“We often feel that we lack something, and seem to see that very quality in someone else, promptly attributing all our own qualities to him too, and a kind of ideal contentment as well. And so the happy mortal is a model of complete perfection–which we have ourselves created.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther

After my dad died, my mom eventually sold the family home near Soquel and moved down the coast to San Luis Obispo.  The town’s local “polytechnic” university gives a sort of nerdy, upscale air to its student-rental trashiness.  The broader area also hosts a Japanese-American community established long before the internment camps of WWII.

During a recent trip down for some business regarding my mom’s estate, I met with an attorney who’d been assisting with some of its details.  Sitting down across from her, she gave me a rather long, drawn-out look.  “You remind me of a Russian supermodel.”

I must have telegraphed a tersely doubtful expression.

“No, really!” she insisted, continuing that I reminded her of Irina Pantaeva, before writing the name on a slip of paper and sliding it across the table.  “Look her up.”

I did…  Ms. Pantaeva is an ethnic Buryat-Mongol, born in the Buryat Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic in 1967.  That makes her just slightly older than myself… though apparently rather taller and thinner.  But after watching an interview, I’m going with it.

In the US, I think I’m considered an ethnic “Asian” (whatever that means)…
at least according to the box I’m supposed to check on official documents.  In Japan, I might be described informally as “hafu”, the expression referring to those of mixed Japanese and foreign (generally non-Asiatic) ancestry.

Regardless, I don’t think either most Americans or Japanese really see the amalgamation in my hafu-face.  My mom had the kind of Asian-like European visage of a young Sophie Marceau, and that seems to have combined with my dad’s Japanese features to have produced an evidently ambiguous “Asian” appearance.

“Hafu” isn’t considered a derisive in Japan. In fact, during my last trip to the country, I noticed an article aimed at a somewhat younger audience discussing “hafu envy”.  Just as in many other cultures, some, especially younger Japanese associate “beauty” with what might be considered exotic features among an otherwise relatively monotonous sea of Asiatic facial characteristics.

Regardless, the unvarnished facts of Japanese origins is itself rather an amalgamation.  Paleolithic “Jomon” and later “Yayoy” peoples, combined with more recent additions of ethnic Koreans and Chinese all contribute to a wide variation in facial characteristics throughout the country.  Nowadays, most contemporary Japanese aren’t particularly sensitive to appearance-related ethnic differences, and it’s not even considered in census data.

So aside from apparently looking Buryat-Mongol, most people in Japan will address me in Japanese. But I’ve also been the recipient of some spontaneous Korean while in Korea, and Chinese (I think) of an unknown dialect while in Taiwan.  Attending a nearby Native American gathering with a friend, someone even inquired which Nation I was from.  But mostly, I seem to be addressed in what I consider to be my native language of American English.

My apparently “Non-Hispanic, White-Anglo” (whatever that is) husband’s attitude is merely that we’re all guests in each other’s crowded world, and so we have to be both tolerant and respectful of bumping into one another. Sometimes that means accepting a little discomfort, and at other times knowing how to adapt.

At a tiny, rural-Japanese eatery that mostly served the local fishermen from a town on the outskirts of the Bōsō Peninsula, my husband carefully picked the last grains of rice from a bowl of fisherman’s stew. The woman who served us said to me that it was the first time she’d ever seen an American show respect for his food.

Back in the US, my husband and a friend went for an overnight ski trip through some local mountains. Late the next day, after driving my husband’s car to a meeting at the state capitol, I picked them up at a trailhead.  Heading home, a police officer drew alongside for a moment.  Sure enough, he pulled us over.

The officer moved along the car cautiously, and in the rear-view I could see a hand covering his firearm as he examined the skis and packs laying in the back. Regardless, the whole stop only took about a minute before he sent us on our way. Supposedly, he’d had trouble seeing a dirty registration tag on the license-plate, but it had come up okay on his computer just after we stopped.

A small, nicely-dressed Asian woman driving a car registered to a male, and with two scruffy-looking men as passengers. “Discrimination?”… perhaps.  But I understood; and it was actually a little reassuring.

Americans used to call it “prejudice”, referring to the ignorant judgment of character or the nature of a situation based on superficial characteristics, such as one’s outward appearance. But somewhere along the way, the term was replaced with the appellative of “discrimination”, the word loaded with the implication of harm based in the vagaries ethnicity and race.

Of course, where any form of discrimination excuses harm, it’s a basic obligation of society to address that harm.  But much of the current American fixation seems to have emerged from the narrative implied by those boxes into which we are checked.  Defining ourselves by our most superficial yet unalterable of characteristics resigns anything else as forever, irreconcilably, contrary… even a police officer simply endeavoring to make certain that everything is okay.  It’s an at best futile recoil into pack mentality.

The laws of a just nation should protect everyone.  But it’s mere self-deceit to conceive of some force that will bend others’ attitudes to make how we feel about ourselves more comfortable.  Self-determination requires both tolerance and adaptation, as well as perhaps the patience to pick out those last grains of rice… even if you happen to look like an over-privileged American,
or a Buryat-Mongol supermodel.