Both, Nothing and Everything [BLOG]

This week’s blog post comes from Aozora Brockman, a sophomore at Northwestern University. Brockman is studying anthropology, creative writing, and Asian American studies.  She is especially interested in researching racial issues that impact the Asian American community and is currently involved in an independent research project on how Asian American masculinity is viewed by non-Asian female fans of K-Pop male idols. Her intelligent commentary on race is colored by her perspective as a bi-racial Asian American growing up in the 21st century. 

During the winter of third grade I spent a blissful month at my grandmother’s house in Japan with my Japanese mother, American father and two brothers. I had come to Japan to find my true roots, since at my rural elementary school I was always the Japanese one, the Asian one, the exotic one. I had only visited once before as a baby, but I knew that Japan was my home all along. And I was right—Japan embraced me. My extended family stared at my haafu eyes and told me I was beautiful, our friends took us on trips to temples and fed us teppanyaki that melted in our mouths, and the sight of rolling green hills and the feel of the wispy air on my skin was completely new and wholly unsurprising at the same time. When I left I cried while waving goodbye to two sweet cousins and vowed that I would return as soon as I could.

As a high school senior, my dream finally came true and I flew to Tokyo to spend ten months attending a Japanese girls’ high school. By this time I had wholly embraced my Japanese identity not only because I wanted to, but because I had to. Though I fully believed that to be patriotic meant to challenge wrongs that the American government committed in order to make the country better, most of my classmates disagreed. During one heated debate in high school, one student turned to me, and with frustration trembling his words, said, “Why don’t you go back to Japan if you hate America so much?” It was in that moment that I felt fully cast away because my standing as a foreigner to this country—though I was born and raised an American—was made explicitly clear.

Yet in Tokyo I was horrified to discover that in Japan, too, I was a foreigner. Even while speaking fluent Japanese and wearing a Japanese school-girl uniform on the train, I would look up to catch passengers staring. My poof of brown, curly hair immediately made it impossible for me to be “fully” Japanese. I was so obviously “mixed” on the surface that I could never be “pure” Japanese, “pure” anything. I envied the girls with long, black hair just as they envied me for my double eyelids, because the beauty they saw in me was white beauty—unattainable—and secretly slipped into their consciousness by the fashion magazines and make up ads, but I just wanted to be a part of a group for once in my life.

And that is when I had my identity crisis: what could I be if I was not a part of the country I was born in and the country I thought I belonged in? Was I Japanese or American?

But of course I had an identity crisis; I’m mixed after all, right? And don’t all mixed race people have to overcome massive challenges with their identity? The problem with this line of thinking is that it assumes that race is the same as culture. It assumes that my “White” culture from my father and my “Asian” culture from my mother conflicts, and leaves me grasping for any kind of sense. But what if my mother was a third-generation Japanese American who had never visited Japan? Just because my phenotypic features may seem “mixed,” I may not be culturally mixed at all. Moreover, what does it mean to be culturally mixed? I did clash with my Japanese mother growing up, but I was also able to unconsciously pick and choose the aspects I liked from both my Japanese and American cultures to make my own culture. Culture is an always shifting, unstable reality, so to be culturally mixed does not automatically throw you into a whirl of confusion.

What caused my identity crisis was not my mixed race and mixed culture themselves, but inability of the people around me to accept my mixed-ness. I had to choose one race, one culture, one country because I was not allowed to be both.

To be both means that boundaries of race and culture are broken, and what looked like stable categories and true generalizations erupt into a flurry of uncertainty. I had to choose one group to belong in so that everyone else could go on pretending that race and culture exists in our blood. But I would like to exist as proof that it does not, and never did. So I am both, nothing, and everything at the same time—an ambiguous mystery.