On Being an Outsider

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/29/well/family/on-being-an-outsider.html

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Before I had any children of my own, I spent a decade and a half living in places where I was an outsider. While I never lost the feeling of estrangement that comes from missing basic cultural cues, for me this was a period of great liberation. I loved the freedom that being a stranger gave me. I loved the fact that people were unable to “place” me and that I was also largely free of preconceptions about them.

This experience was only amplified when I met and married my husband. I had grown up in Boston in a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant family. He was a Maori from New Zealand, and when we married we both became members of communities we knew little about. This, too, had its challenges, but we both experienced it primarily as an opportunity to learn — and be — something new.

When we began having children — three boys in seven years — I was excited by the idea that our kids were going to have a complex identity. It would begin simply with the way they looked. My husband is dark, I am fair, our children are a range of in-between. They all have dark eyes, dark hair, neither curly nor straight, and skin that is light in winter and goes brown quickly in the sun. Ethnically speaking, they are quite difficult to place; over the years they have been mistaken for Latino, Iranian, Turkish, Pakistani, half-Korean, half-Japanese.

I loved the idea that our children were ethnically ambiguous. I saw this as their passport to freedom and viewed our boys as citizens of the world. I wasn’t sure how long it would take them to understand it, but I was confident that the rich complexity of their ancestry would become apparent to them in time. It never crossed my mind that it could be anything other than a bonus.

It helped that early in our married life we lived for a time in Honolulu. Hawaii is an unusual place, demographically speaking. The population is European, Japanese, Hawaiian, Filipino — there is no ethnic majority, and nearly a quarter of the people who live there identify as “hapa,” meaning that they belong to two or more different groups. Hawaii was a comfortable place for us as a family. Our friends were Indonesian, half-Chinese, Pakeha New Zealander; it seemed as though everyone we knew was either some kind of mixture or came from someplace else.

Our three sons are now grown, and it recently occurred to me to ask about their experience of being hapa. Some of what they told me came as a surprise.

One of my sons described his childhood in terms of being “culturally unmoored.” “We were like expats,” he said, which, in fact, we were for much of his early life.

But it was a feeling that stuck, even after we moved back to live with my family in Boston. He always felt that we were different from the people around us, an experience he likened to being “not quite a native speaker.”

He conceded that being different was in some ways an asset, in that people were interested in him, but also that “it makes the game harder.” When you’re different, he said, you stand out, regardless of whether you want to or not. “Not everyone is suited to it,” he observed.

This was certainly the case for another of my sons. “From the first day of school,” he told me, “I felt different from my classmates.” He described this as a “slightly bad feeling” and said he’d been bullied, something he’d never told me before. For him, difference was not an advantage, it was a burden, and his looks, which are somewhat exotic, were “a card you could play but don’t really want to.” He, too, acknowledged that this exoticism could be an asset, but it was not one he had ever wanted and the price he’d had to pay for it was steep.

My third son had an entirely different take. By the time he was in middle school, he told me, he had recognized that being unusual gave him a social advantage. “I knew it was something that was cool,” he said. He told me that he got a kick out of the fact that people couldn’t pronounce his surname (something that caused his brother endless misery) and observed that the social cred effect had only increased with age.

Despite having grown up in the same family and sharing almost everything in their lives, my sons had very different accounts of what growing up hapa had been like.

At least part of the reason is that they themselves have different strengths and weaknesses, different instincts, different tastes. One’s shyness is a disadvantage in this context, another’s gregariousness is a plus. Birth order also plays a role; it’s harder to be first than third. But of my three sons, only one had enjoyed the unadulterated pleasure at being “difficult to place” that I had so confidently envisioned for them.

I’m kind of amazed at how wrong I got this. I had loved being out of my element, but I had been a grown-up. I had chosen the experience of estrangement, I had traveled on my own to the far side of the world. They, on the other hand, had been children. They had never had any choice in the matter; being different was something that had been foisted upon them.

It’s such an obvious distinction that I wonder now how I failed to see it. Perhaps the answer lies in the way we, as parents, project ourselves onto our children. We forget that they are not us and that their experiences are not ours and that the world they inhabit is different from the one in which we grew up.

They will, however, have other experiences, many of which will have to do with the way the world is changing around them. Hapa kids belong to one of the fastest growing segments of the American population. The percentage of people with mixed ancestry, now estimated at about 7 percent of the population, is expected to triple in the next 30 years.

I asked my sons whether they had any sense of belonging to this broader hapa community. One of them said that, in his experience, people who are half one thing and half another tend to identify one another. “It’s kind of tribal,” he said. “Like trading business cards.”

This made me curious about how strong the bond between members of this new tribe might be. He thought about this for a moment.

“About as strong as that between, say, Toyota owners,” he ventured — a group to which, I should point out, both he and I belong.

Christina Thompson is the author of “Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia” and editor of Harvard Review.