Aren't we colored, after all.

Race. Ethnicity. Jokes. Slurs. Affirmative action. Interracial relationships. You can’t avoid it. Sooner or later, you’ll step on someone’s toes and someone will step on yours. Do you become profusely apologetic for the rest of your life? Plead the 5th and live your life in ignorance? Where is the line? Is there a line at all?

I walked in on an interesting lunch conversation today. Ruchi, who is Indian, was questioning the political correctness of a current campaign we are designing for a restaurant chain called Oriental Wok. (One could argue that the name itself stirs dissent.) Andrea, who is white, was hyperventilating at the mere thought that their smart campaign might step on racial toes and frantically paced the floor defending her work and the campaign. The campaign sought to poke fun specifically at Caucasians who tattooed themselves with Chinese symbols without knowing the real meaning and also sought to meld Eastern stereotypes into the mix. One of the headlines read something like, “You are as ugly as arranged marriage.”

Frankly, I didn’t think the lines made much sense and took too much thought, but surely the issue of race and racial lines hit the heart of many. As a first generation Chinese American woman, I have a lot to say about this.

A temporary salve, childhood kept me innocent and unaware of racial lines. I was born in Georgia with parents who grew up in Taiwan – another world, another generation apart. Mandarin was my first language, but I had to learn English to go to school. I grew up here in Cincinnati. Despite going to a Chinese church, I grew accustomed to being around Caucasians all the time. To this day, I am more attracted to Caucasian males than any other ethnicity. (I am also uncomfortable around large groups of Asians. Weird, huh?)

Then puberty hit. And oh no – suddenly I was sucked into a whirlwind of an identity crisis. I wanted to be pretty, popular, and accepted. The first time I put on a sleeveless shirt, my mother gasped in horror because she could see the outline of my bra. I was marched upstairs to undress. I was smart, clumsy, and laughed at by the boys. Oh how I envied the popular girls…too dumb to spell their own name, but they had the guys tripping over themselves. I attributed their popularity to the fact that they were white, and it would be years before I stopped wishing for big blue eyes.

In high school, some boys at the Chinese church wore bracelets engraved with the word “Chigger”, a combination of the words “chink” and “nigger”. They defended themselves, saying that it’s okay to make fun of your own race, you just can’t make fun of another race. Was that true? I didn’t know, but I was horrified.

Over the years, girls would tell me to be happy that I’m Chinese. “The boys want you more,” they’d say. “You’re different. You’re exotic.” Was that a good thing? Should I be happy that a lot of men have Asian fetishes or should I be angry because I’m treated differently? In the same way, should I be happy that affirmative action helped me get into college or should I be angry that I’ll never know if my academics could have pulled that weight?

One of my greatest pet peeves is people who think that, just because I’m Chinese, I can’t be American. They don’t recognize the difference between nationality and ethnicity.

I’ll never forget the day Jason and I sat down to have dinner with his best friend Joe and Joe’s parents. A lover of sauce, I was drowning my steak in BBQ sauce and praising it. Rose, Joe’s mother, remarked, “Oh honey, you’ve never heard of this sauce before? Don’t worry, I think it’s an American thing.”

You could have cut the silence with a knife. “Moooom!” Joe whispered. “She IS American.”

It wasn’t the first time something like that’s happened, and it certainly won’t be the last. Take your pick – kids pulling at the corners of their eyes, playing “Chinese fire drill” on the roads (we never invented that, btw), guys hitting on me because they have an “Asian thing”, butchering my last name, asking me “Where are you from? No, where are you REALLY from?”, friends trying to “kung fu” me, the people who see Jason and I as an interracial couple before they see anything else.

Years back there was a national outcry and debate about who, if anyone, could say the word “nigger”. The topic resurfaced when Eminem became popular. And then there was that one politician who mistakenly said the word…what was it…”niggardly”?…in a speech.

I will end this post by saying that Jason, bless his heart, surprised me when he told me that my ethnicity played no part in his attraction to me. Between the two of us, I am probably the more discriminatory, since I have an affinity towards white men.

A few months ago, we were serving in the children’s ministry and sat down with our kids to listen to the children’s leader give a lesson on acceptance. “You should love everyone, even those different from you. Like, take the Orientals for example. They may be different from me, but I still accept and love them,” he preached.

My mouth hung open in a soundless surprise. Jason, equally stunned, fought the urge to laugh. Here was a white man teaching a room full of white children a lesson on acceptance by using an example about Orientals. And I was the only Asian (and minority, for that matter) in the room. To this day, Jason calls me an “Oriental” in a redneck drawl as an inside joke.

So what do you think? What is your racial story? Are there lines to be drawn? If so, where?