What Are You?

This question always used to stump me as a kid. I asked my parents again and again, but I always got more than I'd bargained for. My ancestors seemed to have come from every nation in Europe and a few others besides, so it took them ages to finish answering the question. "Lots of stuff," I used to tell people who wanted to know, citing a few of the more interesting examples. I always used to envy the people who could give one answer, like 'Dutch' or 'Pakistani.'

Once I moved to Japan, however, I was American, pure and simple. Never mind the fact that for many Japanese people, American meant Caucasian and all too often Caucasian was another way of saying American; most people didn't even ask me what I was because they felt they already knew. And in case I was ever in danger of forgetting, there was always someone eager to remind me, especially late at night on the trains when people had been drinking more than they should. I found this unsettling. All my life I had felt quite neutral -- as though my nationality or ethnic origin were hardly even there. Now all of a sudden, I couldn't get away from it. It followed me out of bed in the morning, sat on my shoulder and whispered in my ear.

In a sea of generally black-haired people, I stood out: a little taller, a little larger, my facial features more pointed, my hair more wavy and far lighter. In the part of Japan where I lived, you could go for months without seeing another obviously non-Japanese person. After a month, catching sight of myself in the station mirrors became a nasty shock. Good God, is that me? No wonder people are staring!

The more I felt myself defined by my outward appearance, the more keenly I began to feel for every ethnic minority in the world. I remembered the Egyptian boy who joined my third grade class and how he used to sit watching the others play, desperate to join in but not knowing quite how to do it. The handful of African-American students who suddenly appeared in our largely white elementary school one year; how annoyed one of the girls got when someone asked her what color her blood was. The three American-born Hispanic kids in an all-white high school biology class, how patiently they smiled when well-meaning people asked them questions about Mexico and pestered them with random phrases they had learned in Spanish. Dark-skinned people in the Midwestern States, Indians in Africa, Africans in Finland -- I couldn't get enough of reading about how they coped as minorities, what their experiences had been, and how they had handled their frustrations, their feelings of alienation and differentness. I was willing to bet that they would hardly feel different at all if the people around them weren't so eager to point it out.

After a little over two years in Japan, I went back to the States and suddenly felt my new identity disappear overnight. I was neutral again; all around me conversations were taking place in English and no one batted an eye when I walked past. No one whispered that I was foreign; no one asked me how they did things in my country, how they said things in my language. No longer was I called upon to be both spokesperson and de facto goodwill ambassador for every sorry Caucasian on the planet. The relief was so great I could have wept.

And yet, here is the weird thing: I felt different. Completely different.

For the next few weeks, I moved around almost as though in a dream, considering from a distance those members of my new/old in-group: Caucasians. Redheads, tow-heads, small and large, tall and short, rednecks and Republicans, hippies, liberals, conservatives and communists, members of the Aryan Nation and tree-huggers. They -- we -- were all as different as chalk and cheese and yet for two years all of us had been lumped into one group! It was mind boggling.

Now I live in a small town in Scotland. We have little ethnic diversity here. There are a handful of ethnic Chinese, most of whom operate restaurants, a Scot of Pakistani origin who lives here with his many brothers, a family from Nepal who run a gardening center, and the odd tourist. I hate the fact that I notice their outward differences. I hate the fact that a lot of people mix up the Nepalese man, who is in his forties, with the vastly younger, thinner, lighter man who runs the Chinese restaurant. I cringe inside whenever I hear people talking in loud, patient tones to the restaurant-owner's children, all of whom were born here and happen to speak with Glaswegian accents.

Because I know how much we all have in common.