The essence of a person...

I find myself thinking about what the White House smells like today

Today was a pretty spectacular day in history with the Biden/Harris team entering the cockpit of the country. Question: Do you ever shudder a little bit when you take someone’s seat right after they’ve gotten up? You know, somewhere like a restaurant (remember those?) or on a bus? And it’s still warm! How strange, right? Especially if they’re wearing a strong scent, the space somehow loiters with the essence of that person.

I find myself thinking about what the White House smells like today. What kind of essence Trump left behind. The good ol’ Law of Conservation reminds us energy doesn’t disappear, it transfers/transforms. How much Clorox spray does it take send those Trump vibes packing? More importantly, where does it go?

While half of my brain is fretting over that thought, my id is getting riled up with the new energy moving into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. It’s bringing a something of “mine” into the mainstream I haven’t seen or heard since The Joy Luck Club (oh hi kids, um, it’s like Crazy Rich Asians but 10x better) hubbub…

…We’re all talking about Asians a lot in the news and in popular culture.

The word itself is quite nice on the eyes - blur them a little and see “Aslan,” king of Narnia! It has a euphonious quality. Ehh… Xianne. Those are basically only the two positive qualities I could find as a kid growing up. You cling to the positives when you’re branded stereotypes by a culture who aren’t even part of it (isn’t it just a bitch when some kid named Patrick tells you your house smells like sushi when it’s goddamn hot pot? That’s a different country you dumb shit!)

I also found myself threading out the positives when I became “the Asian girl” at school/on the street/at the bar/in the group. Other fun fill in the blanks included, but weren’t limited to: Pretty good at driving/English/drinking/dancing/art … for an Asian.

So how do I feel about this historic day with a woman, part Jamaican, part South Asian, taking over the second most powerful position in this country? I’m over Pluto about it. You know what makes me even more stoked? The fact that we can start to discuss more widely what it means to be a mixed-race person and to carry the burden of representing an entire people on your shoulders, while simultaneously being shunned for not being ______ enough.

An excerpt from a recent article in Vox:

In 2019, accusations swirled on Twitter that Harris was not an “American Black” because her father was a Jamaican immigrant, rather than the descendant of enslaved people (these rumors later appeared to be the work of a coordinated bot campaign, but it was still retweeted by Donald Trump Jr. and spread briefly into the mainstream

I highly recommend reading the entire thing because it also discusses how her Asian culture has also been suppressed in the media. Kamala is your head spinning yet? I hear this culture hierarchy being echoed all over America and it all comes down to this simple truth: “America still doesn’t know how to treat multiracial people.”

Seriously, have you seen a Census or hospital intake form lately? Are you Black, Hispanic, Asian, Caucasian or Other? Check your tiny home box! I checked Other when I was about to have my daughter this year. In the Other box, I wrote a couple of my backgrounds squeezed together in the blank space, and here is a re-telling of the conversation I had with the lovely nurse woman:

“Oh, you can only check one box Miss.”

“Oh ok, well, I’m a couple things listed here.”

“Hmm, that’s a tough one,” (If there was a camera filming me I would turn to it Jim Halpert-style) she continues…

“Ok, but what are you the most of?”

Ok, now I laugh. It might be the epidural? She scans my face and is just itching to answer for me, until finally she finds an acceptable solution society would give muffled white glove applause to:

“Oh, I know! What is your father?”

“Chinese.”

“Check!”

I was pretty shocked to find out that only 6.9% of Americans are multi-racial, meaning they have at least two different backgrounds including themselves between them, their parents, and grandparents. If anyone knows the percentage of Canada’s I would love to know. Actually Maine too, because wow, if we moved from San Diego to find diversity, we didn’t go in the right direction. (We did Google where do the most Atheists live in the US, and New England won, so there’s that.)

So, learning lessons here. I previously thought that there were more multi-racial kids my age in this country than proves to be true. Thankfully the company I keep, hid me from that fact (although now come to think of it, my mixed-race friends might all be my cousins…)

From the jungle gyms to college campuses, first jobs, and in-laws, the constant inquisition of being mixed-race is, I believe, a result of natural human curiosity (ugh that word has so many negative feels but it’s also accurate). Coupled with the Darwinian Classification trait (the need to categorize things in a certain way for survival), I understand why people stumble so much when talking to people of mixed background. I just don’t like it. I never had the language in my toolkit to express that when I was thirteen. For the record, now that I do, I’m a major buzzkill at cocktail parties.

When the Joy Luck Club came out, I was too little to understand its importance in culture, but when Crazy Rich Asians came out, it dug up all of Amy Tan’s wondery once again. It’s not news that Asian actors are still horribly typecast or that there were slim pickings for role models (Who do you want to be when you grow up Coco? Lucy Liu or Mulan?) but now the edges of the box are fraying. Amazing comedians like Ronnie Cheing, Ali Wong and Jimmy Yang are scooping up Netflix specials. I can relate to a memoir by an award winning chef because his childhood growing up Asian in a white neighborhood has echoes of mine (David Chang ilu).

Kamala Harris wasn’t born in Canada to a Chinese father, or a half-Irish mother, with South African grandparents, but she knows what it’s like when someone gets red in the face trying to compute her DNA, her patriotism. This is why today is a good day for the little girl who was told her fried rice was a gross lunch, who was boxed under “exotic,” who’s allegiance is constantly questioned.

I guess it doesn’t matter where the energy goes from the past inhabitant of The White House, because another law of energy?

When it transfers, it dissipates.