Life in the Middle Ground
If there’s one thing I’ve learned in life, it’s that we have a disturbingly deep association between race and identity. It’s buried so deep, we miss it in most of its forms. Lynching, name calling and outright discrimination aside, race still permeates every aspect of life.
Living in a country where the faces aren’t all like yours forces you to come to terms with your race from a very early age. You learn to create these spheres of existence, those that can run parallel but can never meet. From the snide looks at my mother’s food in my primary school lunchbox to calling white adults by their first names, I’ve learned to prune my cultural expression to not draw attention to the fact that I’m different. Well, any more than my appearance does. At least if I’m white on the inside people can relate to me, and can digest me.
Then comes the internal divides. Being mixed-raced meant my mother had to speak English in the house. Then suddenly following the divorce, I was left with ears too old to absorb the language filling every phone conversation I overheard. Cue the second barrier. I made a concerted effort to learn the language as a child, but the light giggles I got when my English tongue got tied around a Filipino word discouraged me, so I just settled to be the filo kid who can’t understand filo. As the only half-caste apple on the tree, I’m the one cousin who couldn’t understand the family gossip sessions, TV dramas, or have conversations with grandparents that go beyond “hello.”
For a while, the uniqueness of my situation made me feel special. But once my mother remarried a Filipino man, and he and his daughter moved in, every family dinner slowly warped that feeling of specialness into alienation.
These series of divides in both my worlds means that I’m stuck in this middle ground where I’m too Asian for white people, and too white to Asian people. I am neither here nor there, so I stick out in both places.
I mean, I’ve made friends and haven’t really experienced any outright struggle because of my race. But sometimes I think it would be nice to firmly belong somewhere. Like I said, race and identity are so intertwined they’re almost one and the same, so when you’re neither one or the other your identity is split to adapt to both environments.
I always used to wear my mixed heritage like a badge of honour. The fact that I had a mouthful to explain why my eyes are slanted but skin is fair and only spoke English was like quirk of mine. I was the manic pixie ethnic girl.
Then when it came to my family, I compensated for my alienation with some gross Western elitism. I was the assimilated, affluent English-speaking child who was “going places.” In both spheres of my life I was the outlier, so I relied on my differences to split and influence my identities- when in reality, I was none of these people.
What’s even more interesting is both identities came from a place of internalized racism. I was either using my heritage as a party trick or outright denouncing it. One of the toughest realisations as a minority is coming to terms with being both a victim and perpetrator of your own subjugation.
Sometimes I wonder if I would feel as strongly as I do if I popped out looking more Anglo-Saxon. I can only imagine how drastically different my life would be, even if my life went on more or less the same trajectory. I also wonder what kind of person I’d be if I was born and raised in the Philippines. It would definitely be easier to wrangle with my identity. Not half this or half that, just plain old 100% something. It seems nice.
But why should it even matter that I don’t belong to one particular group? Especially in a country like Australia. The world is getting more global, so race shouldn’t matter anymore right? No one claims to see race, but it can’t be a coincidence that a majority of friendship groups I’ve seen are the same colour.
Race still plays a vital role in how we relate to each other and identify ourselves, even subconsciously. Life can get pretty lonely, and it’s naturally easier to relate to and find solace with people like yourself. It’s why now that I’m living in China, I gravitate towards the Australian students.
As much as we’d like it not to be the case, race and identity are still so tightly intertwined. And rifts in race causes rifts in identity. I still feel like a somewhat fractured human, trying to find a whole, fluid self in the middle ground.
