(* MY FRIEND'S SLANG USE OF FRENCH IS NOT NECESSARILY GRAMMATICALLY CORRECT)
The layers of contradiction in my family's views on race and racial equality continue to taint my memories of my parents. I struggle with resentment of having to unlearn the shame I was taught to feel for exhibiting racial or cultural tendencies that were considered too Filipino or too Black. At eighteen, finally free from my family and country, a Cameroonian friend held a pocket mirror to my face as we sat in a Paris cafe telling me,
"Cherie, tu n'est pas une blanc! Tu n'est pas une vrai Americaine!"
He laughed at me as I cringed in embarrassment.
As a child my parents talked to me and my two younger sisters about people being the same no matter what color they were. They were both nurses and told us that in medicine they could see the human being in every person they cared for and that illness, injury and death did not discriminate.
"We're all born, we all bleed, we all die no matter what color you are" my father often said.
Basic physiology and anatomy was emphasized to us over external physical characteristics as the core essence of our humanity, as if they hoped to raise us as neuter-race, neuter-identity beings. But even under our own roof, it was noticed if we'd been a bit longer in the sun than my mother liked, or if a casual interjection of street slang entered the conversation. With raised eyebrows and disapproving comments, our and other's racial and cultural differences were noticed, pointed out and sometimes ridiculed. I did not become aware of our family rituals of bigotry, the self-hatred it created that I reflected toward myself, and my own expression of it towards others until I was into my young adulthood, long after Monsieur Henri had confronted me with that mirror.
During grade school my mother had a co-worker friend from the hospital who was married to a tall, man with an exotic Jamaican accent. They shared dinner with us often and over the years I grew accustomed to them as extended family. The one thing about them that I found particularly extraordinary was that they were both very tall. They towered over my five-foot mother and my five-foot-seven father. As I stood by their sides swinging on a playful hand, peering up at them I wondered if they ever bumped their heads on doorjambs.
One evening as I cleared the dishes and began loading the dishwasher, after we'd shared another dinner with them, my mother sighed as she scraped a plate clean,
"Funny how after all this time I can't get used to it. I still think that it's disgusting. 'Salt and Pepper.' "
I was sorting steak knives from the rest of the silverware to keep out of the dishwasher basket. I cast a glance across the dirty dishes, expecting to see some sort of catastrophe involving salt and pepper in the dishwasher.
"What's disgusting about salt and pepper, Ma?"
I couldn't see what she was referring to. I looked up, her mouth was turned upside down in a grimace.
"You need to learn this now. It's not about salt and pepper. That's what you call it when someone who is very dark marries someone who is very white. "Salt and Pepper". It's disgusting."
Before that moment I'd never seen our friends as anything but very tall, very nice, very funny grown-ups that I liked. At this moment my mother transformed us both by lowering these glasses of bigotry before my eyes. She also revealed her truth to me, that all she'd raised me to believe about equality and humanity was really a lie to her. Now I saw the situation with educated eyes. Her girlfriend was Swedish - tall, pale as porcelain, blond as bright sunshine with a handsome husband as black and elegant as Sidney Poitier. Up until that moment everything I knew about them was good and fun and "normal". I was confused by this notion that because they were married they were doing something bad. But now I was a co-conspirator to my mother's truth. My child's mind told me that these people must be bad for being married since my mother just told me that it was disgusting.
My own family was composed of three brown-skinned, black-haired daughters of a fair-skinned Asian Pacific Islander mother and African American father, yet those color conscious lenses were never turned backward to examine ourselves; as if by being the ones to keep pointing a finger outward, showing how everyone else was different from white America, we would be shielded from revealing and addressing the colors of our own cultures. Perhaps my parents believed we would somehow be granted immunity from racism.
In my early twenties an angry ex-boyfriend ranted at me during the adolescent tragedy of an ugly break-up and claimed that my mother only liked him because he was "a white man to take me away from it all". Of the many ironies in his uttering that statement was the situation involving his own mother's rejection of him and my family's acceptance of him, even housing him, rent-free in our home for eight months. My parents, sisters and especially our lovable family dog, Rue, absolutely hated him.
Driving through San Francisco over the years has become the most effective exercise in understanding exactly where my father's opinions on race lie. As an adult, riding in the car with my father at the wheel has been the best confrontational therapy to help me understand how listening to his bigotry toward Asians throughout my childhood undermined my self-esteem and re-enforced my desire for a separation from any ethnic identity.
"God dammed slant-eyed bitch! Go back to where you came from! See that, she ain't two weeks from behinds a water buffalo in a rice paddy. Ain't got no damned business behind the wheel. Asians don't have regular eyes anyway, they ain't got no peripheral vision. I don't see why we keep givin' them driving licenses, they can't see to drive no how."
Day after day these anti-Asian epithets clouded my head as my father drove me home from school, or my mother to and from her office at the hospital. We never said a word, just silently counted the blocks as we drew closer to home and freedom from the cigarette-smoke filled prison of his car. My mother finally learned how to drive and got her own drivers license and car when I was seventeen. Her driving skills were lousy but I attributed that to her Asian background and not her inexperience as a forty-eight-year-old, first-time driver.
I did not begin to make any sort of connection to his bigotry towards Asians and my own simmering inner-resentment of my third-world heritage until after I'd left the San Francisco Bay Area. I was living in Portland, Maine with my husband and our new baby daughter. As I drove home from the grocery store one afternoon I made a mistake navigating the unfamiliar streets and merged onto the road I needed. I backed off and allowed a car to pass that I almost accidentally cut off. The man driving the other car was not pleased with my maneuver and as we sat at the stop light. He leaned out of his window his face twisted with disgust and screamed,
"You fucking gook! Go back to Vietnam!"
I was shocked at his rudeness and shrugged and waved at him,
"Sorry, I didn't mean to cut you off!"
But I was laughing at him too thinking,
"Boy this guy is stupid, I'm not Vietnamese, what an idiot. Sounds just like my dad"
The light changed and I continued on my way home without thinking twice about that moment.
When I arrived home with my groceries and began to unpack my bags, I opened the kitchen cupboard to clear some space for my canned goods and there it was. My moment of awakening. Next to the salt and pepper and other basic condiments was a bottle of "Nuoc Nam" Vietnamese fish sauce. My family isn't Vietnamese, but this fish sauce is identical to the traditional Filipino fish sauce called "patis". This was the closerst thing to patis I could find in Maine. I use it on just about everything I eat, it's on my table at every meal so there it sat on my shelf, its presence mandatory in any Filipino household.
The searing hatred in that man's voice exploded back into my ears, seized my neck and shoulders, convulsed down my throat where my disgust and despair regurgitated from the core of my being and I clung to the sink vomiting, heaving with panicked sobbing of realization that I was an object of racial hatred. I was an object of disgust.
Especially brutal to realize:
I was that "slant-eyed bitch" that my father wanted so badly "to go back to where I came from."
Thanks to Mom and Dad, I would never know just where that place was.
But in any case: Here I Am
