Mixed :: Personal Narrative Racial Papers

Mixed "Did your real mom die or something?" The boy with the snot-streaked face asked me on the playground, next to the jungle gym. He wore a striped blue shirt open at the neck and his eyes were so dark I couldn't see his pupils. "W-what do you mean?" I stared hard at him, my voice already taking on a defensive edge. I gripped the edge of my red corduroy jumper with my grubby hands. "I mean, what happened to your real mom? The one that's not a gaijin." Then I understood. Gaijin. Foreigner. I looked down at my clenched hands, too dirty to rub my face with if I started to cry. The boy wasn't trying to be mean, he was just curious. But I was sick of it-the teasing, the questioning, the staring. When I hit him hard in the face, he looked more stunned than hurt, his eyes so wide open that I could see white all around the iris. Back in those days, I told many stories about myself. One of them was about why my eyes were golden-greenish-brown and not dark brown due to an illness I'd had. Another was about how I dyed my hair to make it reddish-brown instead of black. The most absurd one was about how my mom really was Japanese, but had lived in America all her life and that's why she looked white. Most of them made no sense. I don't know if the kids ever believed me. No matter how many lies I told about myself, I knew deep down that I could never imagine away who I was. I would always be "Half," not whole. In Japan, people would identify me as "haaf"-the Japanese bastardization of the English word, "half"-used to connote someone of mixed race. My dad would get angry again and again when strangers tried to touch my hair when we went out in Tokyo. And my mom would be asked, "where did she adopt those adorable Vietnamese children?" every time she brought my brother and me back to the States to see my grandma in Florida. Most of my memories of growing up in Japan can be divided into two groups-my interactions with adults and those with children. Having grown up in a house with five adults until I was 5-years old, I naturally preferred the company of older people.