Half-Asian Invasion

A few things have happened lately that have raised questions in my mind regarding racial and national identity. Since I have a mixed-race background, in true half-breed (lol) style, those questions have come separately. This is the 'ethnic' post. The English one comes later. :o)

At my old workplace, we had a gang of administrative staff that all seemed to follow an Identikit aesthetic template: dark, usually slightly wavy hair, dark eyes, glasses (although occasional contact lens wearers) and an olive complexion. Most of us were not white, but mixed race of some description or from an Asian/Oriental background, so we jokingly described ourselves as ‘beige’. None of us really looked that similar if you knew us. But when other staff members or visitors to the Centre’s reception would finish a conversation with one of us that they had quite clearly started with another, it became apparent that we had each become some sort of admin clone, and we started referring to our band of look-alikes as the ‘sisterhood’. It became an in-joke. One person even insisted that one colleague and I were sisters, despite our adamant denial. I mean, we do actually know our respective mothers, and neither has a secret lovechild, but apparently that still wasn’t a convincing enough argument.

Still, there was a strange sense of belonging we had, our merry little band. Even though none of us actually shared the same ethnic background (English, Filipino, Chinese, Indian/German, Iranian, Chinese/Jamaican/Italian), we had formed our own. In some ways I quite liked the paradoxical sense of belonging to a group that didn't belong. I suppose it came from my own feeling towards my ethnicity. The experience of coming from a ‘dual-heritage’ or ‘mixed-raced’ background is different for everyone. For me, it has usually always been a positive experience. I often joke about being asked 'what are you?' and the confused looks I used to get in primary and even secondary school, when referring to my mother's homeland that no-one at that time seemed to have even heard of. I've grown to love being slightly different in that way, so much so that perhaps I embrace it too much, sometimes shying away from identifying myself with a race at all. I've always been wary of being perceived as a stereotype - my parents being a Filipina and an older English man. It just sounds so cliché. It's ironic that when I was a child, it seemed very few people (children and adults alike) had even heard of the Philippines. Now I'm an adult, everyone knows about it, but often, to my irritation, as a place where Western men go to find young brides after a failed first marriage. You can see my reluctance to identify my family with this sort of connotation.

So I've always quite liked the fact that I can be mistaken for any number of different ethnicities, being able to slink between different groups of people 'undetected', not feeling defined by my race or ethnic background. I like the anonymity of it, the fact that people can't always make an assumption about the way I am based on their perception of what I am. Granted, a lot of this is my own 'issue', and sometimes, in my aim to avoid being stereotyped, I can veer towards denying my ethnicity, which isn't a good thing. I don't meet people who share the same specific ethnic background very often, although it's not especially rare. But I've never felt like I don't belong, and I'm grateful for that. Neither have I necessarily felt that I needed to.

However, maybe there is a need, however small, to belong, or feel that affinity you can feel between you and someone with whom you share a commonality of background. Where I work, we currently have a relatively large number of temporary staff. Many of them are Australian, here on working holiday visas, saving up to take money back home and see a bit of Europe while they are here. They're a friendly bunch and I've become quite good friends with one of them. While talking to one of the girls recently, she alluded to her 'crazy' auntie, who was visiting from Australia and would be meeting her English boyfriend. She mentioned her auntie was Filipina (almost by way of explanation for her craziness, much to my amusement). For some reason, this completely surprised me and I exclaimed, "Your auntie's Filipino? [I always say 'Filipino', which is actually wrong when relating to a female. My Mum chastised me about this on Friday so I'm trying to correct myself. It's like Spanish, feminine words end in 'a'.] Are you Filipino?" [Again, wrong, but I'm just trying to be accurate in my re-telling of the story.] I can usually tell when another person is the same mix as me, but it had never even crossed my mind with her. Maybe because she is from Australasia, I assumed she may have had some Maori or Pacific island blood. (Here's the thing with other people assuming things about my background - I do exactly the same to other people.) There was a split second after she said "yes", that I felt a weird sense of excitement, of identifying with her, before replying "Me too! My Mum is!" We both had this odd surprised excitement, amid exclamations of "I didn't realise you were!" and "You don't look it!" It sounds funny and dramatic, but it was nice, discovering another person like me. I felt that aforementioned affinity and I hadn't realised I would. She then told me that one of the other temps is also half Filipino, again, much to my surprise. We chatted briefly, her asking where in the Philippines my family was from, had I been there and when was I likely to go again. All of a sudden there was an additional element to our acquaintance. "Tell me when you're going out there, we could meet up!"

In some ways, I felt a little silly at my excitement in the discovery I share such a small similarity with another person. I liked her anyway, it's not as if this made me like her more, or more likely to talk to, or keep in touch with when she returns home. But there is something reassuring in finding a sense of similitude with another. I've realised that at times, we can tend to focus so much on the differences between ourselves and others, that finding something we have in common, however trivial, seems a startling revelation. And those similarities are much more common than we think.