When I was five, I got a lock and key diary from the Scholastic book fair and messily scribbled what I thought was the most scandalous thing about me
Dear Diary,
I am White, but my mom is BLACK.
There on the page, in sparkly teal gel pen, was a confession revealing two glaring truths about my five-year-old self: I thought that being Asian was the same thing as being white and that being Filipino was the same thing as being Black.
My misunderstanding of race as a binary of white and Black encouraged me to categorize myself and those around me according to their melanin, completely unaware that Blackness was used to denote African origin and not just the brown shades of Crayola crayons. I remember making a mental checklist in my mind, trying to make sense of the world around me according to the designated “skin tone” colour of the peach crayon:
I’m the same shade as Dad (who’s Scottish and Japanese) and we’re both the same colour as Nana (Japanese), so the three of us must be white. Lola (Filipino) is the same shade as me, but Mom (also Filipino) is darker than Lola, so Mom must be Black and Lola, white. Mom and Ms. Gill (who’s Indian) are the same shade of brown, so they go together, but Mr. B (Irish) is the same skin tone as Nana, so he’s white like her.
I knew that I was considered Asian, but my five-year-old brain categorized Asianness as a subset of whiteness. I was yet to learn that Filipinos were also categorized as Asian. I thought that what made me Asian was my East Asian appearance and since my mom was darker than me, I thought we were categorized differently.
She must be Black.
I decided that Filipino was synonymous with Black. I further supported this hypothesis with the misunderstanding that my godbrother looked Filipino and, therefore, must have Filipino parents. I was unaware that my godbrother is also mixed race and has a Black father. I thought that his dad was Filipino since him and his mom matched the same Crayola crayon. If race didn’t mean skin colour, then what was it?
Without any background knowledge on racial hierarchization and systemic oppression, my attempts to make sense of the constructions of race as a five-year-old were terribly misguided. However, my confusions are illustrative of race as a construct that is constantly in negotiation and scrutinizes what traits are used to racialize people (Hall, 1990).
It’s understandable that, especially as a child, I was hesitant to categorize Filipino under the umbrella of Asian. Afterall, the only representations of Asians I’d seen were always of fair skin, jet black hair, and small eyes. Even today, there is plenty of discourse surrounding the complexities of Filipinx identity and what labels we can claim (Chutuape, 2016).
Although Filipinos are impacted by the model minority myth, the myth itself was primarily based upon the migration of East Asian individuals (Kawai, 2003) and Filipino Americans, in particular, have a complex, postcolonial relationship with their home that is unique of other Asian communities (Chutuape, 2016; Ocampo, 2014).
Some Filipinos choose to deprioritize the label of Asian to foreground their cultural identity, and others feel closer to Latinx culture than Asian (Ocampo, 2014). Across the Asian diaspora, Filipinos are sometimes labeled the “Blackest Asians” in others’ efforts to consider the specificity of Filipino identity, in a harsh manner similar to my five-year-old confusion (Chutuape, 2016). Although Filipino identity cannot be equated with Blackness, the nuance of Filipino experience highlights the importance of challenging the colonial desire to categorize Asians as a monolith (Cheng, 2013).
This makes culturally specific activist projects just as important as collective ones across one or more diasporas. Still, these spaces need to be accessible for multiracial people to challenge the notion of perpetual homogeneity within ethnic groups (Hall, 1990). Our cultural identities are in constant production, but the journey is even more complex for mixed race individuals, who are often pigeonholed into opting for the simplest label, rather than what resonates the most (Hall, 1990; Mahtani, 2014). We are plagued with choosing an identity before we even know what the options are or what they mean.
When I was six, we had to make an “All About Me” poster, including a picture of the flag of our home country to celebrate the cultural diversity at our school.
Mika B. Div. 5
At this early age, I was sheltered from the complexities of claiming national identity and what the label of Canadian means in the context of settler colonialism and Indigenous genocide. Still confused by the categories of race and where my ethnicity placed me, Canadian was the only label I was confident about. Without even considering another option, I grabbed a red crayon and furiously scribbled two rectangles and a maple leaf.
It wasn’t until I saw other people grabbing different colours of crayons that I realized even if I wanted to draw another flag, I didn’t know what they looked like. In the coming years, I would learn to carry shame regarding my disconnection to culture, feeling uncategorizable, and a disappointment to my elders. I would come to resent my mother for losing her Tagalog and never taking me to the Philippines. I would wish for a sibling, so we could figure it out together.
My confidence in Canadian identity would dissipate as my knowledge of race spilled outside of the crayon box and I began to learn “Canadian” was never a sufficient answer for those who inquired. Although Canada assumes the positionality of multicultural and, even, “raceless,” Canadianness is still equated with whiteness (Paragg, 2015, p. 28). This leaves few concise options for mixed race people fielding questions of ethnic origin (Paragg, 2015). Despite the abundance of countries that make up my ethnic background, I ultimately spent much of my childhood feeling cultureless. This is the danger of heralding multiracial people as signifiers of multiculturalism instead of recognizing the influence of Canada’s colonial past (Mahtani, 2014, p. 47).
When I was seven, a woman at a restaurant touched my face and told my mom I was “mestiso”. I tugged on my mom’s sleeve and whispered in her ear, “what’s that?” She betrayed the confidentiality of my gesture, and her and the woman giggled. The woman told me not to worry. “It means you’re beautiful,” she said.
My Tagalog is limited to the names of some dishes and a few basic greetings, so at the time I brushed off the comment as another word for beautiful, smiling politely as she pinched my cheek one more time before walking away. It wasn’t until years later when I was watching an episode of Law and Order: SVU that I heard the word again. Only it wasn’t used as a compliment. There is a lot of overlap between Spanish and Tagalog due to the Spanish colonization, and the Latina woman in the episode was talking about being called “mestizo”.
The word didn’t mean beautiful; it meant mixed race.
Although the character in the show described it as a derogatory term, wiping tears throughout her testimony and drawing negative translations like mongrel or half-breed, the woman who spoke to my mom at the restaurant had used it as a compliment, romanticizing my ambiguous features.
That was how most interactions with adults went for me at that age: some sort of physical gesture affirming their affection, like a tight hug or pinch on the cheek, and a comment on my appearance. If it was a Filipino woman, it was almost always something about the shade of my skin, sometimes with the additional reminder for my mom to keep me out of the sun.
There is much to unpack here regarding the privileging of whiteness and existence of colorism in Filipino culture. However, what I find most compelling is that despite the praise I received about my ambiguous ethnic appearance, what I desperately wanted at that age was to look more Filipino. I am afforded a lot of privilege due to my light skin, but at that age I was only focused on the desire to simplify my identity and experience a sense of belonging through homogeneity. The only half Filipino celebrity I saw in media was Vanessa Hudgens, and even she performed as monoracially Latina for the screen. If I could not lay claim to Canadian identity, I needed to find a secure sense of identity elsewhere with people who looked like me.
When I was eight, I thought it was cool that no one at school could tell me and my best friend apart. I detailed our sleepovers and conversations in my diary with messy felt pen, as we coordinated our lunches and hairstyles.
Dear Diary,
Tomorrow me and Maya are wearing matching shirts to school.
It’s like we’re twins!
We had fun dressing in matching Halloween costumes and giggled whenever our teachers got us confused. We were often the only two Asian girls in our classes and always begged the school counsellors to give us the same teacher. Maya wasn’t Filipino or Japanese, but we were both mixed race (her mom, Taiwanese and her dad, Mexican). It started out harmless, but our perpetual association would become damaging in our preteen years, as classmates and teachers learned to scrutinize our differences. People intertwined our identities so tightly that we were both in a constant state of comparison. Rather than learning our individual names, teachers and classmates would opt to refer to us as a pair, homogenizing our identities into one. I had gotten my wish for a sibling—just not in the way I’d wanted.
Looking back on our friendship, I think that the two of us bonded over shared experiences of mixed identity. We understood each other. She never shamed me for not being Asian enough or too “whitewashed” or questioned my identity, because we were both on the same confusing journey of navigating the diversity of our backgrounds in white or monoracial spaces. When people made offensive comments about one of us, the other person was there to console or defend. It was an early experience of community and solidarity for me that I didn’t find in other cultural spaces.
Which of the following best describes your ethnic background?
(Choose one)
☒Asian/Pacific Islander
☐Black/African American
☐Indigenous/Native American
☐Latina/Latino/Hispanic
☐White/Caucasian
☐Other
When I was nine, a Japanese girl in my class told me I’m not really Japanese because I don’t go to Japanese school on Saturdays.
Which of the following best describes your ethnic background?
(Choose one)
☐Asian/Pacific Islander
☐Black/African American
☐Indigenous/Native American
☐Latina/Latino/Hispanic
☐White/Caucasian
☐Other
When I was ten, the Chinese boy who sat in front of me said I was whitewashed.
Which of the following best describes your ethnic background?
(Choose one)
☐Asian/Pacific Islander
☐Black/African American
☐Indigenous/Native American
☐Latina/Latino/Hispanic
☒White/Caucasian
☐Other
When I was eleven, the strange man at the playground yelled at me and my nana to go back to where we came from.
Which of the following best describes your ethnic background?
(Choose one)
☒Asian/Pacific Islander
☐Black/African American
☐Indigenous/Native American
☐Latina/Latino/Hispanic
☐White/Caucasian
☐Other
When I was twelve, the substitute teacher asked me what language I spoke at home.
Which of the following best describes your ethnic background?
(Choose one)
☐Asian/Pacific Islander
☐Black/African American
☐Indigenous/Native American
☐Latina/Latino/Hispanic
☐White/Caucasian
☒Other
If asked to make an “All About Me” poster today, I’m not sure what I would draw. My journal is no longer littered with questions of belonging or crayon doodles, but my identity is everchanging.
Although my experiences are shaped by the diversity of my ethnicity, I no longer find it the most perplexing facet of my identity or wish to simplify it for the convenience of others. I continue to grapple with the extent to which I’m able to lay claim to Filipino and Japanese identity but opt to embrace that uncertainty by validating my experience as a mixed diasporic subject, instead of isolating myself as deviant.
However I choose to identify should not be under the confines of what someone else dictates as the standard of one race or culture. Mixed race people are not cultureless in-betweens or indicators of a post-racial society but, rather, destabilize the binary understanding of race and challenge homogenous notions of racialized features.
Note: created for CMNS 486 at Simon Fraser University, Professor Kirsten McAllister (April 15, 2022).
References
Cheng, W. (2013). Strategic orientalism: racial capitalism and the problem of ‘Asianness’ African
Identities, 11(2), 148–158. https://doi.org/10.1080/14725843.2013.797284
Chutuape, E. D. (2016). ‘Chinese-Mexicans’ and ‘Blackest Asians’: Filipino American youth
resisting the racial binary. Race, Ethnicity and Education, 19(1), 200–231.
https://doi.org/10.1080/13613324.2013.792801
Hall, S. (1990) “Cultural Identity and Diaspora” in Stuart Jonathan Rutherford (ed) Identity:
Community, Culture, Difference. Lawrence and Wishart 222-237.
Kawai, Y. (2003) “Revisiting the 1966 Model Minority Myth: A Narrative Criticism of its
Textual Origins”, Kaleidoscope A Graduate Journal of Qualitative Communication
Research 2(1) 50-69.
Mahtani, M. (2014). Mixed Race Amnesia. UBC Press.
Ocampo, A. C. (2014). Are second-generation Filipinos ‘becoming’ Asian American or
Latino? Historical colonialism, culture and panethnicity. Ethnic and Racial
Studies, 37(3), 425–445. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2013.765022
Paragg, J. (2015). “Canadian-First”: Mixed Race Self-Identification and Canadian
Belonging. Canadian Ethnic Studies, 47(2), 21–44. https://doi.org/10.1353/ces.2015.0017
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