petermaize

IDENTITY

A few stories for you. When I worked in Arkansas at a TV station, I had a colleague who was looking for a job in a more cosmopolitan location. The standard practice back then was to send a tape of your work to another TV station and hope they liked what they saw.

Well, one station did like what they saw. They only asked my friend to make one small adjustment: they wanted him to change his name. You see, my friend had a white American father and a Korean mother. There are many stories of American servicemen falling in love with women in Japan, Korea, Vietnam and elsewhere, marrying them and bringing them home to the State. My friend, Bob, looked Asian but sounded and acted as culturally American as you could be. But his last name was a very standard Anglo-Saxon one, and the news director who was considering Bob thought this was too disconcerting for the viewers.

He asked Bob to change his last name to “something Asian. Lee, Kim, whatever.” So to get the job, my friend changed his last name to fit in more easily to American stereotypes. Didn’t really matter that Kim is a Korean surname and Lee is Chinese. After all, they are all Asians.

My son was born in Hong Kong. He’s a big white guy with an accent that usually sounds British. He has the unusual situation ofof being an American born in a British colony and raised in China (Hong Kong being part of China, even though it has a unique status). He is a professional rugby player, and in order to play in the Olympics for the territory he calls home, he had to     his American passport and apply for a Hong Kong Special Administrative Region one. They are hard to come by, and almost none of the Indian and Pakistani nationals who who have lived in Hong Kong for generations will ever be able to get one.

Because ethnicity and nationality are still correlated in much of the world. In the United States, where anyone can become an American, we often forget this fact. But in many countries, you can never become a naturalized citizen if you don’t match the racial/ethnic profile associated with that country. This is outdated and ridiculous in the 21st century. But around the world, a person’s skin color still is a pre-dominant determinant of who they are. This becomes even more ridiculous when you remember that a black guy from Los Angeles or a black woman from Tulsa don’t have that much in common with residents of Ghana or Ethiopia culturally or socially. It’s a heritage thing.

Heritage. I’ve lived in Hong Kong for 25 years, but when people ask “where are you from?” they want to know what country I was born in; what my passport says. My daughter, who was born in Hong Kong and viewed the U.S. as a place to visit in the summer, has no choice but to answer “America” to the question. Any other answer leads to a series of increadingly forceful questions that eventually lead to the answer, “America.” Then the questioner is satisfied.

I have many friends who have adopted Chinese orphans. These children are raised by white parents and have white siblings. Occasionally, as they grow up, some are curious about their heritage. But what does it mean to find your roots in China? China is a culture that includes 55 minorities that were engulfed by the Han majority over the centuries. A generation ago, the Communists denounced traditional Chinese culture as “feudal superstition.” Now they promote “socialism with Chinese characteristics, which allows the government to pretend to still be Communist.

Identity is multi-faceted and goes well beyond the simple talking points of American society, which predominantly focuses on black-white relations and related prejudices and definitions.