versa. My parents' well-intentioned, but overly-simplified logic is this: they are Chinese and Jewish and I am their daughter…therefore, the world must see me as a reflection of themselves, that is, Chinese or Jewish. They don't understand that my filial connection to them isn't so evident to everyone else and it's not so easy to explain being Chinese and Jewish. My mom has said to me, "Your brother doesn't feel this way, he doesn't have problems with being mixed." It's true that not all mixed kids are confused about their cultural and societal identity, but every Hapa experience is distinct, just like every Hapa is unique. Hapas have to face a slew of issues that no other ethnic group has had to face before. The age we live in is unique because, although we are not the first of our kind, our generation is the result of an unprecedented number of mixed marriages. The issue of space becomes important. One must find one's own space in society, in the world. Communities are traditionally formed to bind a type of people together within a space. But mixed children are faced with the task of transcending established communities in pursuit of their own space in the world. Because I feel uncomfortable in both Chinese and Jewish communities, I must create a unique niche for myself. Paradoxically, being mixed is simultaneously anti-American and the purest definition of what it means to be American. Ideally, the United States was established as a melting pot—a land where people of all races and ethnicities could live and multiply together and, ultimately, become one people. In some ways, though, America is still more of a tossed salad than a true melting pot. The phenomenon of the hyphenated American is undeniable within our society. It remains important for families to preserve the same customs and way of life as their ancestors. And yet, at the same time, the number of mixed children is growing rapidly; on the Johns Hopkins campus alone, there were a large number of Amerasians, resulting in a student group called Hapa. The truth is that at this point in time, mixed kids straddle two worlds. We are caught between a society that still forces us to define ourselves by some kind of hyphenated American label and a world whose face is being changed forever by technology and the globalization of trade and travel. From my own experiences, I now have mixed feelings about intermarriages and mixed relationships. While on the one hand, I believe that race or religion shouldn't be a deciding factor in love, I do feel that it is important to perpetuate traditions through your children. However, I have no choice—my marriage will be a mixed marriage, no matter whom I marry. Unless, that is, I happen to marry another Chinese Jew, which I find unlikely. This leaves me wondering: what will I pass on to my children? Part of the joy of have children is the knowledge that you can instill in them the same beliefs and cultural values that your parents passed on to you. One of my greatest fears is that in future generations, my own culture and influence will only dwindle. At this point in my life, I feel more inclined date Hapa men than anyone else. This decision is not simply a result of my desire to pass traditions I grew up with on to my children. I would be lying if I said that weren't a factor; however, much stronger than that is my desire to be with someone who understands me to the very core. Being mixed has shaped who I am. It may seem ironic that even though I have the freedom to date or marry whomever I want (after all, I am the product of an interracial marriage), I would choose to be with a Hapa. Some could see my preference as a perpetuation of traditional, monoracial dating standards. But just because we're Hapas, does that mean we have an obligation to date outside of our race? In reality, my decision is really a personal choice to be with someone who can relate to me. After all, I would never restrict myself to dating only mixed men since I know first-hand how much it can hurt to be judged solely on the basis of ethnicity. Besides, with this freedom, is it really surprising that I would decide to be with someone like me? Now, when people ask me, "What are you?" I consciously refrain from saying that I'm half-Chinese and half-Jewish. I am Chinese and Jewish. I'm not half and half, I am whole. I am an individual. It no longer bothers me to mark my ethnicity as "Other" on forms. It's taken me a while to accept who I am and be proud of it. I'm not a mutt, I am a "strong, healthy mix" as a cousin and her husband, both doctors, put it. Why not take pride in being a Hapa, a mixed-blood child, a Eurasian, an Amerasian? After all, mixed kids are physically healthier and many people assert that we're smarter and better-looking, too. As we enter the 21st century, you see more and more of us in the public eye. Actors Jennifer Tilly and Dean Cain, gold-medal speed skater Apolo Anton Ohno and supermodel Devon Aoki all share the strange, unique, wonderful experience with us. It's hard to understand what it means, unless you experience it yourself. I realize that ultimately, being mixed has made me a better person with a rich cultural background. I've worked hard to compensate for the conventional Chinese and Jewish upbringing I never had by exploring my roots. For a while, I immersed myself in Jewish tradition, culture and education. My lack of tradition growing up incited me to learn as much as I did. In the end, however, I realized that I would never fully belong to that community, not just because of the way my mother converted or my "slanty" eyes, but because I was raised differently and exposed to various cultures and communities. In the same spirit, I studied Chinese for several years at Hopkins. My initial embarrassment at my poor accent and slow learning eventually evolved into a genuine love for the language and culture. I was thrilled when I realized that I could finally understand my family's conversations. Best of all, for the first time in my life, I could communicate with my grandparents myself and not through my mother or a relative. And they appreciated it. My Chinese is rusty, but to my grandparents, it's perfect. Learning it was my way of saying how much I loved and valued them…they didn't need a translator to tell them that much. Now, I live my life according to the principles my parents instilled in me and I celebrate what is important to me—Chinese and Jewish alike. The way in which we are raised has the greatest impact on our identities...it shapes what we need, what we want and who we are. I can at last accept that my identity is a mixture of ideals and traditions. Almost six months ago, I watched my beautiful, beloved grandmother lay on her deathbed, finally succumbing to the cancer she fought for ten years. The last time she was lucid enough to recognize me, she gasped out words that she had told me all my life. I never understood what she was saying until a few years ago. "Ni…tinghua." Listen. Listen to what your parents say. When I was younger, those words made me feel unworthy, but now I finally understand what she was saying. I know that I inhabit two different worlds and I am the possessor of two cultures. I am my parents' daughter and they have passed their culture and heritage down to me. I must define myself by what I know and not by what others think of me. About
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