What Are You? by Nagisa Smallheiser '21
Every time I apply for a summer internship or a job, I’m asked to check a box stating that I identify as being of “two or more races” so the company can report to the government that they’re being inclusive in their hiring practices. When I travel to a country halfway across the world from everything I know and get told that I look like a local, I laugh and say thank you. But I’m not quite sure whether I should take it as a compliment. And when people meet me for the first time, the question that always seems to follow “What’s your name?” is some variation of: “What are you? What’s your ethnic background? Where are you from?” as if knowing my racial background is somehow a super insightful and important fact that will help them immediately understand me. The best is when someone asks me where I’m from and I respond “The Bay Area!” only for them to say “Yeah, but where are you really from?”
The thing is, understanding my ethnic and racial background is an important step to understanding me; it’s just not something that can be described in two neat sentences when introducing myself to someone for the first time. As is the case with most anyone who grew up in the U.S., race played a role in shaping my life long before I could put together the correct words to describe the phenomena I was experiencing.
I grew up in Pleasanton, California, which is pretty much exactly what someone would imagine if you said ‘middle-class American suburb.’ Not many of my neighbors actually had white picket fences, but culs de sac of two-story homes with perfectly manicured lawns were the norm. My childhood home was two stories, white with black roof tiles, and a magnolia tree in the front lawn. All the neighborhood kids would come by to play on our hand-painted wooden swing. On one side of us lived an older, windowed woman who would take care to put up decorations for every holiday, from St. Patrick’s Day to Memorial Day. My mom liked to spend a lot of time in the kitchen, and whenever she baked scones or made vegetable soup or tried out a new muffin recipe, she would send me or my sister over with a little plate of whatever just came out of the oven. On the other side lived a family with three kids, all younger than me and my sister. When the weather was nice, we’d often play catch with them or shoot hoops in the street outside their house. As I got older, I became the go-to babysitter for their family.
The San Francisco Bay Area is known for being one of the most diverse parts of the country, but it didn’t mean that race didn’t matter. I was raised in a society where white was the default. Almost all of my neighbors were white, and all through elementary and middle school, I never had a teacher that wasn’t white. But the thing is, I never even thought twice about it; it was normal to me.
To give some context to all the stories I’m about to recount, maybe I should explain how I identify racially: mixed. I’m a panda, as my sister and I like to joke: black, white, and Asian. Ethnically and culturally, my parents are very different. Looking at my extended family gets even more interesting. Of the three grandparents that I had the chance to know, each of them comes from a very different background. One of them is Japanese, one of them is white, and one of them is black.
My grandma used to laugh when she told stories of when she was young. She grew up middle class, in one of those East Coast homes with a wrap-around porch. She lived with her two parents and her sister in the suburbs of Boston, Massachusetts. She’d tell me about how her hair would get a red-ish tint after playing in the sun all summer and how she used to wear it in braids, just like me. She’d tell me about the time she scraped up her knee after a stick had gotten lodged between the spokes of the front wheel of her bike and sent her flying over the handlebars. She didn’t want to wake up her dad because he was working the night shift that day, but he got up and took care of her anyways.
When it comes to the childhood of my grandpa, on the other hand, I don’t really know very much. I know he grew up poor somewhere in the Bronx and the only real stories I heard from his childhood were of him causing mischief. I’ve met his siblings, but I don’t really know anything about his parents. I’m pretty sure his dad died when he was young but he’s never talked to me about either of his parents. My grandma used to say that if you looked at them both on paper without knowing who was black and who was white, you’d never guess that she was the black one.
Growing up, race was definitely a topic of conversation. I remember sitting on the couch at my grandparents’ house while my mom and grandma sat at the dining room table. They only lived 20 minutes away, so it wasn’t uncommon to go over to their house on the weekends. My sister always found a way to slip into the front bedroom and turn on Disney Channel instead of watching the Jeopardy that was constantly playing on the TV in the living room. I would curl up on the couch with a book, the sounds of Jeopardy floating in one ear and the voices of my mom and my grandma in the other. From a young age, I was always good at taking in everything that was happening around me, even if it looked like I wasn’t paying attention. My grandma knew that I was always listening, and would sometimes ask me a question in the middle of her conversation with my mom, just to see if I was still following along. And I would answer her without looking up from my book.
My grandparents have always been big travelers, and she’d tell stories about how she refused to drive through certain states when they drove across the country. My grandparents had gotten married at a time when interracial marriage was still illegal in some states. While that’s not the case anymore, there are still certain places that she doesn’t feel comfortable going to, and it’s a feeling that my grandpa will never truly understand.
When you’re in such a racially mixed family, there’s just certain things that even the people you’re closest with will never quite experience the way you do. For me, that disconnect exists with my parents. I have, and will continue to experience things that they may not be able to relate to. Everyone has a private and public persona. Who you are at home is different from who you are in public, but for me that difference is even greater than it is for most other people. My mother wanted my sister and I to grow up speaking Japanese, and since we lived in a place where everything outside of the house was in English, she made sure that we only spoke Japanese when we were home. Even my dad, who doesn’t have a drop of Japanese blood, only spoke to us in Japanese. She enforced this rule so much that as a kid, I began to think she didn’t understand English. The cashier at the grocery store would ask her if she wanted a bag, and I’d translate for her, asking if she understood. Spoiler alert: she’s fluent in English, she just wanted to make sure my sister and I had an environment to actually speak Japanese in.
Now when I go home, it’s a much more casual blend of Japanese, English, Spanish, and sometimes even French. But that sense of division still exists in my consciousness. Even though I know that I don’t have a reason to be, I get a little self-conscious or uncomfortable when I have to speak Japanese outside of my family; Japanese had always been something I didn’t share with the public. I’ve gotten to the age now where I’m grateful to my mom for having forced me to learn Japanese, even though I hated having to attend extra school and do homework on the weekends. Without it, I wouldn’t be able to communicate with half my family. We used to spend whole summers in Japan, and since none of my family there speaks English, it definitely would have been a lot less fun if I didn’t speak Japanese. There were already enough things (my hair, my clothes, my double eyelids, my tan skin, etc.) that identified me as a haafu [half, as in only half Japanese] that not speaking the language would have really pushed it over the edge. These differences, however small, are always noticed. To a Japanese person, I will never truly be Japanese, just like I will never truly be white to a white person and never truly black to a black person.
***
We were going to 上野公園 [Ueno Park] today! お母さん [my mother] hurried my sister and I out of じじ[my grandfather’s] silver minivan as we got to the train station. “Stay close!” she reminded us as we followed her towards the escalators. My sister and I hopped onto the moving steps, excited that we were spending the day at the park with our friends. They used to live in California with us, but a little after we all started elementary school, they had to move back to Japan so we hadn’t seen them in almost two years.
We stayed close as お母さん pulled out her Suica card, ready to buy our tickets from the machine at the top of the escalators. We’d been to Tokyo from this train station many times before, so we knew what to do. Both Japanese people and Japanese trains are always on time, so we couldn’t be late. As soon as お母さん got our tickets, we walked through the turnstiles and hopped on another escalator down to the platform.
Everything in the train station, including the people, ran like clockwork: nothing (and no one) was out of place. Everyone on the escalators stood calmly on the right, while a few people, including us, walked down the left side. We finally reached the platform about two minutes before the train arrived. It was sunny but a little windy, and I shook my hair out of my face. After about a minute or so the train slowed into the station, right on schedule. As we stepped onto the train and found seats together, お母さんlet out a breath. “Ohhh,” she said, as if she finally understood. “It’s because you’re wearing your hair down.” I looked at her, confused. What did my hair have to do with anything? “People have been staring, but today we’re not with your father [meaning: people normally stare because my dad is a 外人, a foreigner]. It’s because you’re wearing your hair down.” The thing was, I hadn’t even realized people were staring. I had watched them as they hurried through the train station, and they had been watching me.
As the train started to pick up speed, I thought about it. My hair was big, as one would expect of someone who was part black, but since it mostly just got in the way, I usually kept it tied in a knot on my head. Today, however, it was out in all its natural glory, and people had noticed. People had definitely noticed.
***
Middle School was a time when one small thing could make or break you. Everyone was hyper-aware of their appearances, the brands of the clothing they wore, who you hung out with, and even the way you wore your school-distributed P.E. clothes. In terms of the social hierarchy, there were people who were very clearly cool, and those who were very clearly not. I was somewhere in the middle. I was athletic enough, smart enough, and cool enough to be liked by most everyone, but I wasn’t free from the pressures of trying to fit in, either. I played soccer and sang in the choir. I was friendly with whoever I got placed next to in class.
I thought of P.E. as just another easy but necessary course. In eighth grade, I had it at the end of day, so it was the last hour I had to get through before I got to leave. The teachers liked me, though. On Wednesdays, when we had to run The Mile, I could run it in six and a half minutes if I tried. But mostly I just used P.E. as a time to socialize with my friends while occasionally throwing a frisbee or walking laps around the gym.
One afternoon, on a particularly lazy day, my friends and I were sitting in the gym, near the bottom of the bleachers. We were supposed to be playing dodgeball but we had all gotten out so we could just sit and talk instead. I remember Hannah on one side of me, Trent sitting a row below us with Adam next to him, forming a little square as the sounds of dodgeball echoed around us. I was closest with Hannah. She was Chinese-American, and something about her drew me to her. She was nice, and she was naturally very pretty: she had clear skin, bright eyes, and shiny, smooth hair. Trent was also cool. He was about 10 shades paler than either one of us, about a foot taller, and probably didn’t weigh much more than 100 pounds. Adam was my least favorite of our P.E. crew. He was a year younger than us, and even though he wasn’t always the nicest, we let him hang out with us anyways because he didn’t seem to have any other friends. There was just something about him that didn’t rub me the right way. He either couldn’t read social cues very well, or simply didn’t care to.
That specific day, we were talking about how Hannah and I were both Asian, but different kinds of Asian. Trent turned to Adam. “What’s the difference between Chinese people and Japanese people?” Adam took a moment to study Hannah’s face next to mine before answering “Japanese people have pimples and Chinese people don’t.” I was mortified. As my face flushed, I looked to see if Hannah and Trent had heard the same thing I had. The look of shock on both of their faces was enough to tell me I wasn’t imagining things. Suddenly, we heard Mrs. Swyers blow her whistle, signaling the end of class. Adam got up to head towards the locker room, unaware of the impact he’d left in his wake. I don’t really remember if Hannah and Trent said anything to me as we all got up to go change out of our P.E. clothes. I was in shock; I don’t think I had been more embarrassed in my life.
As I stared out the window on the car ride home, I wondered what life was like for
Adam outside of the hour a day that I saw him.
***
I spent junior year of high school in Spain as an exchange student. I hadn’t even taken two full years of high school Spanish before I got on the plane. I didn’t know a single person there, and I was expected to take normal bachillerato [high school] classes, same as if I had grown up there. It took me a while before I felt comfortable. Luckily, my host family treated me like their own daughter, and even though they didn’t speak English, they didn’t mind me asking them to repeat themselves every time they spoke to me. In the evenings, when I didn’t have too much homework, I would sit at the kitchen table as my host dad prepared dinner.
My host dad liked to go hiking on the weekends, and since nobody else in the family liked to, he usually just took the two dogs with him. The first time he asked if I wanted to go with him, my host mom smiled at me. “None of us like to go, so he’s used to going alone. Don’t feel like you need to say yes.” She turned to her husband. “Let her sleep in on the weekends!” I assured them both that I wouldn’t mind waking up early, and that I’d love to go hiking. After that first weekend, he invited me to come with him every time he went out. And while some weekends I decided to sleep in instead, it became a regular thing for us; I even got to know some of his hiking friends.
One night, I was sitting in the kitchen while he showed me how to make tortilla de patatas, a staple Spanish food that I soon grew to love. He was telling me that we would have to stop by el chino the next day on our way home from soccer practice, because my host mom needed some wrapping paper for her coworker’s birthday gift. By now he explained words to me even before I could ask what they meant. El chino [literally: the Chinese] could be used to describe a Chinese man, but it was also the word used to refer to shops that sold cheap items. Most of the time these items were imported from China and the owners of these shops tended to be Chinese, but not always. I eventually came to understand the negative connotation that came with the word el chino. There were also negative connotations and stereotypes attached to words used to describe people of African descent. Even in Northern Spain, where I was living, there were many immigrants from north Africa, and in many ways, they were seen as inferior to ‘real’ Spanish people. The racism and the colonist mindset that had led to the expansion of the Spanish Empire centuries ago was still glaringly obvious in Spanish culture today.
At first, I found myself wondering how no one else saw just how racist the Spanish language was. But it was engrained in society there. Most of the time, people weren’t even aware of what they were doing or saying. It was just the way it had always been.
Back in bachillerato I was the only American, so when it came time for English the professor would sometimes let me lead the class. I shared what it was like to go to high school in the United States. I showed them pictures of my campus, explaining everything in English, happy to get a break from constantly having to translate things in my head. Before the bell rang to signal the end of class one day, I mentioned that I spoke Japanese at home, which meant Spanish was my third language. Everybody got excited when they found out I could write in Japanese. As the professor left the room and I headed back to my seat, almost every girl in the class came over to my desk, asking if I could write their names for them in Japanese. I got handed people’s notebooks, little scraps of paper, almost anything that could be written on. I spent the next 15 minutes writing everybody’s names in Japanese. It was almost comical. I could have drawn little scribbles of nonsense, and no one would have known.
Being American was cool, but being Japanese? That was a whole new level of exotic. For many of the people I met that year, I was the only Japanese person they had ever met in their entire lives. Why was it that Chinese people or African people were seen and treated as inferior in Spanish society but when I was Japanese, that was cool? Four years later, I was on the phone with one of my friends from this class and she told me she still had that piece of paper with her name written on it in Japanese.
***
Learning Cluster is one of my favorite parts of being a Soka student. Soka University is simultaneously exactly what you’d expect and completely different from what you’d expect for a small, private, liberal arts college in Southern California. Our entire student population is less than 450 and about 40% of us are international students. The mission statement talks about becoming “global citizens,” and everyone’s required to take philosophy courses, writing courses, an art course, and a language other than English. Studying abroad for a semester is a graduation requirement, and we all live on campus together, spending 4 years of our lives in a 0.16 square mile bubble.
As first- and second-year students, we participate in a winter block called Learning Cluster. For the whole month of January, we only take one class. Students are encouraged to help construct the syllabus, and we normally have class for three hours a day, so it’s an opportunity to get to know your classmates better. Every year, a few of the groups are selected to receive travel grants, which allow for students to conduct research abroad. During my second year at Soka, I got into a Learning Cluster that was going to Hong Kong and mainland China to study economic development and social entrepreneurship. The group had to be strategically selected, because we needed enough people who spoke Mandarin and Cantonese to balance out those of us who didn’t speak any. Once we got there, we made sure never to go anywhere unless we had at least one Mandarin or Cantonese speaker with us. While we toured businesses and conducted interviews, this wasn’t a problem because we all stuck together, but when it came time to go out for meals or spend free time exploring the city, we had to be more careful.
One night, after we had finished our research for the day, a group of us decided to go out to explore the nearby nightlife. Of the six of us that went out that night, none of us were Chinese. One of us had studied Mandarin since getting to Soka and was about to study abroad in Shanghai, but that was the extent of our language abilities. Visually, we were an interesting mix. One white guy from the States, one Kenyan guy, one Indian girl, one Asian-American guy, one Dutch-Dominican guy, and me. We found a bar with outdoor seating, so we sat down at an open table and asked for menus. When the waiter came back, ready for our orders, we asked if he spoke any English. He shook his head and smiled. The waiter then looked to Jacob, who’s Filipino, Japanese & white but looked the most Chinese, as if waiting for a translation. Jacob immediately shook his head and laughed, telling the waiter in English that he didn’t speak any Mandarin. Mateo, the Dutch-Dominican guy, started to tell the waiter that he was the only one who spoke any Mandarin, but the waiter looked at me next. I smiled, and turned towards Mateo, who was finally able to catch the waiter’s attention long enough to order for everyone at the table.
It isn’t just in the U.S. where East Asians are homogenized.
***
Another one of my favorite parts about Soka is the fact that every student gets the chance to study abroad for a semester. I happened to be placed with a French host family that sometimes ate weird food but were generally really nice, and I loved spending time with them. One night, after my 5-year-old host sister had gone to bed, my host parents, my host brother and I grabbed our plates of homemade pizza and settled in on the couch to watch a movie. They warned me that the movie was in Korean but they had found a version with French subtitles. I hadn’t even been in France for a month, so they were concerned I wouldn’t be able to read fast enough. I told them not to worry about it, and took a bite of my pizza. As the first scene unfolded, my host mom turned to me and asked “Do you understand what they’re saying?” I was about to answer that the subtitles weren’t moving that fast so I was doing okay, but then I realized what she meant. She was asking me if I understood the Korean. I told her “No, but the subtitles are easy enough to read.”
It didn’t hurt. I knew she didn’t mean anything by it. I knew she had been listening when I told them a few nights prior that I usually spoke Japanese at home. But maybe that was part of the problem. Whenever these microaggressions happened, it was never anger that came to me. Maybe annoyance, but mostly, I was indifferent. Sometimes I didn’t even notice them happening. Is it because I’m so used to it that these types of comments seem normal to me?
***
Emma, Lauren and I were friends from Soka, and the three of us were studying abroad in the same city. When our Final Exam schedule got released, we realized that we were going to have a whole week off before our last exam. We had been taking advantage of our long weekends the whole semester, traveling throughout Europe. We packed in as much as we could while staying up to date on our studies, but somehow, we hadn’t yet taken a trip with just the three of us. When we found an €18 flight to Budapest for that last of week of exams, we knew it was our chance.
We stayed in the best hostel, exploring the city during the day and experiencing the lively nightlife culture in the evenings. It was our last day, and we hadn’t yet visited the neighborhood Lauren used to live in, so we decided to go have brunch at a restaurant in her old neighborhood. We walked almost single-file on the skinny sidewalk, occasionally glancing down at our phones to make sure we were going in the right direction. As we got further away from the center of town and closer to the restaurant, there were less and less people on the streets around us. I momentarily locked eyes with a tall Hungarian man standing on a stoop, talking loudly into his phone as we walked around him. As we kept walking, I had the feeling that we were being followed, so I turned around to see the man on the phone a few meters behind us, talking slightly quieter now. When he looked up, I locked eyes with him again, this time on purpose, to let him know that I saw him trailing us. He broke first, turning back around to continue his phone conversation from his stoop.
After brunch, we headed to Budapest’s famous Central Market Hall. None of us really needed anything from there but we wanted to see it anyways. We walked in though large double doors and I was immediately overwhelmed with that pungent smell that hits you when you walk into a butcher shop. It spanned three huge floors: the first was sprawling with booths selling groceries, and if you looked up, you could see the second and third floors packed with restaurants and little shops selling souvenirs. We walked past the glass cases full of sausage and huge cuts of beef, past the vegetable and fruit stands until we got to the stairs at the other end of the hall. The booths upstairs had almost every souvenir you could imagine, from magnets to tea towels. I remember walking past one station and seeing the exact oven mitt I had gotten for my mom 4 years before, when I visited the Budapest for the first time. There were people all around us; not enough to need to elbow our way through, but enough to where we had to stay close not to get lost.
We were walking past the booth with the oven mitts when I noticed a man walking behind us. I don’t know what it was, but something about him seemed off. He hadn’t done anything specific, but he seemed predatory to me. We kept walking for a while, both Emma and Lauren a few feet ahead of me. I wanted to see if he was actually following us or if I was being paranoid. After a few moments, I figured it was better to be safe than sorry so I shouted at Emma to wait up. At first she didn’t hear me, but Lauren did, and they both made their way back to me as I pretended to be interested in some keychains. I watched the guy as he caught up to where we were. He put his head down as he walked past, but I could tell he was watching us before we stopped. After he passed, I explained to Emma and Lauren that he was following us, and I wanted him to let him pass. Neither of them had noticed, and they thanked me for being careful, agreeing it was better to be safe than sorry. As we continued through the market, I wondered if there was a reason I was the only one who had noticed both men who tried to follow us that day. All three of us stood out when we spoke, our distinctly American voices floating through the air. I had always been good at paying attention to my surroundings. My grandma had known that for years, but it still made me think: was it my personality? Is that just who I was? Or was I just more used to constantly having my guard up? Of us three, I was the only one who didn’t look white.
***
Sometimes, when I’m filling out a job application, I think about why I’m checking the box that says “two or more races.” Why is it that the government cares if you’re black, white, Asian, or Latinx, but if you’re more than one race, they just don’t care? Other times, like on the SAT, it says to “check all that apply,” so I check white/Caucasian, black/African-American, and I check Asian. Even though I believe that race is a social construct and we shouldn’t put so much importance into categorizing humans in such an arbitrary manner, the fact of the matter is that it has some very real consequences. It’s like clothing. The way you’re dressed shouldn’t affect how you’re perceived by others or how much respect you’re given, but it does. And while you have a closet full of clothes at home, you don’t wear every shirt, every shoe, or every pair of pants every day. A stranger I sit next to on the train will see the outfit I wore that particular day and never know anything else about me. But those I spend more time with have seen much more of my closet. I’m constantly finding new ways to pair my shirts, pants, socks, shoes, and accessories together to create new looks. I’m proud to tell people I’m mixed. I have more articles of clothing in my closet than most other people. And while some people would be overwhelmed with figuring out how to put together so many outfits, it’s a challenge I’m happy to tackle. I may have more to learn and more choices to make, but at least I’ll look good doing it.