I came across Kip Fulbeck's project on Hapa people, also known as those of mixed heritage, part Asian and part something else. It's a book of 250 portraits where each Hapa person answers the question "What Are You?"
Hapa comes from the Hawaiian word for "mixed descent", a derogatory term not unfamiliar to other cultures who have their own labels for those who do not fit in with the majority. In Singapore, we have the Hokkien word "Zup Jing" which literally translates to "mixed genes" and isn't exactly a very neutral, politically-correct name. Incidentally, I wanted to use http://www.zupjing.blogspot.com/ for our gestating baby but Daniel refused.
Whether we (or other people) are going to label our kid Zup Jing or Hapa or mixed or whatever, one thing is for certain: he or she is going to look and be special. 50% German and 50% Chinese really doesn't mean anything since "German" does not come prepacked in a jar of genes on the western end of the chromosome-market shelf. So what will our baby be?
I have always wondered about how children of two or more cultural heritages construct their identity. How would they answer the questions "Who am I?" and "What am I?" If they lived in the same society most of their lives, would they identify with that culture and not that of their other parent? If they looked more like one parent, would they identify themselves with the ethnic/cultural group of that parent?
Race and ethnic labels (like German and Chinese) are pretty simple signposts for the more complex concept of identity -- who you are. If both my parents are Chinese and I grew up in Shanghai I would not think very much about who I am. For those of us in Singapore, few lose sleep over this question since we've been told since the day we could read and activate the remote control that we have a "Chinese" (or Malay or Indian) race and a Singaporean nationality. The rest of us who do not agree with these signposts have to work a little harder to convince ourselves we are "Eurasian" or "Arab" or "Cockapoo".
Whatever scratches your identity itch.
In fact, more and more people are joining the ranks of those who do not fit neatly into a "race" category. Even people who fit neatly in on paper do not identify themselves with that group. If you were a Chinese Singaporean who grew up in America, spent your youth in Europe and then worked in Hong Kong, what about those experiences make you a Chinese, and even Singaporean? Maybe you speak some Chinese but that is not going to get you invited to a Chinese person's mahjong session. Your American-accented English is going to get you ridiculed amongst your Singaporean coworkers and your once-yearly trips to see Grandma and Grandpa back home are not going to make you au fait with the ways and wonders of Singaporean slang and the local love-affair for the best street food.
The new world of global movement and global economies has begun to dramatically alter the landscape of traditional identities long tied to homeland, nationality and race/ethnic groups. It's not even so new anyway, but the evolution of the way people work and live and move has sped up in the last decades and will spiral even faster in the decades to come. There will be less space for identity politics like (single) national allegiance in a burgeoning population of Hapas and Zup Jings who hail from two or more nationalities and cultures. Already, people are becoming less anchored to one home, one place as they travel the world in search of jobs and experiences. Will there be any more relevance to national identity or cultural identity once people no longer spend enough time in one place to engender IDENTIFICATION with that place and that society?
In 7 months, our baby will have two nationalities - German and Singaporean. S/he will live in Singapore until which time my job or Daniel's job takes us to another city. We will visit Germany at least once a year. In several years, maybe more, we will rethink where we want to live. Decisions such as ours will have a profound impact on any child growing up in a family with strong blood ties to two cultures on different sides of the planet. Family and employment would be the biggest factors that either push or pull us this way and that. Our kid will have to figure out who s/he is and where s/he fits in while juggling three languages, two sets of culturally-distinct relatives, two or more societies that s/he will live and socialise in before s/he turns 21 and has to decide what and who s/he wants to be. A German or Singaporean.
I feel sorry for the kid already. S/he is going to have to pick her/his way around all kinds of labels that people are going to try to shove at her; s/he will look in the mirror and see a question mark; I long to tell him/her that the only important label one should give oneself is "Adaptable".
So kid, no matter how stupid government policies that force you to pick one identity are, no matter how incompletely you feel trying to fit in to one group, and no matter how few friends you have that look like you do, life is not about belonging to one or two groups of people who talk the same junk and behave the same way. Life is about making the most of what you've been given and doing the most good with it for yourself and the people around you - no matter which group they belong to - in the short, short time you have alive.
