College Advice: Why Does My Interracial Relationship Make Me Uneasy Sometimes?

Dear Double-V One-M,

I am Asian, and my boyfriend is Jewish. I am very happy about this for the most part, as I firmly believe that genetic diversity means good babies. However, interracial coupling does lead to some awkward moments. When we visit his predominantly white hometown, I often find myself the uneasy colored person. The worst instance was when we were at a packed Chinese restaurant, and the only other nonwhite person in the room was the waiter. I don’t know why this makes me feel so weird all of a sudden. I’ve never been particularly sensitive to this. Heck, sometimes I forget I’m not white. Where does this come from? Do you think this unease represents a greater divide in our relationship? WHAT DOES IT MEAN?

- Malaise-ian

Dear One M,

I spent a lot of time thinking about your letter when I received it. It’s not the kind of letter you can answer directly: there’s no easy or correct way to think about your racial identity or your boyfriend’s, and even if I offered you one, you’d have no incentive to take or trust my advice. The best I can do, I think, is start with my own experience, and try to frame the problem in new terms for you, in hopes that having another perspective will help you understand your own.

I’m half Mexican, but I grew up in New York, and like you, I often forget that I’m not white. (I look pretty white – more so than my sister and cousins.) Anyway, a couple of months ago, my boyfriend and I ordered take-out from an Italian restaurant he’d been going to for years. While we were waiting for our order, he started chatting with the host in Italian, which I can usually understand but don’t speak. Having nothing else to do, I set about trying to decipher their conversation, and in a few minutes I was so involved that I barely noticed the busboy with our food until he dropped the plastic bag in my hands.

“It’s yours, right?” he said, and I looked up at him. He was a dark Mexican man, about forty, with a youthful face bearing the unmistakable indio features I recognized so well from my mother and her family — a strong jaw, curving nose, square forehead, dark eyes – features I saw, though diluted, in myself. I noticed suddenly that while the host and waitstaff were all Italian, the kitchen workers were mostly Mexican. “Yeah,” I said. “Thank you.”

I couldn’t think of anything to say after that, and in the brief silence, I realized that I felt guilty, somehow, although I didn’t know why. Our eyes met for a tense moment. His gaze was unwavering and I was sure he knew what I was thinking, that he was accusing me with his glance — but before I had a chance to respond, or even look away, my boyfriend took the bag from my frozen hand and said, “Thanks, man. Ciao!” and we paid and left.

Later, after we’d cleared our plates, the Yankees had won something or another, and the dishes were almost done, I tried to figure out why I still felt so uneasy about the incident. I realized that what made me most uncomfortable wasn’t that I’d noticed that he was Mexican, but that I’d forgotten that I was, too — at that moment, I was just someone’s date, someone from out of town, someone hungry and tired.

Once I noticed that, it felt like a betrayal, because it’s a luxury, as an ethnic minority, to be able to forget your race, and it’s a luxury that the generation before ours never had. By forgetting my own race, I felt that I had forgotten the plight of those before me who hadn’t been able to forget.

After I’d spelled out my discomfort, it seemed laughable; what was I supposed to do, be guilty all the time? Feel out of place everywhere? Ironically, to my Mexican family members, I’m as white as they come, having learned Spanish in high school with the rest of my class (and mostly from a sarcastic ex-acrobat from Japan). I grew up in New York, I’ve never attended a quinceañera, and I can’t even eat salsa or chiles. But that, too, is part of the unique problem of children and grandchildren of immigrants: we’re caught between remembering our family’s unusual origins and purposefully forgetting them in order to focus on differences that matter more — and there’s no one to tell us how to do it. Even our own families often aren’t clear about the extent to which they expect us to retain our ancestors’ cultures and to what extent we’re supposed to adopt American ideas.

Still, we’re among the first generations who’ve had the advantage of being able to choose. Lonely as that choice can be, I think it’s worth the angst, you know?

-VVM

Send your questions about college life anonymously to VeronicaMittnacht@thefastertimes.com