I just finished reading White Teeth by Zadie Smith. The LIttle Red Haired Girl did not love it, so I’ve put off reading it until now. Maybe it’s because my expectations were low, but I ended up really enjoying it. Although it takes place in England and the characters are Jamaican or Bengali, the way she presents the story of these immigrants feels universal.
Irie Jones was obsessed. Occasionally her worried mother cornered her in the hallway before she slunk out of the door, picked at her elaborate corsetry, asked, “What’s up with you? What in the Lord’s name are you wearing? How can you breathe? Irie, my love, you’re fine—you’re just built like an honest-to-God Bowden—don’t you know you’re fine?”
But Irie didn’t know she was fine. There was England, a gigantic mirror, and there was Irie, without reflection. A stranger in a stranger land.
Nightmares and daydreams, on the bus, in the bath, in class. Before. After. Before. After. Before. After. The mantra of the makeover junkie, sucking it in, letting it out; unwilling to settle for genetic fate; waiting instead for her transformation from Jamaican hourglass heavy with the sands that gather round Dunns River Falls, to English Rose…
Growing up I worried a lot about my appearance. Not what I wore, but that I didn’t look American. To me, “American” meant white. “American” meant wavy blonde or brown hair that got tangled in the wind and curled at the ends. “American” meant freckles, thin pointy noses, and shapely eyebrows. Looking “American” was something I couldn’t ever hope to accomplish, and my deficiencies weren’t something I could figure out how to hide. Eventually I started hiding it from myself. I rarely looked in the mirror, and avoided thinking about my appearance. I went to an elementary school that required uniforms, so I only had to think about clothes on the weekends. By the time I graduated from uniforms to middle school, I had fully convinced myself that I did not care what I looked like.
While I know full well what I look like, it’s still a little of a surprise to me when I look in the mirror. I spent my formative years being as “American” as I could in every other way and avoiding thinking about my appearance that I began to think of myself as white. Not that I pictured myself as caucasian, I just did not picture myself at all.
Sometimes when people meet me they ask me where I’m from; I usually answer that my parents were raised in Taiwan. In the past few years it’s more likely that people don’t acknowledge that I may have a different ethnic or cultural experience. It’s considered impolite, maybe. Something about China may come up in conversation, and someone might apologetically ask, as an aside, what my “background” is. Other times people will talk about something very relevant to my experience, carefully (or clumsily) avoiding the elephant in the room- my straight black hair and Chinese last name. I can find reasons to be offended no matter the situation. Why wouldn’t you acknowledge the obvious fact that I’m some sort of Asian? Why do you assume that just because I look Asian that it’s part of my identity? Why are you talking about my culture without deferring to my expertise? Why should I have an opinion about that just because my parents were born there?
It’s a strange thing, having part of my identity so clearly stamped all over my face. Stranger still to have another, my sexuality, be invisible. But that’s for another day.
