By Diane Brown
http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/kera/local-kera-905532.mp3
Dallas, TX –
May was Asian Pacific American Heritage month. The period caused commentator Diane Brown to reflect on her own background and the reaction of some people to it.
I'm an immigrant to the United States. Last month marked 50 years of living in Texas. Unlike most immigrants, I didn't choose to come here. I was interracially-adopted as a five-and-a-half-month-old infant from South Korea, and I'm immensely grateful for the opportunities my adoption has afforded me.
Nevertheless, given the increasing diversity of the American population, I am still surprised by encounters I've had with people because of my Asian ancestry. Undoubtedly others who look like me have experienced the same thing. Mine is particularly ironic given that my cultural upbringing was not Asian. My late parents were good old working class whites from small town Texas where my brother, also of Korean ancestry, and I grew up. I've certainly got the Texas accent to prove it, but few people seem to hear it once they've focused upon my Asian features.
Recently, I've had two people ask me if I'm Buddhist, despite one of them knowing I was interracially-adopted. On another occasion, in a video rental store, I heard two teenage girls giggle as I passed by and say something about the "Japanese lady." My husband thought I was imagining things because he assumed they had to be talking about a movie. I knew otherwise, and we walked by them again only to discover there were no movies with Asian characters near the girls. My husband was stunned because we live in an upper-middle-class suburban area that is somewhat racially-diverse, so one would think that these girls would be sophisticated enough not to make the comments they did.
I'm an attorney, and I had a hearing where I introduced myself to the opposing counsel. A few minutes later, he, seemingly having forgotten our first meeting, asked if I were the interpreter, as his client was Asian. Not too long afterwards, he told me that he'd talked to his client and realized all Asians weren't the same. When I mentioned my interracial-adoption, he commented that he noticed I had a good command of English.
My brother was the only person of Asian ancestry in a McDonalds recently when he saw a young boy show his sister how he could make "Asian" faces by pulling up his eyes with his fingers to make them look slanted. He stopped when he noticed my brother saw him. But a few minutes later, the boy repeated the display for his father, who actually started helping the boy perfect the imitation!
As a child, I encountered similar situations frequently. They happen only occasionally now, but even after all these years, they remind me I sometimes feel I don't quite belong.
Many of us want to categorize other people in as simple a way as possible, and that means that we want to fit them into nice, neat little packages. However, individuals are complicated and few of us, even those with the outward signs of fitting into those neat packages, really do.
Diane Brown is an attorney from Highland Village.
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