by Alex Wagner
To a certain degree, the halves themselves no longer mattered; it was almost as if they canceled each other out, and in the vacuum that created there was something new and unburdened by expectation and history. I wouldn’t be bound by stale, atavistic ideas about identity, some hokey old timer’s notion of what “regular” America looked like. That was the past! The signifiers of my tribe would be as rigorous in their inclusion as that line cook was in his exclusion: The less you fit into any one category, the more you belonged.
My thinking about this brave new identity crystalized on November 18, 1993, when the cover of Time heralded “The New Face of America,” which, kind of (if you squinted or were legally blind), looked like me.1
“Take a good look at this woman,” the headline dared the reader. “She was created by a computer from a mix of several races. What you see is a remarkable preview of…THE NEW FACE OF AMERICA.” The thrill!
Inside was a story that promised to explain “how immigrants are shaping the world’s first multicultural society.”
I was a sophomore in high school and the cover was a revelation: I was the new face of America! Somehow I was a precursor, sent from the future to show the people of America what they would all look like a few generations hence. Just as Time promised, these parents of mine—one immigrant plus the child of some immigrants—had unknowingly created the futureface.
When I found a box, in late high school, filled with my mother’s old clothes from the seventies, there was a tiny bright green T-shirt emblazoned with orange iron-on letters that spelled out RANGOON RAMONA. It was something my father had made for my mother, based on a nickname that had been retired several anniversaries ago, but here was the perfect shirt for me, futureface. Rangoon Ramona. Who was she? It was like Clark Kent finding the S logo.
“Rangoon” was the capital of Burma, far away on the other side of the world. “Ramona” was continental, the Old World. The old European world, that is. It dawned on me—sitting on the linoleum floor of a basement redolent of wet wood and cat litter—that there was something here. I felt lucky. To be Burmese without the Irish-German half was to just be Asian. To be merely a descendant of Irish Germans was just to be white. Oh, but to be both! To be both was to be the space between them, the whole world that their stories traversed. It was to be the future.
And so here I was, in my mother’s hand-me-down RANGOON RAMONA T-shirt, defending not one particular culture but swimming around—gloating, even—in the new thing created from the mixture of two. It seemed almost greedy. On a trip to Hawaii right before college, a local called me a “hapa.” What exactly was a hapa? “It means you’re mixed!” he said to me, and the revelation was akin to having lived your whole life thinking you were a pigeon only to find out you were a toucan. Tropical, ambiguous, exotic. Hapa.
Shortly after college, on a visit to New York, I was wearing a single feather earring and ordering a coffee when a man with a deeply cleft chin came up and asked me, with the hushed incredulity of an actor on The Bold and the Beautiful, “What’s your blood?” I responded, “O negative,” because he deserved a ridiculous answer for an absurd question…and then I promptly recounted the story throughout the day to anyone who would listen. “Can you believe that douchebag?” I asked my friends. They could not believe that douchebag.
* * *
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The idea that I could name my “blood” was a reductive and outmoded concept. Instead, I had enrolled myself into a polyglot Tribe of All with great gusto—just as America herself, in the third quarter of the twentieth century, had also found new purpose in celebrating multiculturalism. For this country, the leap toward diversity came after years of official cultural monotheism: an institutional allegiance to white patriarchy that started at America’s inception and began to shift only with the 1960s flowering of cultural studies programs born of protest, starting with the establishment of African American studies in the late 1960s. Even white Judeo-Christian scholars started to question whether a rigorously monochromatic, Judeo-Christian canon best represented our dynamic and increasingly polychromatic society: Didn’t women and brown folks play pivotal roles in the building of our democracy, our economy, our history—often in opposition to the very same white patriarchy? If there was a common American story, how could it be told without them?
By the 1970s, scholars and activists and authors were doing what I had done: They were wearing the proverbial feather earring; they were donning the seed-bead necklace. This was the Dawn of the Age of Hapa. In 1980, historian and activist Howard Zinn released his alternative chronicle of our national project, called A People’s History of the United States. This was a history that accounted for the labor of slaves, the work of women, the struggles of the native people; the nation making and destiny shaping that happened at the grassroots, rather than the constitutional conventions—but was no less pivotal. Zinn’s text could be taught in classrooms as an alternative to the dusty, one-sided histories of yore, and American liberals were now taking their turn at reframing a story that had been told since time immemorial.
In my own high school during the early nineties, a steady diet of dead white men—Chaucer, Hawthorne, Donne—began to change. Now we would read Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, and Alex Haley’s Roots. Now we would study Ghana, Mali, the Songhai Empire, and Benin. We would know Africa, because Africa, not just Europe, had birthed America. Knowing this not only made us wiser, it made us stronger: truer to our values, our people, our histories. America was not simply the Stars and Stripes; it was a mosaic, a quilt, a rainbow. There was power in being mixed.
Or at least that was the idea. Because as soon as The Canterbury Tales was sidelined for Langston Hughes’s “I, Too,” the backlash began. And, boy, was it swift. Who knew that so many folks were fans of “The Knight’s Tale”?
Conservatives started to attack this new hybridized American canon as a threat to national identity: All of a sudden there was Dinesh D’Souza and his book Illiberal Education, railing against multiculturalism as a balkanizing force on American campuses. All of a sudden there was Pat Buchanan, running on a platform of cultural nationalism, blaming immigrants for America’s troubles, drawing a firm line in the sand between Us and Them. The nineties were wild!
But the criticism of Age of the Hapa was not limited to the right wing: Liberals recognized that the “melting pot” idea necessarily eliminated the differences between cultures, breaking them down into one mushy brown stew—and wasn’t this, too, a sort of surrender in the culture wars? I remember vaguely toward the end of my high school career being cautioned not to refer to America as a “melting pot” but instead as a “salad bowl”—the idea being that the ingredients in a salad bowl better kept their integrity, even though they were mixed. A tomato was still a tomato—even if it was surrounded by iceberg lettuce.
Things got even more complicated by the time I went to Brown—which was, incidentally, the only school my parents requested I not apply to. “Political correctness has run amok over there!” my mother declared one autumn Sunday after reading a less-than-flattering story about the school in The New York Times. My father didn’t really know what precisely constituted political correctness, but concurred anyway. Naturally, I decided to apply early and chose to attend as soon as the mailman had delivered my acceptance letter. (I had never even seen the campus.)
At my future alma mater, I attempted to navigate the choppy waters of multiculturalism: engaging in private hand-wringing over whether I should join the South Asian Students Association, or whether the very existence of this group reinforced the marginalization that it aimed to combat. (Answer: I joined, but never attended any of the meetings.) I took post-colonial literature classes, and I read Edward Said.
The generic mantle of “mixed” felt empowering but also weightless, in a way that race, as I understood it, was not supposed to be. I knew there was no such thing as a racial history without bagg
age, but I had no conception of how to assign that weight, how to reconcile the pasts of my futureface or the price paid for the privileges that I was now so eagerly adopting. So I didn’t. Somehow, I reasoned that because I was a new thing, a Burmese-Luxembourgian, my role in the American story of blood and plunder was unwritten. Ultimately, I chose not to think about the backstories of the European and Asian cultures whose blending had created my Broadly Mixed Race Heritage. I opted for that most American of paths: forward, to the future, with complete disregard for the shit that had been left behind. I wasn’t ready to relinquish my new power. There was a war going on, and, having seen the future, I knew who’d win.
* * *
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Even as I spread my toucan’s wings, I still struggled with the more quotidian problems of being alive, or being me, the kid who still played solitaire, if metaphorically. As I grew older, I became better at making friends and finding companions, but these relationships were always partially instrumental: I was trying to stave off loneliness.
“We are born alone, and we will die alone” my father used to intone, in case I had any suspicions that my best friends and favorite pets would be escorting me to eternal damnation or heavenly salvation. It wasn’t what an only child needed to hear over a Saturday morning bowl of Kix, but this is what he thought of as wisdom, a thing to remember in good times and bad, and so he repeated it often and I came to believe it. When my parents finally divorced, some twenty years after they got married, this koan took on even more meaning: My parents’ unlikely and exotic partnership had ended, and I was truly alone, like an astronaut on a distant planet. Other people had families to guide them through the Milky Way galaxy of life. I had only two separate satellites and no base station.
Friendships created connection and rituals, but those friendships, as delightful and anchoring as they were, were born from circumstantial origins. My friends were my friends for the same reasons two strangers got married and became my parents: We bonded over shared schools or professional worlds or political causes or tastes in music, not because we were tied together by blood and tradition. And, just like my parents, as conveniently as we had come together, we could be broken apart.
This sense of existential unrootedness, of transience, followed me into adulthood. Leaving college meant losing rituals and friends; changing jobs (relatively frequently—thanks, twenty-first-century economy!) meant losing associates—and sometimes even identities. Each one of these changes felt seismic, if quietly so. How did other people adapt so easily?
A few years ago, after the umpteenth job change and millionth fizzled attempt at casually rewarding friendship, it occurred to me that all these efforts were external ones, dependent on the tricky and unreliable chemistry of interpersonal relations. And the problem I was trying to solve was an inherently interior one, something no amount of shared ricotta pancakes or emailed correspondence could truly resolve. I was asking my bosses and my friends and my semi-friends to account for something that was very nearly impossible to resolve. I didn’t have a people. I didn’t know where I could find home.
* * *
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Not incidentally, this is something that we are also grappling with as a country—at various volumes and with various degrees of indignation: Who are our people? What makes them so? White Americans, once the country’s comfortable majority, used to tell themselves golden stories about the past—a time when everyone knew who they were and where they belonged. They didn’t know what DNA was, but that didn’t matter; American communal identity was in the land and the blood. This, of course, was never quite the truth; even when segregation was the law of the land, aggressive cultural mixture was what set America apart from other countries. But for most Americans, tucked into neatly segregated corners, even if they listened to rock ’n’ roll and put nacho cheese on their chips and watched Bruce Lee at the drive-in, this aggressive cultural mixture happened…somewhere else. Not in their hometowns. Not in their homes. Not in the canon. Especially not in the White House.
Our blood is changing. White men and women may have voted monolithically to install the forty-fifth president, but they are unlikely to be able to do so again: Their numbers are shrinking. America is browner, richer, poorer, angrier, lonelier. The constants—to the degree that they ever existed—are gone. We have tried to replace the old ideas of how we belong with other forms of connection based on pastimes and politics, a casual tribalism born of geography or Instagram likes. This was my parents’ story, a union formed by chemistry and liberalism, novelty and interests. But the question of belonging can’t simply be answered by a collection of habits and jobs and addresses or even by a political platform. It requires something deeper and undeniable. A story that draws a circle: Inside the circle, you find (okay, yes) yourself…but not just you. You’re not alone in that circle—you also find your people. And this is what it means to belong, in the truest sense.
* * *
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America is fracturing because its citizens are losing the ability to find that larger story. On both sides of the political spectrum, a movement is growing based on that craving to find a narrative that accounts for us, that tells us who we are. There’s a creeping sense that multiculturalism might not be the answer to, but the seed of, our discontent. That we’ve forsaken specific ancestry for something fashionably exotic, and this has made us disconnected and isolated, or angry and confused. In response, we’ve seen the growth of benign forms of reconnection to the old ideas of blood and land: the sudden preponderance of genealogy websites and genetic tests designed to find every lost ancestor floating in your DNA. We’ve seen immigrants holding on to old identities, or trying to forge new ones—but not assimilating into white America, a place that’s lived in but not understood to be home.
We’ve seen African American quarterbacks taking knees at football games and brown-skinned superstars building their performance art around the iconography of New Orleans and the West Indies and Africa. Some of the responses have been less benign: the rise of explicit white ethnic nationalism as a political force; a passion for building walls; the demonizing of Mexicans and Muslims and anyone who looks like a Mexican or a Muslim; and a return to an “America first” mentality, where “American” means exactly what it meant to that line cook all those years ago, which is to say, not black or brown or mixed. Not me.
And yet, I can’t be angry that so many others crave that same sense of belonging I longed for, so many years ago, sitting on the living room floor, playing solitaire and listening to Starship on the actual radio—the indelible feeling of self-recognition and camaraderie that might endure beyond transient affiliations. I have long recognized the absence of belonging, a questioning loneliness, in myself. And now it’s split the country around me. We’ve divided ourselves, segregated our communities into Us and Them in an attempt to feel whole, to better affirm who we are. In the process, we’ve ended up even more alienated and more confused about who we actually are: After all, the undeniable existence (and encroachment!) of Them is a challenge to the very concept of Us. How can America actually be our own, if so much of it is made up of people who live and act and think in opposition to us? And if divisions aren’t the way to draw an irrefutable, satisfactory line around identity, what circle to draw? And how?
Might I ever find, for myself, that grounding, sustaining thing?
After so much time, so many years, spent looking outward to answer this question, I wondered if what I was looking for wasn’t within me already. If instead of trying to be the lonely avatar of the mixed-race utopia to come, I could go back. I could search my own blood to find my people in the here and now. Was there some part of my story, in its improbable combination of DNA double helixes and far-flung genetics, that might offer connection to that elusive Camaraderie Supernova for which I’d been searching? One’s personal story is constant and irreversible, after all, something that will be with all of us from the
next lunch hour until the last glimmers of light pass over our eyelids. If you could find a way to carry it (and all the people from it), then you’d never really be alone again.
I began contemplating this and how I’d go about it. I’d never dug into the family archives with any degree of rigor (or interest, if I was being honest) and knew so little about, well, everything that had come before my parents and me, the prehistories that ultimately determined my own story. I was going to have to learn. I was going to have to get serious about the past. I began to steel myself. And then, just as I was beginning my search, edging into the darkness of the family past, something impossibly serendipitous occurred. An event that snapped me once and for all out of my futureface fantasies, and offered this curious loner something impossibly seductive: a family mystery. It was a lifeline to another way of being, a hidden tribe of elders who might claim me as their own—and (more urgently, perhaps) whom I might claim as my own. A chance, at long last, to know myself and where I truly—really, for real this time—belonged.
*1 Don’t feel bad for me. I never had to fight for dessert!
*2 Burma is now officially known as Myanmar. This dates back to 1989, when the ruling military junta changed the name of the country in what many considered a bid to deflect international attention away from the gross human rights violations it was carrying out across the country. My family—and all the Burmese exiles I have known—continued to call the country Burma, as an act of defiance—a refusal to acknowledge an illegitimate junta and its decrees. (As a matter of fact, referring to the country as Burma was official U.S. policy through much of the Obama administration.) At any rate, throughout this book I refer to the country and its people as Burma and Burmese. Despite its unfortunate colonial nomenclature, it remains the way in which my family has identified itself and separated itself from a regime that has persecuted and killed its own citizens—and continues to.
