Voices on the New Diasporas - an MIT student journal
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I’m a Chocoholic, What are You?
by Talia Winters, Class of 2006
“You hit hard! Are you from the ghetto or something?”
“This line is full of Asians – what are you doing here?”
“Oooh, lissen t’her talk, she so coun-try!”
“Wait a second, you’re not black?”
“Where are you from? Canada? I mean…what are you?”
What am I, indeed. The facts are simple: my mother is Indian, my father is white, so my brother and I are mixed. I was born in Canada, near Toronto, grew up in a Detroit suburb, and went to high school in rural Indiana. I have family in Los Angeles, Vancouver, Calcutta, and Australia. I speak French and Spanish, wear bandannas and baggy jeans, and have an accent that sounds country, British, or Midwestern, depending on my mood. I’ve always considered myself Asian, as I’m clearly not white, but over the years my sense of my Asian heritage has faded, eroded by my integration into the predominantly-white society of Middle America and the influence of friends from around the world. When pressed to define myself, I continue to identify as Asian by default, since I really can’t declare myself anything else, but I consider it one of the more incidental facets of my identity.
Of course, the very use of the term “Asian” is fraught with ambiguity. Strictly speaking, Asian-Americans are those of Asian heritage born in North America, distinguished from Asian immigrants by their birthplace, regardless of their current status. This obvious definition requires clarification for the term “Asian heritage,” since Asia is a large continent consisting of many distinct cultures and ethnicities. General use of the word “Asian” is what I call “Oriental,” the common face of Asia: light skin, slanted eyes, dark hair and eyes. This encompasses the native populations of Japan, Korea, China, and Taiwan, and to some extent the Southeast Asian countries, but is insufficient for my notion of who is Asian, which adds in the populations of the Indian subcontinent. It had never occurred to me to consider my family anything but Asian until a (Chinese) friend pointed out that “Indians are different…you could never mistake one of them for one of us.” And this is true; perhaps the most common and annoying comment heard when clarifying one’s origins to the average American is, “Chinese, Japanese, whatever; you all look the same anyways!”
Though my definition of who is Asian is a trifle more inclusive than that in common use, it does include some qualifications. Pacific Islanders, Russians, and inhabitants of the Middle East technically reside on the Asian continent, but neither they nor I call them Asian. My use of the term “Asian” tends to vary with context; when discussing things I see as common to all Asian cultures, such as the emphasis Asian parents place on education, I don’t bother to specify any country in particular. When explaining arranged marriages, on the other hand, I usually point out that my experience only qualifies me to talk about the Indian version of such things, which may or may not vary from the practice in China or Japan. Talking about friends and people, I use country of origin most often for clarity; though not a surefire defence against confusion, it makes most sense. Since coming to MIT, I’ve been especially careful about such things since the likelihood that my audience is actually knowledgeable about Asia and its various populations is far higher than it would be back in Indiana.
My awareness of the definition and status of the term Asian-American has, in fact, undergone a rather interesting change since I moved to the United States. The area of Ontario where I was born had a rather sizeable Bengali Indian emigrant population, enough to support a wide range of friends for my mother and our family, as well as a school that operated on the weekends, teaching us to read and write our own language, as well as singing, dancing, and playing instruments. After each week of public school, I’d spend my Saturday mornings studying foreign symbols that seemed far less intuitive than the French I was learning in school, and playing tic-tac-toe and MASH on the blackboards during breaks. It never struck me as odd that my friends Siobhan and Diala didn’t go to school on the weekends, or that they wore their favorite dresses to go to church, not puja. If I’d cared to consider it, I’d likely have noticed that I was Asian-American, but back then I didn’t have any sense of myself as anything in particular, except tall.
This part of my life is the only time I’ve directly absorbed the Asian culture that is theoretically my birthright, but even then I was receiving healthy doses of North American influences. My mother sent me to Sunday school each week with a neighbor, hoping I would develop good Christian values. I wore Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle shoes with holographs on the sides, which everyone deemed totally awesome. Even my mother’s cooking changed to accommodate our low tolerance for spiciness and strange ingredients, becoming relatively basic Western fare dressed up with exotic Indian flavors. The extent of my un-Asian-ness became obvious when we spent a month visiting my maternal relatives in Calcutta and then touring southern India. My brother and I couldn’t talk to anyone there except our grandparents and the African man who drove our hired minivan, were too squeamish to eat anything except chapatis (plain flatbread) and boiled eggs, and didn’t even have cap-guns, the ultimate status symbol among the local children. Everything from my jeans and t-shirts to my short hair and long legs marked me as a tourist and an outsider.
My perception of myself as Asian-American, rather than simply Asian, thus started when I was quite young. The next major shift in my thinking came a few years later, after I’d emigrated to the United States and ended up in a private school for elementary and middle school. Billed as an “international” school, it catered to foreign families working for the auto industry by emphasizing languages from kindergarten onwards. It was a small school, between 100-120 students, and in my year the only non-foreign females were three African-American girls. Shakira, Veroni’ca, Katrina and I were the local kids, loud, obnoxious, and able to dominate the school by default. They introduced me to black culture: rap and R&B music, urban slang, and basketball, all of which had been entirely outside my experience. Though I was accepted as one of them because of my intelligence (that, and I could guard any guy during our recess ball games), any attempts on my part to act “hip” were naturally ridiculed, so I simply watched, listened and absorbed. I remained an anomaly, the only Asian of any sort in a sea of German students sprinkled with Latinos and blacks.
When I moved away and started high school, I seized the chance to redefine myself and experiment. Thrust into a large urban public high school, surrounded by more blacks and Hispanics than white students, only the most clueless could ascribe my Spanish skills to Latin ancestry; too many real Latinos crowded the halls to allow such confusion. In response to the Midwest’s chronic lack of any sizeable Asian population outside of Chicago, I continued to abandon the already-small Asian part of my American heritage as I encountered pop culture in large doses for the first time. I changed schools several times in quick succession, each year adopting more new language, habits, and tastes. By the time I graduated, the only voluntary acknowledgement I made of my background was my status as a prominent member of the Asian students’ club, a distinction that faded in comparison to some of my more notorious characteristics; as my friend Adam, a black boy from Gary, IN likes to say, “Christalee’s got flava!”.
When I came to MIT, then, I viewed my Indian ancestry as a fact, neither shameful nor a source of pride, only useful in explaining my brown hair, brown eyes, and brown skin. The Institute’s non-classification of Asians as minority students stripped the label of what little cachet it might have held for me, and the fragmentary nature of cultural groups on campus, a direct consequence of such a large and diverse Asian population, held no interest for me. I couldn’t identify with the typical Indian students, sharing neither their culture nor their quiet, studious, dutiful attitudes. Instead of the soft, musical accents of those for whom English is a second or third language, I cut through class discussion with a brash, heavy country drawl, an affectation I developed to appear less intelligent and educated than I actually am, and continue to use because it amuses me. I’m not demure, respectful, or polite, and I swear like a sailor. I don’t look or act like a stereotypical Asian, and I’ve witnessed more confusion about my ethnicity since coming here than I ever have anywhere else. Many link my use of the word “y’all,” my appreciation for rap music, my fondness for bandannas, and my outgoing personality together and conclude that I’m African-American, despite having none of the requisite physical characteristics besides non-white skin. Others, misled by my sporadic use of Spanish phrases, assume I’m from somewhere south of the border. Attempts to correct this are only slightly useful; when told that my mother is in fact from India, I’m then asked, “But your father’s black, right?”
I’m not sure why MIT students, apart from placing less emphasis on physical appearance in general, would be so confused over such a simple matter. Perhaps it’s because unlike at home, it’s the Asian that is familiar and the Hispanic and African-American that is rare, hence an unknown specimen like myself must be one of the latter groups. Or perhaps I’ve done such a good job at suppressing my Asian heritage and sensibilities and have created an impenetrable layer of my own personality, which happens to borrow somewhat overtly from African-American culture, simply because that’s what I enjoy. Ironically, the general confusion about my origins has led me to be more sensitive and emphatic about proclaiming them than I’ve ever been, with interesting results. Random “ethnic moods” will influence me to dress in silk shirts that look like vintage 60s hippie styles, which is in character for me, but are really authentic Indian garb. I’ve encountered such widespread confusion and so many unconsciously insulting comments about how I “can’t be Asian, no way!” that I’ve gone so far as to stand up on a coffee table, yelled a roomful of people into silence, and then carefully explained exactly where and who I come from. Sometimes I wish I could have my life story tattooed onto my forehead for easy reference. Of course, not everyone notices, inquires, or cares about my ethnicity. And despite my renewed awareness of my background, I’m not in any particular hurry to re-embrace it. I hope to make another visit to India soon, but to see family and meet friends I’ve made online, not to “return to my roots.” In the meantime, I’ll keep gently educating the masses that Asian ≠ pale skin, black straight hair, and slanted eyes. Gently.
