Wednesday, March 30, 2022 — 7
Michigan in Color
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

“I want the tall Mexican kid!” 

Nobody moved from the pickup bas-
ketball line. Every player’s eyes were 
suddenly searching for this elusive, 
presumably Hispanic guy so the game 
could start. 

“You, dude, YOU” an impatient fin-

ger points directly at me, the exaspera-
tion clear in my temporary teammate’s 
voice. 

“Uh… I’m not Mexican,” I awkwardly 

reply.

“Yeah, yeah no hablo Español moth-

erfucker. Just get on my team.” 

Uncomfortable laughter erupts. I 

trot over to my temporary team. 

As hilariously offensive as this 

exchange was, it may be familiar to 
many ethnically ambiguous Ameri-
cans like me. I have learned repeat-
edly throughout my life that if someone 
doesn’t know what “group” you belong 
to, they’ll be sure to put you in one.

I am not entirely sure when I first 

became aware of my “race”, or even 
when I realized that race was some-
thing that mattered. Perhaps it was one 
of the times some random white per-
son thought it was a good idea to ask 
if I was adopted when I was out with 
my dad. Truly crucial information for 
her to go about her day. Maybe it was 
the hundreds of times I got the “Where 
are you really from?” question. That 
one is always a favorite. An even better 
rendition is the “Is it ok if I ask what 
your race is?” … Uh, I guess so dude? 
Or maybe it was getting called racial 
slurs at summer camp. Sailing camp in 
North Carolina turned out to be a dubi-
ous idea at best. 

If you’re even slightly melanated, you 

may also have a number of awkward, 
hilarious and/or offensive exchang-
es imprinted in your memory. There 
comes a point, whether it be middle 
school, elementary or even Pre-K, that 
the white majority of the U.S. stamps 
you with an otherness that is seem-
ingly impossible to escape. There is 
something undeniably American about 
a knee-jerk desire to compartmentalize 
racial and ethnic groups. A desire that 
is not born from curiosity or genuine 
interest in other cultures or histories, 
but from a need to organize. An atti-
tude that says, “once I find out your 
‘group’ I’ll know how I can treat you.”

Throughout a life full of “Which one 

of your parents is white?” and “Are 
you allowed to say the N-word?” and 
“Where did you get your tan?”, I’ve 
learned that it’s some combination of 
unsettling and intriguing for many to 
see me and not be able to immediately 
allocate me to some region of heritage. 
I could be Latinx, European, African, 
Middle Eastern, you name it! I’m a nosy 
white lady’s worst nightmare. 

An interesting social phenomenon 

I’ve noticed is the hesitation in the 
questions — the faux uneasiness in ask-
ing. It’s as though it’s polite to be on the 
fence before asking an inherently rude 
question. Look, I know you don’t real-
ly care about my comfort, so you may 
as well just ask away. The truth is — I 
don’t really mind when people ask any-
more. I have no problem simply shrug-
ging or walking away from rude or 
inconsiderate people, or even making 
up an outlandish answer to cue them in 
on their own weirdness. “Oh yeah I’m 
from Sweden, I just tan really easily.” 
As I have gotten older, I have come to 
learn that I don’t owe anyone answers 
about my personal life or identity. A 
valuable lesson I’ve learned from my 
mom is that if someone takes offense 
to my indifference, then they’re sim-
ply not a person worth talking to in the 
first place.

What I do mind is the fact that I 

don’t even completely know my heri-
tage. Imagine how frustrating it can 
be sometimes. “Hey man, where you 
from from?” I’m not really sure. If nosy 
people at the grocery store are curious, 
just think about what it’s like to look in 
the mirror every day. Where am I from?

I have a vague idea, of course. My 

dad’s side is the simple part, a blend 
of white European immigrants. Along 
with his last name, I inherited a 
healthy dose of Irish-Italian blood, 
thick curly hair and an inability to 
dance. My mom’s side is where things 
get complicated, a mixed bag if ever 
there was one. She has seven siblings 
and each one looks to be from differ-
ent area codes, longitudes, latitudes 
and continents. Every family member 
is essentially a surprise. Uncle Doug 
is undoubtedly a Black man, but Aunt 
Tony-Girl is a pale amber and everyone 
thinks my mom looks like Jeanie Boulet 
from “ER.” My sister and I carried on 
that legacy, it would seem. She’s fairer 
than me, with blonde hair and blue eyes 
no less. One family, same genes, just a 
cocktail of phenotypic expressions and 
confused nosy neighbors. 

Don’t get me wrong, curiosity has 

gotten the better of me many times. It’s 
frustrating that I couldn’t fully escape 
the culture of ascription that sur-
rounds me, but my identity is important 
for more reasons than being able to tell 
people about it when they ask. Identi-
ty is as personal as a name or a laugh. 
While it’s annoying and disheartening 
that a made-up construct like race is 
intrinsic to its construction, as long as 
it is I will always wonder exactly who, 
what and where I am composed of.

There is comfort in racial and eth-

nic identity. Pride. There is a fond-
ness and security I see others have 
that I wish I could in many ways. I’m 
proud to be a member of my family, 
and I’m proud to call myself a person 
of Color, but the tension that comes 
with my ambiguity extends beyond 
my interactions with white people. 
What struggles am I allowed to par-
ticipate in — allowed to feel as though 
they apply to me? I’ve been discrimi-
nated against and suffered both micro 
and macro-aggressions because of my 

skin, but I’ve also had people of Color 
tell me that they consider me white. It 
seems that no matter what, ascriptive 
culture has me at a loss. I know that I 
have African American heritage, but I 
am by no means a Black man. I know 
that I am related by blood to members 
of the Ramapough Lenape Nation, but 
nothing of my upbringing or famil-
ial culture was by any means Native 
American. The Ramapough Lenape 
themselves are a wonderful combina-
tion of Native, Dutch and Freed people, 
so no luck there if I wanted a concrete 
group of origin. What a headache! The 
more I learn about my history, the more 
blended it becomes. I wish it was as 
simple as just asking my mom, but that 

always got me some version of the same 
disappointing answer. 

“You’re an American Stephen, who 

cares!” 

The first time I had that conversa-

tion with my mom, I was endlessly 
frustrated. I know I’m an American. 
Culturally and physically, I fit right 
into the romanticized melting pot that 
this country so often fails to live up 
to. Although I wish it wasn’t the case 
that the closest identity marker I’d get 
would be so inherently problematic, it 
is evident that being an American isn’t 
even something to be proud of. I was 
born in Long Island, raised in Mary-
land (though I claim D.C.) and deeply 
appreciate the art, food, music and 
culture I grew up with. However, this 
country’s history is full of targeted 
violence and systemic oppression that 
directly brought about this “melting 
pot” that many revere and praise. Hav-
ing an already tainted image of this 
country given its oppressive history, 
it was disheartening to be the physical 
manifestation of a rhetoric that’s sim-

ply tokenizing. Being an “American” 
felt trivial and at odds with my person-
al values. I wanted to know where the 
melanin was from, my non-whiteness. 
So much of American culture tells me 
that due to my skin tone, being “Ameri-
can” must only be part of the story. 
Everyone and their racist grandma 
wants to know, so I figured I ought to 
figure it out. 

I routinely had this conversation 

with my mom several years in a row 
around Christmas time. I would ask for 
an Ancestry.com or 23andMe test and 
each time I was met with reluctance 
or chiding rebuttal. “It’s not like you 
as a person will change in any way. It 
doesn’t matter as much as you think it 

does.” How could it not matter? How 
could I exist in this ambiguous space 
without grounding, without a broader 
community? If I’m going to be bothered 
so often, at least let me know who the 
“others” I can relate to are! I’ve often 
been envious of people who are able 
to call a group their own, who belong 
somewhere in a way I often feel as 
though I don’t. 

However, with each passing year, I 

believe that I see more nuances to my 
mom’s philosophy. I think I am slowly 
learning that her answer isn’t just her 
being dismissive or flippant, and isn’t 
necessarily to say that my racial or eth-
nic identity doesn’t matter. It is in part 
a rejection of this culture of ascription 
that detracts from meaningful inter-
action, and in larger part an explana-
tion that the nuances of my identity are 
truly as American as it gets. I believe 
that my mom’s interpretation is her 
protecting my peace, and I will for-
ever appreciate that. The idea of a 
hodgepodge person born from genera-
tions of cultural and ethnic plurality 
is a noble one. As I get older, I notice I 
take more and more pride in that idea 
of my identity. I think that I still have 
more capacity for appreciation of my 
existence and am interested in seeing 
how that appreciation grows in five or 
ten years. While feelings of insecurity 
and curiosity are sure to reappear from 
time to time, I feel blessed to be in such 
a unique position.

I’m an American in the sense that I’m 

just some guy. To my mom’s chagrin, 
I’m sure I’ll do some ancestry program 
at some point to get the percentages 
in my head because I’m obsessive like 
that, but my initial reasoning for get-
ting the statistics has evolved. I no 
longer care about changing my life or 
attitude to fit those numbers as I once 
did. A naive and immature perspective 
of social readjustment has grown into 
a more three-dimensional appreciation 
of my specific heritage. I’m not going to 
take on new dimensions of my identity 
or ~get in touch with my roots~. I don’t 
intend to adjust my self-perception 
based on newly discovered pieces of my 
history. I’ll still shrug off nosy people 
and continue to make up answers for 
my amusement when I get asked about 
my skin. I’ll simply have the privilege of 
knowing a little bit more about myself 
and move on trying to be the best per-
son I can be. I’ll continue to take pride 
as a hodgepodge person because that’s 
how I identify.

“Why do you treat me so horren-

dously?” a voice called out. Upon hear-
ing this, the young girl froze motionless 
on the pavement. She stood facing away 
from a woman more than 20 years her 
senior several feet behind her, who 
held tightly onto a stroller — having 
just cathartically confronted the young 
girl on her passive-aggressive actions 
over the past year. The young girl was 
shocked as the woman almost always 
met her dismissive attitudes and snark-
iness with gracious tolerance. The two 
stood in utter silence until the girl’s 
baby sister cooed for their attention, 
blissfully unaware of the atmosphere of 
brewing anger and conflict or the long-
standing discord between her sister and 
the woman.

That young girl was 11-year-old me, 

and the woman was Pei, our live-in 
maid who was employed by my family 
a decade ago, back when we were liv-
ing in Beijing. Due to its acute intensity, 
that confrontation is but a distant and 
blurred memory of mine. However, the 
profound conflict we had and the naive 
cruelty I had demonstrated during the 
year she inhabited our home still occu-
pies a dark corner of my brain, tucked 
away in a vast library of my memories, 
and still haunts me to this day. The 
dimmed details and incentives behind 
this ingenuous cruelty of mine had 
grown lucid as I became increasingly 
aware of China’s policies; ones that sus-
tained wealth inequality and inequity 
that dictate the lives of women like Pei 
over the course of modern Chinese his-
tory.

Pei was in her mid-30s when she was 

hired to help my mother with house-
hold duties after my sister’s birth in 
Beijing, far away from her husband who 
still resided in her hometown in the 
country. My family stood in a position 
of privilege from the get-go: my mother 
was a part of the diminutive percent-
age of women who were able to afford 
a maid to aid with chores and child care 
and my father was among the smidgen 
of men who could afford never learn-
ing to drive, instead opting for drivers 
to take him to work and airports. Pei’s 
work consisted of shopping for grocer-
ies, cooking, cleaning, taking care of my 

baby sister and any other miscellaneous 
tasks around the house. 

I can’t quite recall when I started see-

ing her signature old, pilling red sweat-
er float by as she cooked, scrubbed and 
swept all over the house every day. Pei 
was a tall woman with broad shoulders. 
She had freckles and tan skin, and con-
stantly wore her hair in a simple pony-
tail that I always assumed was for the 
purposes of her labor-intensive work. I 
don’t ever recall seeing her hands rest-
ing: they were either submerged in salt 
water, purging sand out of clams that 
would eventually end up as our din-
ner, or squeezing the cleaning solu-
tion out of a terry cloth to deep-clean 
a variety of surfaces around the house. 
As a result, her hands were wrinkled 
with dry patches. Juxtaposed with my 
mother’s pale and supple hands, nour-
ished in L’Occitane hand cream and 
La Roche-Posay sunscreen, her hands 
invoked a slight sense of disgust in me. 
As an 11-year-old, I was just beginning 
to comprehend the fact that I was far 
more financially privileged than a lot 
of my peers who stood in awe at my 
mother’s pampered beauty and fashion, 
which I took great pride in. Therefore, 
I gradually began associating the pol-
ished feminine stillness demonstrated 
by my mother, who was scouted as an 
actress and model in her younger years, 
with desirability and associating rug-
ged appearances with Pei’s infelici-
tous physical labor, which I had looked 
down upon. Unbeknownst to me at the 
time, despite being a full-fledged indi-
vidual of her own, Pei’s upbringing, her 
socioeconomic status and work were all 
influenced by China’s history of misog-
yny and classist policies that prevented 
upward mobility. Based on this history, 
I try, now, to piece together parts of 
Pei’s life.

My mother and Pei perfectly exem-

plified the clash between newly import-
ed “white” femininity coinciding with 
the economic boom at the end of the 
20th century that ushered in a new age 
of capitalism and traditional rural Chi-
nese femininity. In the 80’s, during Pei’s 
childhood and adolescence, billboards 
of double-eyelidded models with ghost-
ly white skin and dyed chocolate brown 
hair gradually emerged in cityscapes, 
and the ancient gender role of women as 
the sole conductor of exhaustive house-
hold chores who needed to give birth to 

as many farm hands as possible persist-
ed in the countryside. 

The ever-popular folktale of the 

cowherd and the weaver girl perfectly 
illustrates the gender roles mapped out 
by thousands of years of Chinese his-
tory characterized by the division of 
work in an agricultural setting. For one, 
sex had always been a taboo subject, 
with feminine modesty being a much-
praised virtue: according to this out-
dated cultural framework, the weaver 
girl was forced to accept the cowherd’s 
marriage proposal as he had seen her 
naked body as she bathed in the river. 
The weaver girl, despite her status as a 
literal goddess, took on domestic work, 
consisting of weaving, cooking, clean-
ing and, of course, child-rearing, birth-
ing the cowherd, a mere mortal, two 
children. Unsurprisingly, regardless of 
the picture-perfect domestic bliss of 
the farmhand household, the weaver 
girl was punished for marrying a mor-
tal and neglecting her divine tasks of 
cloud-weaving, forever destined to be 
separated from the rest of her family in 
heaven. To me, the folktale illustrates a 
concealed culturally misogynistic urge 
to punish women for men’s wrongdo-
ings and an inability to balance domes-
tic and work duties that translates in 
both urban and rural settings.

This cultural misogyny reflected in 

the folktale was certainly exacerbated 
by poverty and a population boom. Pei is 
but a grain of sand in a sea of hundreds 
of millions of women falling victim to 
the national ailment of women’s ambi-
tions being suppressed due to misogyny 
and poverty. Unbeknownst to most, 
before the one-child policy was imple-
mented in 1980, Chinese women were 
actually encouraged by Mao to have as 
many children as possible in an effort 
to expand the workforce and military. 
In fact, my four grandparents who were 
born in the 40’s shortly before Mao was 
elected into office had two, five, seven 
and eight siblings, respectively. There-
fore, we can reasonably infer that as a 
result of Mao’s encouragement and a 
long-running cultural norm of birthing 
as many children as possible, Pei likely 
had several siblings. 

Despite decades of unrest and cul-

tural change that preceded the 80’s, 
the sentiment depicted in the folktale 
retained its cultural imprint; its misog-
yny passed through the stagnant pov-

erty that still plagued Chinese society 
despite the rampant urbanization and 
economic boom that stemmed from a 
growing workforce from China’s sky-
rocketing population. This misogyny 
was especially prevalent in rural areas 
as agricultural work still overwhelm-
ingly required physical labor desig-
nated for men. Thus, rural women were 
relegated to tasks akin to those of the 
weaver girl’s, without financial com-
pensation and within the confines of 
the house or nearby areas. 

In cities, by contrast women such as 

my mother were more likely to receive 
a high-quality education. They discov-
ered newfound opportunities such as 
retail, factory and even corporate work 
that provided them some level of finan-
cial independence. By the late 1980s, 
the ratio of the average income of Chi-
na’s richest 20% to poorest 80% had 
more than doubled since the late 1970s, 
from 2.5:1 to almost 6:1. In 1980, China’s 
rural per capita net income was a mea-
ger 191.33 yuan, which is around $161 in 
today’s USD. Assuming Pei’s family had 
a yearly income somewhere near that, 
there was certainly not enough money 
to finance all of her siblings’ educa-
tions. If her family did have enough 
money, it is not so farfetched to assume 
Pei’s parents had spent it on her broth-
ers, as they were the designated “cow-
herds” of the family.

To make matters worse, even if Pei 

did receive an education, it would not 
have been enough to lay the foundation 
for her success later in life. In the early 
1980s, just 60 to 70% of Chinese chil-
dren made it through elementary school 
and continued onto middle school, and 
the figure was likely much lower in 
rural areas. Even more dishearteningly, 
education was few and far between back 
then, requiring children to hike great 
distances across China’s mountainous 
rural regions to enter a school house 
with little food, school supplies or other 
resources that facilitated learning. It 
was far more likely that a young girl like 
Pei would stay home to help her mother 
with household chores, instead of going 
through hell 250 days a year to pursue a 
relatively poor education if she was des-
tined to be married off to a “cowherd” 
later on in life anyway.

Even if by some miracle Pei had made 

it to high school, the rigged rules of the 
Gaokao, China’s college entrance exam, 

would have likely prevented her from 
escaping poverty. Perhaps Pei, by some 
blessed silver lining, may have pushed 
through unimaginable difficulties to 
make it to college in another city. How-
ever, I know that in reality, this is highly 
unlikely due to the many inequities fac-
ing rural students. There is, of course, 
the obvious lack of high-quality edu-
cation, poverty and pressures brought 
upon by Gaokao. As if rural students 
weren’t already at a disadvantage, the 
cutoff score to enter into universities 
is often higher for them than it is for 
local urban students in a gruesome act 
of institutionalized oppression. This is 
because, according to journalist Yiqin 
Fu, “universities located in Beijing will 
reserve more spots for students with 
Beijing hukou (residency);” thus, the 
lowest qualifying score for a Beijing-
based test-taker may be vastly lower 
than the score required from a student 
taking the examination in rural areas. 
When you consider that wealthier 
Chinese families with more resources 
are better positioned to enlist tutor-
ing assistance, preparation courses 
and a whole host of other investments 
designed to increase a student’s score, 
’80s and present-day students residing 
in rural areas barely even had a fight-
ing chance at achieving the same level 
of success as their urban counterparts.

Regardless of Pei’s educational sta-

tus, China’s aforementioned Hukou pol-
icy restricts population flow from rural 
to urban areas. Workers like Pei, who 
look to move to larger cities like Beijing 
while being registered as residents in 
a rural area, need to meet educational 
and wealth requirements that many 
cannot meet. As a result, many like Pei 
are restricted to the status of “tempo-
rary” or “transitory” migrants by these 
discriminatory Hukou policies, forever 
forbidden from permanently moving 
themselves and their families to cities 
like Beijing and Shanghai with higher 
pay and better living conditions. Even if 
the migrants’ children obtain the same 
status as their parents and move to cit-
ies along with their parents, local gov-
ernments have set up these barriers to 
prevent the children of migrant parents 
from accessing quality public educa-
tion, continuing the generational curse 
bestowed upon their rural parents.

I’m just some guy: navigating my ethnically ambiguous “American” identity

Between my childhood and me: the tale of a women left behind by

 China’s “economic miracle”

S TEPHEN BUCKLEY

MiC Columnist

ZOE ZHANG
MiC Columnist

Design by Rita Sayegh

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