Handling Racism as a Child

This is a long post I've been working up to for a while. I want to take a very close look at the statement that "parents of color are better equipped to teach their children how to handle racism". It's a statement that's very important for transracial and intraracial adoption. It often gets dropped into a debate or a conversation and just left there.

I'm going to relate a lot of my personal experiences growing up with racism and ultimately agree with that statement. But in the process, I want to point out some things that make it a bit more complicated. What bothers me most is the subtle way the statement shifts "handling racism" as a burden onto the child or the parent. I understand that this is totally not the intention, and it might just be my own paranoia. But I just have to stress, dealing with racism is not something that any child or any parent should have to do. And it's not something any child or parent can truly accomplish to perfection. At best, they can fail less than others fail.

To clear up my own intentions: talking about my own experiences, I don't want to compare myself in a harmful way to a transracial adoptee. I remember sharing a little bit about my experiences in my adoption class, and noticed other parents reacting in two different ways:

1. "Her experience of racism shows that growing up as a person of color with a white mother is very difficult. Adding adoption on top of that would have made things even more difficult."
2. "Her experience shows that biological families can have racial identity issues as well as adoptive ones."

The second reaction is just as valid as the first, but it's also more dangerous. I don't want people to think that my issues made other peoples' issues any less serious by comparison.

Here goes.

We moved to America when I was 6. I saw my father a few times a year, a few weeks at a time. Almost every summer he flew me out to Japan.

We moved in with my grandparents. My mother rented her own house after a while, then started up a home business with my grandfather. It turned out to be successful. The business moved to a separate office and she was soon comfortably supporting us as a single mother. In the recession of the late 80s/early 90s she was fired from her own business and had to start all over again, but that's another story.

Our neighborhood was suburban and rootless. I feel zero nostalgia for that place, and when I tell people where I grew up I usually follow it with the term "armpit of America". In the schools I went to, I was the only Asian. There were exactly two exceptions: one Korean-American boy who was in my 1st-grade class and a Chinese-American girl who was in my 9th-grade art class. I never spoke with the Korean boy and exchanged maybe one sentence with the Chinese girl. We were terrified of each other. To explain why is difficult. I'd have to use the analogy of a school of fish. I was a fish with a stripe that the other fishes didn't have. If I swam carefully the other fish wouldn't notice. But if I swam close to another fish that had the same stripe, the other fish would see it, and they'd go into a feeding frenzy and turn us into sushi.

Things started getting bad for me, socially, around 2nd or 3rd grade. When I was 10, I thought they couldn't get any worse, but they did. I hit a low point when I was 13, in my last year of middle school. I remember every night hoping aliens would abduct me in my sleep so I wouldn't have to go to school the next morning. The abuse would wax and wane in intensity, but it never went away. Sometimes it would be a note on my locker saying "GO BACK TO CHINA". Throwing things at me on the bus. Pulling their eyes. Other times it would be a group of kids following me down the hall, breathing down my neck, singing "ching chong, ching chong, chinky chinky ching chong". It seemed wrapped up in a lot of other things: being nerdy, being a girl. I kept thinking that if I could just improve myself, wear the right clothes, say the right things, then I could make it stop.

My life, in every other respect, was pretty good. I loved most of my classes at school; I did very well and competed in a lot of academic tournaments. I played soccer and climbed trees and went on trips to the beach and awesome family vacations and summer camp, where there were international students.

Here's how several adults in my life reacted to my problems. I didn't tell them the worst of it, because I didn't have the language. Rather, I carefully selected episodes.

• Guidance counselor, middle school: "Toughen up and come back when you have a real problem."
• Dad: "When I was your age, we had to walk over a mountain pass covered in snow to get to school every day. There were bears in the mountain. We rang bells to scare off the bears so they wouldn't eat us. Life is hard. Shut up. Study harder."
• Mom: "The people who say things like that to you are damaged. You should feel sorry for them. You are better and smarter than them and should never believe the ignorant things they say."
• Grandmother: "Give them a sharp backhand slap to the face". She then proceeded to show me exactly how I should slap them, guiding my arm into the proper position. It was like a tennis move. I loved my grandmother but I was always a bit scared of her. She could get very mean, although never towards me, when she had too much Dewar's.
• Grandfather: I never told my grandfather because I wanted to protect him. He was very sensitive. I thought he might start crying if he knew how much I was hurt.

Guess which approach to "handling racism" was most effective? If you're guessing my grandmother's approach (backhandling racism) you'd be right. The day I turned around and faced the kids who were breathing down my neck and hit one in the face and knocked her to the ground, they stopped. I still got insults at a distance, and notes, but they were much more careful from then on.

At the time, I felt a lot of guilt because I couldn't deal with the situation nonviolently. From my mother I'd absorbed a philosophical belief in nonviolence and developed it and made it my own, and the incredible efficacy of violence was a huge shock to that belief system.

A lot later on, I realized I couldn't have really dealt with it. It was beyond me. It was too much to ask. It wasn't my responsibility that I broke or failed; it was the failure of the kids who abused me and the parents who didn't teach them not to abuse other kids and the whole system of unchallenged racism in America.

The guidance counselor was a complete dickhead. Other than that, I can’t blame any of the adults I listed. They did their best. My father had a lot of other problems in his childhood, but he never experienced racism.

He helped me in other ways, which he was oblivious to.

When I was growing up in the 80s there was a very limited range of Asians in the media. A limited and horrible range. Keep in mind that I knew no other Asian-Americans at all, my entire childhood, but I remember watching my first and only episode of that TV show Kung Fu with David Carradine and feeling nothing but sheer blinding rage. This guy was supposed to be Asian? They were cheating me. And then there was the cringing Hop Sing on Bonanza reruns.

I remember a few times staring at my face in the mirror and trying to make eyes look bigger, but I just ended up looking surprised. I've read accounts of this mirror moment in other literature about Asian-Americans, and it also features in an even more terrifying form in accounts from transracial adoptees.

At the moment I was doing it, I felt very divided. I felt a strong urge to do it, and to examine my non-whiteness as if it were something I could cast out; at the same time, I knew it was wrong and deeply harmful. And I was angry at myself for wanting to do it. Looking back at those moments, I think I was wrestling with a demon.

It was because of my father that I won. I knew that the images they showed of Asians were vicious lies. My father was a physically powerful and completely fearless Asian man. He had nothing, absolutely nothing, in common with those lies.

The other adults in my family helped me in some way: even my grandfather, being so sensitive and compassionate. My mother helped by giving me the skeleton of an intellectual framework so that I could step back and analyze what was really going on.

When I was 13 I gave up my horribly unsuccessful project of fitting in. The next year, the first year of high school, for my one elective I signed on to be a teacher's aide for the TMH class (Trainably Mentally Handicapped, the clinical/educational term in use back then). I did it for selfish reasons. Since I didn't care about my reputation anymore, I thought I might as well spend my elective time with people who were guaranteed not to call me racial insults. In the beginning I wasn't a very good aide, but I learned how to be a better one. I flipped the social value system and only tried talking to D&D geeks, goths and punks. The decision I made ended up giving me a strong, positive identity, but I sacrificed a lot to get there; I have no natural ease in social situations. I had to train myself not to care what people think about me, so I come off as not being very empathetic, even when I really do care.

I can't imagine my personality without going through what I went through! I think I've done a good job turning the negatives into positive learning experiences for myself and others. Still, as I touched on in my very first post, sometimes I think about how it could have been so less painful, so much better.