The Elephant, The Chameleon, and The Rabbit Hole

I first noticed the whiteness around me in elementary school. The only other Asian girl was adopted by a white woman and raised Jewish. I was different but not in a way that was shockingly evident. I was just white enough to blend in but not white enough to be comfortable in it. No one was going to botch my name, Elizabeth Alexandra Garrity, with “humorously” inserted ching’s and chong’s. My mom, who immigrated from Jakarta to Maryland in her teens, told me that she had originally wanted to give me and my siblings Indonesian middle names. My white dad said that we were in America and that meant we should have American (read: white) names. When I was a baby, my mom divorced him.

My rejection of whiteness started within my family. My father’s Irish ancestors came following the potato famine, the family name transforming from McGarrity to Garrity. I slowly learned about the domestic violence he grew up with in bits and pieces from my mom and one of his cousins, but never from him directly. Visiting his father’s grave, Dad said that he was a great man. My stomach turned as I ran through all I had heard to the contrary. I felt I didn’t belong to this family and it seemed like the best way to cope was to decide that I didn’t want to belong to them. I didn’t let myself see that they did try to connect with me through the fumbled attempts of those whose families never quite got it right. Instead, I drew a line between us and them and it fell parallel to the lines of race. After suffering an aneurysm, one of my dad’s sisters said to my sister at a family gathering, “I know you think we don’t love you because you’re Chinese.” Elephant, meet room.

Between blunders in the family and a gradual education in social justice, I wanted to bury my whiteness. But I couldn’t transform into the epitome of Asian-ness either. My appearance reflects that I am Asian but not quite, not completely. My eyes don’t fit the literally narrow stereotype. In fact, they’re quite round but their diagonal slant gives an indication that there’s more to me than just Garrity (Note: white people get smug when they correctly guess my Asian background but they don’t typically guess that I’m white). I’m too pale in winter to be a full Asian but my lips are too full and nose too round to be completely caucasian. I’m five feet ten inches tall, giving me a great view over crowds in America and Indonesia. As someone who is biracial, I can’t place emphasis on one half of my racial identity.  Of course, it doesn’t help that it’s all written on my face. 

The closest I’ve ever been to proving the Asian stereotype was during my middle school summers at an academic program, Center for Talented Youth. At CTY, I lived on a college campus for three weeks, studying advanced material in an elective course. Thanks to the program, I spent three weeks of each summer learning about creative writing, forensic science, bioethics, and psychology. I was surrounded by kids the same age as me who were all interested in learning. It was a place where I felt comfortable. My enthusiasm about the program also marked me as a nerd to those who hadn’t gone to CTY. After explaining the program with a wide grin, a few kids laughed and said, “Wow, you’re so Asian.” Asians made up approximately a third of the student body in the program. I realized that I wasn’t like them in a lot of ways, not that my classmates at home would notice. I couldn’t pass notes in a language that didn’t use the alphabet. My parents hadn’t pushed me to study for the program’s entrance exam and they didn’t tell me to take the classes that gave high school credit. My mom laughed when she read Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. She let me quit piano when I was eight years old.  She always said that she knew we were smart but it was up to us to try our best. I didn’t feel like I was really Asian. Then, I started studying Mandarin in high school. One day, class had ended and I was on my way out when a classmate came up to me. “How come you’re so good at Mandarin? Do you speak it at home?” I told him my mom had never studied Mandarin before walking away.  He was Asian too.

I used to feel that my being Asian, albeit watered down in some way, was one way in which I was different from my predominantly white peers. Traveling to Indonesia to visit my mom’s family, I stood out for being white.  Bahasa, the language that my Indonesian family speaks, had faded from my mind. The words flowed around me, opaque like polluted water. The language, even when it came from the mouths of friendly relatives, reminded me that I was out of my element. People could recognize that I was foreign even when I was traveling with my uncle and grandmother. Walking down to a temple in Bali in 2010, an old man selling wood carvings on the steps called out, “Go Obama!  Go USA!”  What had tipped him off? I stuck out in a new way: as a white face in a yellow crowd. I realized that my color shifts depending on my surroundings. I’m a reverse chameleon; instead of blending in with the people around me, I shift to contrast.

This dilemma of racial categorization was a part of my life starting in third grade when I first had to take a standardized test. Upon reaching the box for racial background in the general information section, I faltered. Our teacher had clearly instructed us that we could only fill in one circle darkly and fully with our number two pencils.  So my eyes flicked back and forth between Asian-American and White, but regardless of which bubble I cautiously filled in with heavy strokes, neither felt correct. It took me a few years before I decided that if filling more than one circle wasn’t an option, I could choose Other. I used to imagine whoever handled these tests getting miffed if they ever met me and saying ‘But you do have options here!  Just fill one out!  Don’t put Other!’

When I originally wrote this essay in 2013, my imagined response was the same: I’m choosing not to go down the path of ‘either or’.  Until there’s an option of ‘and’, I’ll keep filling in Other. If I can’t have clarity, then at least I’ll have mystery. In a way, I wished that figuring out which box to check wasn’t such a preoccupation. Putting everyone in their box is a part of organization which is comforting.  We like to think that we can draw clear lines, then the pyramid we have built with all of our little boxes will never fall.  But I have feet on different sides of the line and people on both sides think I belong to the other, whether it’s a classmate in school or an old man on the other side of the world.  I can’t say I fully belong to either.

For better or for worse, I don’t feel the same way as I did 8 years ago. The experience of being racially categorized is not a heavy duvet I can choose to fling off before stepping into the rest of my day, carefree and breezy. The boxes aren’t just comforting; they are part of a white supremacist power structure. My race leads me into conversations with the perception of difference and the significance we give it. 

The idea of belonging in a shared Asian American experience dissolved during my stints in China, first for a summer language program in Qingdao in 2014 and second for my first job in Beijing from 2017 to 2020. When leaving for Qingdao, I hadn’t expected to fit in with Chinese people; after all, I didn’t speak their language (hence the program), my hair was dyed pink, and I have a white name. Talking about my fatigue of navigating in Mandarin all day, of homesickness, and of people staring at me in the street, the gap between my experience and that of my American-born Chinese classmates opened up. They spoke Mandarin at home. They blended in on the university campus and on the bus. Maybe our commonality was back home in the designation of Other and in the eyes of white people. 

I wound up moving to Beijing after graduating college in 2017 for a job. I assumed I would stick out as I had in the past. I settled into a small social world of fellow expats, joining a social group for Asian-Americans. To some extent it was comforting to have the familiar vocabulary of shared pop culture references, the simultaneous yearning for American junk food and appreciation of diverse Chinese cuisines. But I would run into moments when meeting a new person at a gathering and they looked at me with what I took to be confusion. I felt compelled to justify my attendance, jumping into “Oh, my mom’s Indonesian but my dad’s white so that explains the name.” I proved I wasn’t intruding and conversation moved to another topic. 

Expecting to find easy belonging with other people based solely on race feels like an oversimplification. I worry that I’m just looking to talk to someone as similar to myself as possible, like a racial Goldilocks tired of closing the gaps of difference and of justifying myself. I wanted to not think about it. In fact, I occasionally chafe at the evidence of how often others are thinking about it. Once, a guy at a bar sat down at a table with me and my friends, uninvited. After asking us about our ages (we were all 21), he turned to me. “So, what are you?” I told him to guess, for everyone at the table. If I couldn’t escape the question, at least everyone else could share in the experience. After he had gone around the table and embarrassed himself, I got to ask him a question: “Where are your friends?”

Both of my racial parts are inescapable, as is the fixation others have on resolving the ambiguity of their combination. There will be days when I have to explain it, days when I don’t and, if I’m lucky, days when I can forget it. I don’t know if I’ve gotten better at presenting my racial identity, whether that’s developing a routine answer or numbing myself to the question, but I do know that I’ll have to answer it again and again and again. I’ve anticipated the various ways it can come up in conversation. I’ve gone down rabbit holes chasing the implications of the question and it has chased me out of spaces where I thought I would belong. Maybe my answer is not as significant as the needling urge to ask the question.