My husband and I are expecting our first child, and we’re thrilled (and maybe a little terrified, though this was a fully intentional choice)! I think the thing I’m looking forward to most is learning who this new little person is going to be, and what they’ll learn from us for better or worse while making their own decisions in life. They’re going to navigate the world differently than either of us, and be perceived differently as well.
To be blunt, the obvious one is that they will be mixed race, while I am of Chinese descent and my husband is part Romanian and a mélange of other European places. Sorry kid, we’ve signed you up for a lifetime of, “What are you/Where are you really from?” They won’t be alone though; the 2020 census saw a significant increase from 2010 for people reporting as multiracial (though as the census notes, part of this is also design improvements to the way pollsters asked about self-identification). That’s the crux of my thoughts today: while race is an arbitrarily-determined construct, its impacts are not. Our society racializes at a glance- in the Atlanta spa shootings of 2021, the murderer claimed his actions were due to a sex addiction, sexualizing the existence of Asian women whether or not they are sex workers (an aside- SW is work, and they deserve labor rights as well). While the kiddo will be perceived differently than both my husband and I, like me they may face questions from strangers about language skills or their sexual anatomy, invasive questions that indicate the questioner already sees us as Other.
Many immigrants try to mitigate the Otherness by assimilating in the hopes that it will shield future generations. Unfortunately, assimilation is still violence: you hack away at yourself, cutting pieces to fit into an acceptable mold and sometimes what’s cut is lost forever. My yeh-yeh deliberately did not teach his children our heritage language of Toisanese (aside from words here and there, but not enough to be fluent), which meant for the most part, my generation knows even less. In my case, some toddler phrases, words for relatives, and dim sum items. I’d love to learn it, but unfortunately it’s not practical as the elders who do know it fade away and Mandarin becomes the dominant Chinese dialect (though I should note these “dialects” are practically different languages, with Toisanese under the Cantonese umbrella while still having little mutual intelligibility- think of it as extra hillbilly canto). I can pass on what I know, but what I have is already so watered down.
And I think there’s something unfortunate with that. When asked The Question and flipping it back, sometimes I get “uh, generic American I guess? I don’t know” which I find sad in away, because that means they’re disconnected from ancestral origins (while at the same time requiring I have a family history at the ready). Immigration is a struggle, and even when going smoothly still contains the trauma of separation, of starting over in unfamiliar places where your previous life experience might not count. My great-grandmother was a rare educated woman, growing up with a tutor paid for by her father’s wages as a Californian tailor. But when she arrived here in the 1920s, not knowing English meant the only employment she could find was menial labor when her husband couldn’t run the restaurant/bar due to illness for a time. There’s so much struggle and sacrifice for future generations, and deliberately forgetting feels like disrespect towards those efforts. (And this barely touches on the intentional dehumanizing of the Black slave population in the United States, treating people as property and breaking those ancestral ties. In the scope of this post, I don’t fault ignorance on the individual there and don’t reverse the question.)
Colorblindness is not the solution; rather, I think it more instructive that our kid fully knows how they got here and why strangers might ask them rude questions in the name of small talk. And since they don’t owe a new acquaintance a fully-fledged genealogy, there’s an easy enough response: “Oh, all my great-grandparents are from the Midwest” and leave it at that, because it’s true.