Jan 14

Jan 14 S03E05 - Remixing Identity

Transcript

Jay Ooi

What’s your first thought when you think of mixed race people? Maybe you view them slightly differently to other Asians - they’re a bit “whiter” than you, maybe they only speak English. Or maybe you think, man, they’re so beautiful. But their experience as someone who inhabits multiple races is pretty unique. So what influences how they encounter race?

Stephanie Jack

Bendigo in the '90s was pretty white and it's where my dad's family is from. So I was much more surrounded by white people growing up.

Jay Ooi

And how do our views of them impact their identity and experience?

Serena Coady

I think you're basically, as a mixed-race child or person, you're primed to field all these questions from curious people all the time.

Jay Ooi

Hello and welcome to SHoes Off, stories about Asian Australian culture. I’m Jay Ooi.

It’s often talked about how mixed race people are the race of the future. The numbers of mixed race people are growing as our world becomes more globalised, and today I want to explore how their experience can be quite different because they’re mixed race.

So when it comes to I guess your cultural background, what term do you prefer to use? Because there's like mixed, half, multiracial, biracial. Is there ones you like and ones you don't like?

Serena Coady

Well, I mean I do get halfy a lot and I'm not such a huge fan of halfy because I think... I mean it can be based on half-Asian but I think it also comes from half-caste, which I think is an offensive term and historically problematic. So, halfy I'm not a huge fan of. But it can be used endearingly I suppose from one-half Asian to another in a way. But I also I guess...

Jay Ooi

That’s Serena, a freelance writer currently based in London.

Serena Coady

So, I guess mixed Asian I like. I prefer mixed Asian just because it's a bit more inclusive. And I guess multiracial works too, biracial does as well. But I guess with me personally, I am Malaysian and Australian but my mom also has such a diverse heritage, I wouldn't just want to say that I'm biracial like two races.

Jay Ooi

Serena remembers first being made aware of her race when she would go back to Malacca, where her mum is from in Malaysia.

Serena Coady

I think maybe I was about seven and my sisters were five and three. We'd always have strangers come up to us and just be amazed at us.

And I remember, my mom is always... She's such a chatty person, she's a very warm and open person but I remember being quite suspicious of these people. By these people I just mean any person that comes along and is like amazed by children that look slightly different. And it was just kind of weird to me and they'd touch our faces and kind of be very excited by us. And I'm like, "What? What's... I don't get what's going on here."

Jay Ooi

So even though, Serena’s mum is from Malacca, because she’s mixed race, it becomes unusual for someone who looks like her to exist in that space because she doesn’t fit the nice neat boxes we’re used to putting people into. Here’s another incident she recalls.

Serena Coady

I was probably 13 at the time, my sisters... We're all two years apart. We were coming through KL airport from Australia one Christmas and the immigration, they thought that my mom was trying to bring us in as... She was trying to be our pimp. They thought we were these child sex workers or something because we looked interesting and they didn't think she was our mother because she looks more Asian than we do. And so they thought that we were being brought in and it was a really weird experience actually. It was quite scary and my little sister was quite disturbed by this and I was more just confused.

Jay Ooi

Yes, people didn’t think Serena’s mum was Serena’s mum because they look like they’re of different races. And this is kind of just how our brain works - we like to these defined categories, and it’s confusing when we see things that don’t fit into whatever categories we have in our head. But for all of us, and especially for mixed race people, how we perceive them as inside and outside of these categories can affect the individual.

Timothy Kazuo Steains

one of the things that is different about it is the way that mixed race people can be ... or in academic language, we call it hailed. But the way that they might be read in different ways by different people, partly because of their phenotypical appearance.

Jay Ooi

That’s Dr Timothy Kazuo Steains, a mixed Okinawan and white Australian lecturer of gender and culture studies at the University of Sydney.

Timothy Kazuo Steains

But it could also because of their culturalisation within particular cultures.

Jay Ooi

So how does this hailing look like in person? Well for one of Serena’s sisters who looked much more Asian, she embraced that side of her as the cool Asian. And for Serena, she was hailed as both Asian, and not Asian at the same time during school, which can be confusing.

Serena Coady

I guess I got sort of both sides of the coin in that I definitely could fit in with my white friends because they didn't see me as completely Asian in a way and they would tell me things like, "Oh, I don't see you as an Asian. I don't see you as Asian, sort of like I don't see you as one of the other Asians."

But I guess I still in terms of my Asian side, I think people still saw me as Asian Serena. Like if there was a white Serena and then there was me, I would be the Asian Serena. So it was like I had to fit into that kind of box.

Jay Ooi

Yeah, and when you reflect back on some of the comments that you got like, "We don't see you as Asian." Or, "That's Asian Serena." Do you remember how you felt at the time and how you think about it now?

Serena Coady

Well, I think back in that time I probably didn't have the awareness that I have now, like the cultural understanding and the ramifications of what that means to say, "I don't see you as an Asian." Because what they were telling me was that there was something shameful about being Asian. There was something that wasn't accepted yet in being Asian and I do actually feel... I think back then part of me did feel sad because it meant that some was rejecting my heritage on my behalf, and I didn't want to do that.

Timothy Kazuo Steains

And I think the other thing that makes it different is having parents of different races as well, and seeing how they get racialised by the world and how that affects the child too.

Jay Ooi

Yes, for mixed race people, especially those with one Asian parent and one white parent, they’re experiencing race in a different way partly because of their parents.

Timothy Kazuo Steains

There's this really striking description of this by someone called Sara Ahmed, who talks about just walking in public with her different parents. She would feel shame about walking around with her Indian father and the way that he would be read by the rest of the world, and her by association. And it would feel different to the way that she would walk around with her white mother. And she felt she wanted to be more white because of the way that obviously people regarded her mother differently to her father. And so it creates a sort of tension within. It can create tension within a child's sense of self and the different kinds of attachments they have towards their different racial heritages, I guess you could say.

And sometimes that involves a hierarchy between the races as well. It involves devaluing the more racialised part of one's heritage and a striving for whiteness that creates ... I think it can create an internalised tension. Another writer, a mixed race writer called Gloria Anzaldua, talks about it as a clash of voices inside. Where she was a Chicana, so a Mexican-American who had ... she thought of it as her white heritage on the top and then her Mexican heritage and then her indigenous heritage on the bottom. And that there were hierarchies within her because of the way that race works in society.

Jay Ooi

Now I haven’t really gone into racial hierarchies in this show yet, but in every sphere of life, we all have some sort of subconscious racial hierarchy, and as an Australian society, we, in general, rank Asians lower than white people. I’m not saying this is right, but because this happens, it can create an internal tension for mixed race people grappling with these two parts of themselves. And for Serena, her parents didn’t talk that much about race growing up.

Serena Coady

Yeah, my parents didn't really talk to us about race because I guess they were quite used to each other and they didn't see each other as being of a different race. I mean like dad would eat the same foods that we would eat and he would... Like that's I guess it's on quite a superficial level. But one of the only times their differences would be quite apparent would be like when we go to the beach and dad would turn red, we would turn brown. And so, that was one of the obvious times where those cultural differences were pointed out.

But I don't know, I guess my mom, she'd moved to Australia when she was 15 years old. So, she identified as Australian, her accent was Australian and so I guess their differences didn't stand out to me and it didn't stand out to them either.

My mum always brought me up to embrace my heritage and I'm really proud of my Asian heritage. But I do really wish that she and my dad had a deeper understanding of racial prejudice. I mean my mom's definitely experienced it first hand growing up. In an Australian high school, she would've experienced racism. But she didn't really... She wasn't really able to vocalise those experiences to me and tell me how I should deal with that.

Timothy Kazuo Steains

If you live in a context like Australia where the white Western culture is the dominant culture and that there are these assumed racial hierarchies, obviously parents are people and they can adopt some of these ideas and conscious or unconscious ways. And so that can translate into hierarchies between parents. They could be gendered hierarchies, but they could also be racialised as well. So if it's a white father and let's say an Asian mother, then the already existing gendered hierarchy that might be involved there could be racialised too.

There might be this implicit understanding that the white parent is just higher up in an imagined hierarchy. And I guess these parents have to think about, they have to make choices about how they want to bring up their children. What language or languages do they learn? What kinds of attachments will they have to their mother or father's heritage's? To what extent do they want to bring them up with this kind of self consciousness about their mixed race identity? If they make decisions about what languages they learn or what kinds of identities they want them to have, there might be some implicit hierarchies there in terms of, no, I want them to be more Australian because even if it's not spoken about explicitly, it might just be, this is the mainstream culture. This is the better culture, this is is the one that means they're going to fit in more.

But also sometimes that can involve a loss, a loss of a sense of ethnic identity. So some mixed race people do talk about that, where their children, sorry, their parents have decided that they want them to be more culturally white because they want them to fit in. Sometimes this can also come from the more ethnic parent, because they might've experienced racism and they don't want their children to experience that. But later down the track, sometimes the children can feel like there's a sense of loss there because they didn't get a choice in that scenario. Their parents made that choice for them.

Jay Ooi

This stuff is really hard to measure and even pinpoint, but whatever experience these parents have had in regards to race can be brought into how their kids are raised and view their own race. For Dr Steains, his mum fled Okinawa and didn’t speak with her family, so she didn’t speak much about Okinawa, and also specifically wanted to find a white man as a way of distancing herself from the Japanese gender hierarchies.

Timothy Kazuo Steains

I guess one of the reasons why she came to Australia really was to think of, to imagine a better life. And so when she brought us up, because I think that she'd severed ties with her family there, she didn't really talk about it. We knew that we were Okinawan, but we didn't really know what it meant. We ate Okinawan food, but nobody else was eating Okinawan food. So we didn't know that it was uniquely Okinawan. But it wasn't until about 2011 that my sister and I said we want to go back. And so she went back with us and she reconnected with her family and it was a really significant experience for us and our identities, I think.

Jay Ooi

If we’ve learnt anything so far, mixed race experience is really quite complicated. Research has found that racial identity is influenced by a number of factors, including class, what sort of mix you are, and we’ve also seen how your surroundings and parents play a big role as well. And for Stephanie Jack, a part Singaporean Chinese and part white Australian actor and vlogger, growing up in Bendigo definitely had some impact on her identity.

Stephanie Jack

Bendigo in the '90s was pretty white and it's where my dad's family is from. So I was much more surrounded by white people growing up. And I was, I think for a little while at primary school, I was the most ethnic kid in the school. It didn't stay that way, but there was definitely a point in time when being half ethnically Chinese was like the most diverse thing.

I think for the most part I just felt like a white kid who happened to have an Asian mom. I think that was kind of how I would describe how I felt growing up.

Jay Ooi

Stephanie never really considered herself an Asian person until she was living in America.

Stephanie Jack

And in particular, that was one moment where I was dating a guy who was half Hispanic half white, and he really identified as being Hispanic and I kind of really identified as being white still. And it was just this one point where I remember him saying to me, "But you're an Asian woman." And it was like the first time anyone had called me an Asian woman that I could remember, and that really changed things.

I started thinking, "Oh, yeah, I guess I am. I guess I can say that. Why have I felt like I can't say that? Why has that not kind of felt right?" So I wanted to be able to say that, I think.

Jay

Before that, why did you think you couldn't... you felt like you couldn't say that?

Stephanie Jack

It just felt like if I said that, I was an imposter maybe. Because I couldn't speak an Asian language and I couldn't do anything, particularly Asian. I can't cook Asian dishes, at the time I didn't know any like Kung Fu. It was like just nothing I really felt like I could do that was particularly Asian and I didn't feel like just being ethnically half Asian made me an Asian woman. I don't necessarily think that's true. I think it's totally fine for people who are mixed to say they're an Asian woman even if they can't speak an Asian language. But I personally felt uncomfortable with that and I felt like I needed to learn more.

Jay Ooi

This sort of imposter syndrome that Stephanie feels, where even though she is Asian, she can't inhabit that space because she doesn’t feel Asian enough - this was something Stephanie had internalised. And that can often come from us on the outside with these views on mixed race people, that they’re not really Asian.

Serena Coady

So, in the past, I've had Asian friends or coworkers who have made comments like if I've tried to identify with something they've said or bring up an experience that's happened to me that is distinctly Asian they'll be like, "Oh, but you're not really like... Do you really count though?" They'll say something like that and in that instance, they're kind of choosing for me that I am white, whereas I may not see myself that way and so it's kind of like... I guess it's always this... There's this level of comparison that happens.

Jay Ooi

Yeah, how does that feel when that happens?

Serena Coady

It really hurts, to be honest. Like when I've had Asian friends do that to me I felt that's painful for me because to say that I'm not really Asian it's like, "Well, what am I then?" Because I doubt a white person is going to say that I'm white because I'm clearly not. So, it's just like this denial of my own identity and a rejection of where I'm from. And to me that discredits my mom and her really diverse background and my big family. Yeah, it's just strange because it's like, you don't know my upbringing and you don't know my family. How can you say suddenly that I'm not Asian because I'm only half?

Timothy Kazuo Steains

And proximity to whiteness also needs to be talked about too, because sometimes... How do I say this? Sometimes it's the fact that one is half white and one almost gets held as white that can create angst as well. So that you're almost white. "White but not quite," as Homi Bhabha, another post-colonial theorist says.

That feeling of where you have this sense of proximity to whiteness, even a sense of your own whiteness because of your attachment to one parent. But then at various times in society, made to realise that you aren't quite white. And so that in itself, is also something that can be difficult to deal with.

But it is an aspect of privilege too. Right. That you have some level of proximity to whiteness, but it's also difficult to be... What's a way of saying that? It also just creates its own particular difficulties that mixed-race people do need to have acknowledged by people, especially by each other so that they can work through it, I think.

Jay Ooi

So for a lot of mixed race people, there can be a sense of not knowing how to identify. And especially since stories around mixed race experience and mixed race role models aren’t the most common thing we see and hear, finding community can be tough, because mixed race experience is pretty different from those of us with a single racial identity. So how do they navigate this?

Serena Coady

well it's interesting because I've always had this sort of online group of mixed Asian friends, like all these women that I've never met in real life but we all were in a WhatsApp group years ago and it was on Telegram. It's called Telegram, right?

Jay Ooi

Oh, yeah. I remember that app.

Serena Coady

Yeah, random we were on that and we kind of just all found each other on Instagram, and then we made this little community where we'd support each other's photos on Instagram. This was back when I guess I was into that and I'm definitely not any more or I'm definitely into supporting other women but not so much into building my Instagram. And so yeah, we built this camaraderie just because it's like on a service level yes we do, we look kind of similar because we're mixed Asian. But also in that there are also things that we understand about each other. So yeah, I think that's really nice to have that. And yeah, these are women I've never met and they live in Canada, they live in Singapore, they live all around the world and I've never met them but I still feel like we have this commonality and we support each other because it's kind of like this similar niche community and I think it's really nice.

But I guess it is... You can identify with other mixed-race people because we are sort of aware of these weird little... Like vocabulary that has been created around us all our lives. So phrases like, "That's a great mix," or "You're so exotic." And so we get that and we can just share in that mutual disgust and annoyance. And yeah, it's interesting and definitely I have that with my cousins as well, one of my cousins are mixed. So we sort of know what the other's been through in a way and we can just riff off each other and talk about those experiences even if they're cringeworthy.

Jay Ooi

Yes online community is one great way for mixed race people who don’t have other mixed people around them to form that sort of community. This was something that Dr Steains experienced too.

Timothy Kazuo Steains

I think when it became an issue for me, when I started to think about it more seriously, which was probably my undergraduate university years, I went out looking for other people like me. At the time, I was lucky to find a Facebook group called Hafu Japanese. In Japan, the term is Hafu. It was actually brought out of a movie or actually a documentary called Hafu. Where they went and interviewed various half Japanese people living in Japan and they created a Facebook group out of it. And it still exists today, and it's a very big Facebook group. But basically people just posted stuff about their experiences of being hafu or which might be their personal feelings about their identity or it could just be the things that they consume. The cultural products that they consume or just their every day life living in Tokyo as a half Japanese person.

And it was great just to know that there were other people out there that look like me, that experienced things like me. Whether or not my experience was the same as theirs or not, at least there was this larger conversation and this larger community that I was part of, which really just didn't exist in my every day life in Australia.

Jay Ooi

And he was able to take it one step further by turning the virtual in the tangible.

Timothy Kazuo Steains

And I was lucky enough to go to Japan and meet some of the people who set up and run the Facebook group, because they often do this great thing where they're really hospitable and they will just accept guests. When people visit Tokyo, they will just take them out for dinner and go drinking with them and have a good time. And for some reason, that's social experience. Not just the online experience, but the face-to-face social experience was also really validating because I was in the same room with about 10 people that look like me, which just didn't happen.

Just actually being in the presence of other people like that and talking about our life and just being comfortable and having this kind of understanding between each other just didn't happen very often. And so that was also a really validating experience, and it helped me to work through that stuff at a time when I was really quiet ... I wasn't angry, but there was angst, I guess you could say. And it helped me to work through that, to know that there are other people going through that and who had their own particular solution.

Jay Ooi

Yeah. Is it almost like a small little, I don't want to say a subculture, but a small community there? Because there's a shared understanding of something you have experienced that there's an automatic, you're a part of us, we will care for you.

Timothy Kazuo Steains

Yeah, I think so. And people automatically seek that understanding in other people like them. And it's interesting how much doesn't need to be said. That is a surprising thing, that people just implicitly understand. Even if they have grown up in quite different places, there's still this implicit understanding of that experience. And it can be really significant to share that with other people.

Jay Ooi

So Timothy was able to connect back to his culture through online groups and meeting other mixed race Japanese people in person. And for Stephanie, she took it one step further and decided to live in both Singapore and Shanghai.

Jay

What prompted you to want to go like live in Singapore and in Shanghai?

Stephanie Jack

I sort of over the past 10 years, like since I left Australia at 18, I kind of, I ended up living in a lot of different places, but most of them were, it was like the UK or America. I was like English speaking countries and I think I wanted to go to Singapore for very kind of personal reasons. Like, one, I hadn't lived there and I'm half Singaporean and it felt important, but two, my grandmother was still alive at the time and it was like my last grandparent and I felt like I should be around. And actually, I still couldn't really speak to her because at that time I couldn't speak Chinese. So that's something I definitely regret. Because I did go back and I did spend time with her and that was really nice, but I couldn't really speak Chinese and I honestly didn't learn that much in Singapore because Singapore is such an English speaking country as well. But yeah, so that was quite personal.

China was because I just wanted to even things out a little bit. I felt like I was so, my knowledge of Chinese history and culture was so lacking compared to my knowledge of say, British culture, and I needed to kind of balance things a little bit.

Jay Ooi

Stephanie ended up learning Mandarin, and even though her mum didn’t really speak it to her growing up, she now chooses to speak it with her mum.

Stephanie Jack

Well, recently, and this is kind of a weird one, but recently just because of Coronavirus and all of that, I actually started speaking to my mom in Chinese on the streets more because I just felt like hearing about all the kind of racist backlash was so annoying, but I just wanted to really embrace being half Chinese. So I would purposefully speak to her in Chinese in shops and things which is kind of a strange one.

Jay Ooi

And Stephanie has become far more comfortable embracing her mixed race identity.

Stephanie Jack

I think I was listening to something the other day or watching a video where someone mixed who was saying that, "If you're mixed, you occupy three different things. You've kind of got the two races, but then there's a third thing where it's almost like you could relate to someone else who's mixed more than someone from either of those two groups, even if they're not the same mix as you." So I think it would feel very weird not to be mixed. I just can't even imagine it anymore.

I think it's a sense of, part of it is that you feel like you're part of a bit more of a global community maybe. You naturally had to have a wide view of the world because you already start off with parents who are from two different places, so you're always very aware of the wider world. And I think in some cases you become a little bit more likely to go and live in different places yourself, because at least one of your parents did that.

Jay Ooi

And another advantage of being mixed race is having greater mental flexibility, being able to inhabit one racial identity when needed, and jump to the other in different circumstances. And like we saw at the start, where people from Malacca would just come up to Serena and her sisters just because they looked different, you’re ready for what’s about to come at you.

Serena Coady

I think you're basically, as a mixed-race child or person, you're primed to field all these questions from curious people all the time. And I think you grow up with an understanding of how much of yourself you want to give away to a stranger, how much information you want to pass on to a stranger. So, I've always had people come up to me and ask me... And most of the time it's really good-natured, it's just people are curious. But sometimes it is... There's an aspect of fantasization there, people basically commodifying you.

Usually, it is men who will do that to me in bars or wherever and it is really annoying. I'd rather some crap pickup line or something like that. But this whole, "Ooh." They'll say, "What's your mix? You're so exotic." And so I think over the years I've definitely built up the skill of being able to deal with that and how I can go about creatively dealing with that. Because sometimes I'll literally just makeup ethnicities in my head and say that's what I am and see if they notice that I'm bullshitting just because they're annoying me and I just want to kind of rid of them in a way.

But I think yeah, just things like that. Just little things like that and yet I think you do have to be mindful of how you present yourself to the world and how you answer questions because I don't really like playing into the question of when people say, "Where are you really from?" I don't really put up with that because I think if people say where they're from you should be like, "Okay." And accept that rather than being like. "Oh, but are you sure you're from there? You actually look... I think you look like this." A lot of people will sort of play around with what identities you have and it's so weird considering they don't know you. So I think yeah, having to deal with that your whole life definitely lends some degree of creative thinking. And as a defense as well, certainly.

Jay Ooi

And one statement Serena is really not a fan of?

Serena Coady

There's like this phrase that really bugs me and I know a lot of other mixed Asian girls get it and it's... You'll tell them what your mix is and then they'll say, "Oh, that's a great mix." It's like you've given them a recipe and they're like, "Oh, that ratio of cinnamon to sugar, oh, mint. That's just fantastic." It's just such a weird comment to spring at someone, like what a great mix because what is a bad mix? What's not a good mix? How is any mix bad? And people are always like, "That's a good mix." And I think... I guess maybe people like to fill the silence and just say expressions like that. But it's still just such a common phrase that I've heard so much. Yeah, and I think other mixed-race women I know have got that exact phrase throughout their whole life.

You wouldn't say to someone who was one ethnicity, you wouldn't say to someone who was Chinese, be like, "Oh, that's a good ethnicity." You wouldn't say that is one good ethnicity, you wouldn't say that.

Jay Ooi

Now this idea of a “good mix” is probably coming from a good place. After all, a 2005 study found that both Japanese and white Australians found the faces of half-Japanese and half-white people the most attractive when compared to those of their own race or other single races. And this is such a common idea and understanding - mixed race people are beautiful. I’m sure you’ve either said it or heard it said about some parents’ new Eurasian kids and how beautiful they are. There’s a theory that it’s a more “average” face, and therefore more attractive.

Serena Coady

Yeah, it's strange and maybe it has something to do with people's concept of genetic strength or something in that you might get like... Because you're from a more diverse background, maybe you're more genetically strong or something like that.

Jay Ooi

But this perception also comes with some slight warnings. Are single race people unattractive? Does proximity to whiteness play a role here too, where Asians need to be mixed with whiteness for their Asianness to be attractive? I’m not too sure whether these are always true, but nevertheless, even in Asia we’re seeing a lot of mixed race people doing modelling and acting work, including Stephanie and Serena themselves.

Timothy Kazuo Steains

So I think that's a really good point and it is true that there are a lot of Eurasian models and stuff because Eurasian people are attractive. But I think also, that they symbolise particular things that are attractive to people as well. So there's this exotic Asianness or exotic racial ethnicness, that is also mixed with whiteness, that is fetishised.

I think it's actually again, the racialised power dynamic between whiteness and non-whiteness that is mixed in the mixed-race person. The old term for this is miscegenation and has to do with racial mixing. And actually, it's a kind of fetishised thing where people fetishised racial mixing because of the way that, I think, it draws the whiteness out of ethnic people, or it brings them closer to whiteness. And there's this fantasy again of racial hierarchy and a fantasy of bringing the person up.

So we had this attitude in Australia with Aboriginal people too, where certain people wanted to breed out the Aboriginality of people and make them white. And these dynamics were perverse in the way that they fetishised racial dynamics.

Jay Ooi

So whilst it might seem like a compliment to talk about how mixed race people are attractive, I think it’s worth noting what other connotations come with these sorts of comments. We might be, in a way, reinforcing racial hierarchies by saying Asians get more attractive when they’re mixed with white people, and we’re also contributing to this exotification of mixed race people, which to them, can be a little creepy.

But maybe there’s another way to approach this whole multiple-race identity. Both Stephanie and Serena agree that parts of the US and UK are more open minded when it comes to being mixed race, where they get questioned less often just because they don’t quite fit into defined categories.

Serena Coady

I feel like there's a greater representation of mixed-race people here in the media. Whereas in Australia, I don't think it's quite where it should be yet.

Stephanie Jack

America I feel has been openly talking about this stuff just a bit longer than Australia and I feel like race was discussed almost on a daily basis there in a way that I hadn't experienced living in Australia.

Jay Ooi

But these defined views of race are actually quite American in themselves.

Timothy Kazuo Steains

So in America, because of the fact that they have to tick the boxes, it becomes a really significant part of people's identity. So they have really significant forms of community that we don't really have here. But it can become a bit exclusivist and it can also be a little bit trying to create hard boundaries around racial identity, that I don't think we do as much here.

one difference that we can talk about is, I guess it has to do with the identity position itself. So inhabiting an identity position like Asian American or Asian Australian, for example, I think it shouldn't be something that is the be all and end all about somebody's identity.

Or perhaps a better way of saying that is that it shouldn't be something that we hold onto as a permanent identity position. Because in a sense that's actually reproducing the logic of race, which is not real. And that, actually, we should in a way be trying to dismantle.

Jay Ooi

We’ve touched upon this in the episode What Is Asia? But the whole concept of race is literally just a construct. But because we have these kind of rigid ideas of what is Asian and what is white, it becomes easy to say things like “oh you’re not really Asian” to mixed race people. So a lot of these experiences of mixed race people only happen because we, and everyone else, have these ideas of who is in one group and in another.

I think the clearest example I can give is if someone is, say, part Taiwanese and part Japanese, yes they would have different cultural experiences on both sides, but, when it comes to race, they are still just singularly Asian. They can inhabit this Asian identity fairly safely. And because of this, their experience is going to be vastly different from a mixed race person - someone who clearly isn’t fully Asian but isn’t fully white.

I know these terms like “Asian” can be useful. But in circumstances like these, where we see how it can make mixed race people feel like they don’t quite belong in either group, they can be quite harmful as well. So I think we need to be a little more careful with who we include and exclude.

Timothy Kazuo Steains

So, it is good to create community around it because obviously we have shared experiences. Just in the same way that I talked about, that finding other people to have those experience is really good.

But for a mixed race person like me, to define Asian American identity, for example, Asian Australian identity, as different to whiteness as structurally different to whiteness, doesn't actually make sense to me because I also inhabit whiteness in certain ways. And so, the hard boundaries between, "Oh, people of colour are like this and white people are like that," I find really problematic because actually it's not really reflective of my experience.

Jay Ooi

Sometimes we forget there is some overlap - experiences we attribute as Asian experiences aren’t shared by all Asians, and by the same token, a lot of non Asians probably experience them too. And it’s this inclusion and exclusion that has essentially created a separate mixed race experience.

Timothy Kazuo Steains

We want it just to be like one thing. And then so we can commit to that one thing and be like, "Okay, I am Asian. I'm going to structure my life around being Asian. I'm going to have Asian friends or whatever. And people who don't understand that I'm just not going to include them." Right.

Yeah. Or I'm going to define everything that I do around this category. Actually, it would be nice if it was that simple, but culture isn't that simple. It's messy. There's so much cultural flow between different places that you can't really create those boundaries. And so we have to be able to hold that complexity and it's really difficult to commit to that. And it's really difficult to think about it intellectually too, actually.

But I think that is one of the things that we need to try to embrace is that cultural and racial identities are not clear cut. And they're not fixed. They're fluid, they're changing. And there are lots of complex contextual influences and lots of exceptions and contradictions within them that we need to be able to do justice to if we want to have the best kind of understanding of mixed race identity, for example.

Jay Ooi

So we’ve seen how these clear cut racial boundaries play out for mixed race people - it can be very isolating to feel like you don’t quite fully belong in either. But race, again, is just a concept, a shorthand of referring to certain ideas and experiences, but it’s never the totality of our existence.

Serena Coady

I think people I know I'm going to get along with are the ones that don't put my race front and center straight away. They actually just want to chat because just from human to human, which is how it should be with anyone of any race or of any kind of appearance. It's just like, "Just talk, just have a chat about something else." I think.

Jay Ooi

But where to from here? Being mixed race can mean never fully connecting to one or more of these heritages. And yes, there are groups out there for mixed race people to find that community, and that certainly can be helpful. For Stephanie though, understanding more of her Chinese heritage helped her connect to a part she never felt like she could really own, and it’s been quite profound for her.

Stephanie Jack

I feel like a very big part of me growing up and finding a real identity as an adult was kind of exploring the other half, this sort of half that I hadn't explored as much. So I would definitely really encourage people even if they haven't felt the need to do that, I think it's a really good thing to consider. I think it's a good thing to consider going back to these countries and maybe learning the language, maybe not, but just exploring that a little bit. Because I feel extremely different to the person I was five years ago. I feel a lot more comfortable in my own skin.

Jay Ooi

But this isn’t necessarily prescriptive. There can be very good reasons to not reconnect as well, and there’s no right or wrong here.

Timothy Kazuo Steains

Because there aren't many scripts around being mixed race, we can feel this pressure that mixed race has to be this or that. And also, it doesn't have to be that mixed race people need to embrace their so-called ethnic culture actually. And I don't want to give this impression that mixed race people who don't do that are somehow lesser or duped or culturally unaware or whatever.

There's sometimes there's some very good reasons for why mixed race people assimilate to whiteness, or they just feel more approximate to whiteness, whether that be just phenotypically or culturally. And I think that's perfectly fine. And I think it's important to say that. Because again, I don't want to create this idea that there is the best way of being mixed race.

And however mixed race people are living now, they're already creating their own narrative about what it means to be mixed race.

Jay Ooi

Embrace both sides of your heritage, or don’t. There’s no one correct way to live as a mixed race person, just as there’s no one correct way to live as an Asian person.

This episode of Shoes Off was written, produced and edited by me, Jay Ooi.

Special thanks to all the guests in today’s episode: Dr Timothy Kazuo Steains, Stephanie Jack and Serena Coady.

In the show notes for this episode at shoesoff.net you can find all the references, Stephanie’s youtube channel where she vlogs about her mixed race experience at Stephanie Jack Mixed Up, and links to Serena’s writing.

The intro music is by Avik Chari and the episode artwork is by Alli Chang.

Do you have your own experience of mixed race identity? Or have any other thoughts to share? Let me know @shoesoffau on facebook and instagram.

If you liked Shoes Off please subscribe, we’re on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts or wherever you’re listening to it right now, or head to shoesoff.net

And if you have a mixed race friend who might relate to what you’ve heard today, please share this episode with them.

Thanks, and catch you next episode.

Serena Coady

Oh yeah, that's another weird thing. Every time I travel throughout Europe because now that I'm in London I get to do more travel in Europe, which is fabulous, well not at the moment but you know before the pandemic. And people will just on the street, like maybe people who were trying to promote tours or promote their restaurant, they'll start speaking to me immediately in Spanish, always Spanish. Not English or the language of the country but they'll just start speaking to me in Spanish and oh, it's weird. I think...

And even in the UK it happened with some man. He just... I think maybe I was waiting for a bus or something and this man starting speaking to me in Spanish and I was, "I don't speak Spanish and I'm not Spanish." But I was instantly confused and he was like, "Oh, no? No?" And I'm like, "No." And this guy wasn't even Spanish. I mean not to assume but he was a white, British dude and didn't have an accent or anything. I think he just wanted to try and speak Spanish to me and it was so strange and it's actually happened a few times. And yeah, I really don't know what's going on there.