Joy Luck Hub Submission

This sounds like an interesting project, so I'm submitting my own entry. 299 words...

When people found out I was "half-Japanese" they would always ask me about my Japanese mother. In their minds, my story was already written. My father was a white military man, my mother a Japanese girl he had married and taken away back to the States when his post was finished. In the beginning I was simply confused by how wrong this story was. Later on, it made me angry that people kept imposing it on me.

When they met, my mother was a radical hippie and my father was a hippie radical. He made his own sandals out of used car tires, and was once jailed for punching a policeman in a student riot in Tokyo. He loved retelling the anecdote: "Pig hit me with stick. So I punch pig. Then pig take me to jail!" We lived briefly in England during the 70s, and the Sex Pistols caught his imagination, for obvious reasons. He used to sing me to sleep with "God save the queen, iza fascist regime," which he intoned in a bizarre but somewhat credible imitation of a cockney accent.

My parents raised me with bits and pieces of the traditions they were raised with. They also raised me not accept authority at face value, and to question any claims to an ultimate truth.

So I didn't ever experience a "Joy Luck" clash between a sense of Asian tradition and American modernity. I was always on the outside looking in, no matter where I lived. This wasn't easy. In fact, it was incredibly painful. I had no hometown, no home culture, nowhere to stand my feet... and nothing to rebel against in order to define myself. But I still like my own story much better than the stories other people try to force onto me.