How I Found My Way to Hapa |
The Mash-Up Americans
2010-10-06
Being mixed race can make people look at you like you’re a unicorn. We’re the changing face of America! We have a racial passport to anywhere! We can also grow up confused, and challenged on our identity on every front. Is half ever enough? What standards do we have to meet in order to fit in? Our Korean-Brazilian-American Mash-Up Tanya Tarr shares with us her struggle for belonging, and her choice. We’re in.
The identity of a racially mixed person is a squishy place to live.
I never identified as a person of color until I was in my mid twenties. My mom is first-generation Korean-American, and my dad has Brazilian, Finnish, and Scottish ancestry. Though I grew up in a Korean Baptist Bible church outside of Washington, D.C., I never felt that I truly belonged in a Korean community.
To put it bluntly, Koreans are super group-oriented and can sometimes be unflinchingly xenophobic. An outsider is and often will remain an outsider. Among the church kids I grew up with, I was too tall. Too loud. Too fat, by Korean standards. I was nerdy but not nerdy enough to inhabit the rarified air of magnet school kids and Korean-level competition. I wasn’t captain of the mathlete team and my piano skills were not concert-ready…
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Tags: Tanya Tarr, The Mash-Up Americans