Problems with Ethnicity

Her eyes squint, subtly at me as if I were a Rubik's cube that she couldn’t figure out. She opens her mouth to speak but returns back to thinking. Her face was familiar, almost identical to the other strangers who’ve wondered the same thing before. I could hear her question before she even asks it. I dread it but I ease back and wait.

“So,” here it comes, “what are you?” my hairdresser asks.

I say almost automatically, “I’m Wasian. Half white, half Asian”. She opens her eyes in surprise and takes a closer look at my face.

“Wow, I thought you were Puerto Rican,” I want to roll my eyes to the back of my head. I have this mental file in my mind full of the different ethnicities that I’m mistaken for: Latina, “white mixed with something else”, Italian, and of course, Puerto Rican. Very rarely will people actually assume that I’m part Asian.

“Yeah, I’m half Korean on my mom’s side.” You’d think I’d be used to this question but after fifteen years it still stings to hear people mistake me for something else.

She pulls up a picture of her quarter Korean daughter and replies, “This is my daughter, she’s twenty-five percent Korean.” I examine her closely and her very prominent Asian features. “She looks more Asian than you,” that hurt. I look up quietly and force a smile.

When I was a baby, people would ask my mom, “Are you sure that’s your baby?” Sure, an Asian woman carrying around a blonde baby sounds pretty odd and I guess it was. Usually, people would just assume that she was my babysitter. I think about what she tells me and can’t help but feel as if she was being discounted as my mother.

As I grew older, I began to almost entirely ignore the rather obscure half of me. The fact that people couldn’t actually recognize my Asian made it hard to celebrate my ethnicity; I was surrounded by people who enjoyed representing their cultures but I felt differently about my own. I began to resent this side of me that has roused confusion since the beginning of my life. Since I didn’t look the part, why should I play it?

She brings out a curling iron from one of the drawers hidden in the counter filled with clips and combs varying in different sizes, plugs it in and waits for it to heat up. She sets her eyes back to me and asks, “Do you have any siblings?” I open my phone and go to my sister’s Instagram to show her a picture of my brother and sister posing together on prom night.

“This is Quinn,” I point to my sister. “And this is Emmet,”. I know what she’s thinking; they look more Asian. Anyone with a set of working eyes could see it.

“Oh,” she squints her eyes to get a clearer look at them, “I can see that they are Asian a little more, but none of you guys look fifty percent.” It’s true; although my siblings did have darker hair and more Asian features than me, none of us really looked like the traditional Wasian. And although it wasn’t her fault, the physical vagueness of my Korean side upset me. I mean, even quarter asians usually look more Asian than me.

It’s human nature to match a face with an assumption. Since he wears glasses he must be smart or she must be popular because she’s pretty. For me, people often believe that I identify with my white side since my face doesn’t have many Asian characteristics.

As she continues to curl my hair, thousands of thoughts roll through my mind. Some were thoughts of annoyance and others of grief but there was one that stood out from the others. It was different from the others that I’ve had in a situation like this. I look at myself in the wide set mirror ahead of me and think to myself. I can’t change and it won’t help thinking about someone else that I’ll never be.

I managed to release all my tension that I’ve held throughout the conversation. People have explained this to me over the years but I never really made anything of it. “You’re yourself and no one else, just accept it,” I’d hear their advice but never really listen. But for some reason this one visit at the hair salon made me realize that maybe I should’ve.

Once she finishes curling my hair, I get up from the chair and thank her. Although this encounter wasn’t very different from the others, I left the salon not feeling, but knowing that my ethnicity doesn’t define who I am.