How Race Simultaneously Privileges and Disadvantages Me

Can 8-year-old children have identity crises?

If so, I distinctly remember my first "identity crisis" wherein I seriously questioned and contemplated who I was in relation to others around me. At the time, I was eight years old living in a small community in North Carolina. I was at the top of my second grade class and had only ever encountered praises and good remarks from teachers. 

Yet on this particular day we were just learning about the Civil Rights Movement as part of our history unit. Our teacher taught us about Rosa Parks, a black woman who valiantly stood up for her beliefs and refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a segregated bus. 

To demonstrate the effects of segregation, our teacher told all the students to stand up. She asked all the white students to walk to one side of the classroom and all the black students to congregate at the other end. Eager to move, all the students squirmed out of their seats; half of the class walked to one end of the classroom while the other half shuffled to the opposite end. 

I hesitated in my seat, confused as to where I should go and to which group I belonged.

Surely I must go where my white friends are because my skin is not dark like my black friends, I reasoned.

But then I remembered a few white classmates teasing me in a previous class about how my eyes looked "different" than theirs did.  

So I guess I don't belong with them either, I surmised.

Just as I was getting red in the face from the curious stares of classmates already segregated, I remembered my mom telling me I was Chinese because I was born in China before she adopted me and brought me to America.

Teacher, where do I go?  I'm Chinese. Which side should I go on?

I will never forget my teacher's response.

Well, um, you can just stay where you are for now, dear.

And so I did just sit there, in the middle of the classroom, with no one by my side.  I sat there feeling as if I had done something wrong, having no idea who I was or where I belonged.  Everyone else in the room was staring at me in an uncomfortable moment of silence before my teacher hesitantly moved on with the next portion of the Civil Rights Movement.  I walked home that day with more questions and doubts than I ever had before.  That simple, yet inconsequential, experience was the origin of my "race identity crisis" which I struggled to deal with for much of my childhood and adolescent years.

Now I'm 22 years old, married to the whitest guy I know (haha, sorry Sam!), and taking a race and ethnicity college course that is helping me confront and understand the workings of race, racism, and its effects on my sense of identity and past experiences.  In the rest of this blog post, I share my personal thoughts and beliefs on how I identify myself today, to what extent I have faced racism in the past, and how my race both privileges and disadvantages me in American society today.

Feel free to comment and add perspective.  I welcome all comments and opinions on my personal collection of long-held thoughts and beliefs.

I identify racially as Asian, more specifically, Chinese, and ethnically as white Chinese American.  Identifying myself ethnically has always been challenging for me because many people presumably think my ethnicity is Asian American, but that didn’t ever seem to fit the culture or social group I grew up in.  Therefore, I have chosen to identify myself as a white Asian American, because I feel as if I have grown up as any other middle class white kid does.  I was adopted as a baby from China by a single white mother who grew up in a typical middle-class family.  Throughout my whole life, I have lived in a predominantly white community, with very few Asian or colored friends.  My family has always celebrated Christmas, Easter, Halloween, the Fourth of July, and other various Christian and American holidays just as ardently as any other American family.  I had very little experience with Chinese culture, and I didn't know anything about Chinese New Year, Chinese food, or the Chinese language.  Because I was content with where I was and felt that I had all the same privileges as everyone else around me, I had no desire to learn more about my Chinese heritage or culture. 

It wasn’t until I received a mission call to Seoul, South Korea for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that I began to develop an interest in and identify with the Asian people.  I began to more critically view the world through the lens of racism.  In Korea, I was exposed to a whole nation of people who looked similar to me; it really opened my eyes to the fact that white culture was not the only culture out there; as I continued to learn more about the Korean people and their culture, my love for Asia grew immensely!


After I returned back home to my white community, I began more fully critically examining how my race both helped and hindered me in context of living in America.   For example, because I am Chinese, many people automatically assume I am an intelligent being, with superior genius capabilities regarding my academic studies.  This has played as both an advantage and a disadvantage at times in daily living.  When I was little, I was often the teacher’s pet.  This had perks of its own because I gained the teacher’s trust and was favored above others.  Teachers would ensure I was put in advanced classes and assumed I would excel in them.  Yet, despite my peers and teachers thinking I was super smart at math because of my race, I thought there must be something wrong with me because I struggled with math.  Their assumptions proved erroneous when I began to falter behind other students who were far better at math and science than I was.  Consequently, I spent much of my elementary education grappling with two jarring ideas—one that I was smart and special as evidenced by so much attention my teachers gave me, and two that I was struggling in these advanced classes while all my white peers seemed to understand the material much quicker than I.

More recently, I have also faced both advantages and disadvantages as a Chinese woman living in America.  I have always been attracted to and dated white men because of the environment in which I grew up, and my husband is no exception.  He is as white as can be (though I sometimes think he is secretly black trapped in a white man’s body), and he loves and appreciates all different cultures and races.  Being an interracial couple has its advantages and disadvantages.  One advantage is that I seem to be more accepted by society as an individual.  If I had married a minority race, for example another Chinese man, I might not be as integrated with the mainstream culture of my community.  If I am to critically examine every implication my race has on my daily living, then I must acknowledge that being married to a white man gives me more acceptance as a whole into society.  However, I have seen several disadvantages well in these past few months since getting married.  While Sam sees me for who I am—and not just my race—many people looking from the outside see only our interracial-ness.  One striking example is a recording of my husband and I kissing on campus.  Unbeknownst to us at the time, someone secretly recorded us kissing and posted it online for all to see.  After the initial embarrassment wore off, I began to look at all the online comments posted under the video, a few of which pointed out that we were interracial.  Though I certainly don’t take offense for people recognizing and acknowledging we are an interracial couple, the comments people posted mirror what I have been going through my whole life which is that I am recognized and judged by my race first before any other humanizing factors; furthermore, these comments reflect and reaffirm the attitude of society at large—whenever there is a mixing of races, it’s worth mentioning and commenting on.  Thus, the biggest irony about being an interracial couple is that people simultaneously accept me for marrying a white man yet judge me for being an Asian woman married to a white man.

As I have tried to articulate how my race uniquely privileges and disadvantages me, I recognize that I am not alone, and I am aware of several friends who have also experienced similar feelings of doubt, shame, loneliness, and confusion while growing up as part of a minority.  I love America with all my heart, and I love being an American citizen, but we as a people could be doing more to fight racial injustice.  I firmly believe that once we understand how harmful racial stereotyping can be, we can not only learn to empathize with those who have faced discrimination based on their race or ethnicity, but we can also refrain from racial profiling, stereotyping, or judging each other based on our hair style, eye shape, or skin color.

Furnished with Love

Each chapter of life brings with it new interests, new opportunities, and especially new people.  Heaven brought me my new person last year in the form of a charismatic, compassionate, and Christlike man whom I now gratefully and wholeheartedly call my husband.  Returning home from my mission closed one chapter of my life and opened up a new one: marriage.

After Sam and I got married, we moved into a small basement apartment in southeast Provo.  Located in a friendly family neighborhood, our small abode is only a few minutes drive from our university campus.  Karma, our 87 year old landlady, so kindly rented her basement under her house to us.  Though the basement is modest in size, furniture gives possibility to space, family pictures dot and liven the walls, and lots of wedding gifts add life, color, and familiarity to what used to be a cold, empty storage unit.

Our living room acts as our room of council where we work together as equal partners to handle the day-to-day living.  It is there where we unite as comrades in our weekly planning and scheduling and enjoy the warm Spirit that enters whenever we hold family home evening.  We've already put the well-worn, plum colored couch Sam received from his old boss to good use.  The couch has played an important part in our newlywed life as we build family memories such as watching movies, snuggling, and hosting a variety of guests; the couch has also endured difficult times as we cry tears of frustration (mostly on my part) or figure out important grown-up things like finances and future plans.

Adjacent to the couch rests a black bookshelf, the tallest piece of furniture in our living room, which towers over our small coffee table.  This bookshelf represents a union of two different, contrasting lives.  The combination of various things neither Sam nor I are willing to depart with find home together on the same shelves as Sam's various art drawings and projects, as well as his prized mission relics and old books and movies are mixed with my Korean textbooks, old journals, and a charming cat figurine.  Such a mixture on our bookshelf of things from our past lives represent the blending of our new lives as husband and wife, partners for eternity.

The bedroom down the hall acts as our own sort of temple sanctuary--sacred, deeply personal, and far removed from the world.  It beckons us every night after a long day of classes, work, and other demands, and the travails of the day dissipate once we start our nightly ritual of getting ready for bed.  Sam despises the word, routine.  A routine, Sam says, is for those who do things mindlessly; a ritual is for those who do things with care and awareness.  And so our nighttime rituals uniquely enhance our marital bliss as we remember and appreciate the whys of routinized living.  We brush our teeth together, we shower together, we read the Book of Mormon together, and we pray together.  We do it all together, for without doing so, we so easily fall prey to routine.  We talk about the stuff that really matters to us--family, Christ, our marriage.  I will lie on our bed, and Sam will oftentimes give me a full-body massage if I've been having a particularly taxing day.  He also believes that husband and wife should always go to bed together at the same time, and so if I have to stay up late to finish homework, he will stay up with me; and yet if I want to go to bed early, Sam drops everything he is doing and hops right into bed with me, eager to cuddle as sleep takes over my body.  Our little sanctuary down the hall has become such an essential part of our home.

Here's one thing I've learned in all of this:

Before I met Sam, I never envisioned I would get married so early after serving a full-time mission, or that I would end up living in a small basement apartment in southeast Provo so happy and so in love with a man who in every sense of the word completes me.  I knew I didn't need to reach optimal financial stability or become more perfect in Christ as an individual before I found an eternal companion, but I didn't really believe it in my heart.  I was so perfectly content with marrying down the road, at which point I would somehow magically feel prepared to meet the man with whom I was to spend eternity.  But the game of life doesn't work like that, and the Lord has a funny way of changing our plans when we least expect it so that we have an opportunity to exercise our faith in the Savior.  Sam literally splashed into my life and changed my mind about everything.  Ultimately, the thought of spending an eternity with the best man I know quelled all my concerns and reduced them to triviality.

In all of newlywed living thus far, I've learned that one of the most exciting things about marriage is the home.  Empty space becomes a place for a life together, a realm where both of our ambitions, rituals, worries, and baggage unite in strength and support in weakness, empathize in awareness and flourish in creation.  Certain rooms, when furnished with love, awaken potential and engender possibility.   The well-worn purple couch, the build-it-yourself IKEA bookcase, the bedroom at the end of the hall--all of these hallmarks of our apartment truly create, reflect, and build more than our home--they embody and empower who we are and who we will be together for the rest of our lives.

Now excuse me while I go kiss my husband like crazy.