Growing up I always felt different. Most of the time it was subconsciously, but every time I would be at a family function, I could feel eyes on me. When someone asked me what I "was" as if I were a thing... I felt like I didn't belong. Like I wasn't like everyone else.
My mother is an immigrant from Vietnam, crossing the border in 1985, three years before I popped out of her body. My father, of German descent, was born and raised in Philadelphia, later moving to New Jersey to get out of a city that was slowly crumbling. Many assume that my parents met in Vietnam during the war. My mother was in Nam during the war, and had encounters with GIs, and my father did serve, but secretly. Actually, they met in Southampton, Pennsylvania at the workplace.
So to make it easier for everyone, I'll just come out and say it: I'm a mutt. Sure, I've had friends who were halfies. Growing up in elementary school, I became good friends with a girl whose mother is white and whose father is black. Since then, I hadn't had a mixed friend...that is, until I started college. One of my best friends in school now is a Filipina-Italian-American. Her father, too, hails from Philadelphia.
But what I mean when I say I feel different is more family oriented. My mother's family sort of looked down on her for a while (some still do) for having relations with an American, let alone a WHITE American. Had he been a Vietnamese-American, they'd have been more lenient, and perhaps more accepting. Today, most of my mom's family enjoy my dad's company and often ask where he is when he doesn't show up to family functions. It could just be out of courtesy, but who knows?
Whenever I say that I'm only half, a relative of mine will correct me, saying, "No there are no halves. You are Vietnamese." I could persuade myself to believe that, but when I look in the mirror and see a girl that looks nothing like an Asian, I go right back to remembering, "Oh right, you're only HALF." There's nothing wrong with that, but it's the fact that I look nothing like my family members, and it kind of pains me. That every time they look my way while talking, I 'm afraid they're talking about me and how I'm not really one of them.
But the ice, formerly cracked by my mom, was finally broken by my older cousins - my oldest cousin Truc broke relations (more specifically an engagement) with her boyfriend and married a German (from Germany) that she had met on a business trip. She had one child with him who is now five or six-years-old. Our other cousin, Duc also took a chip off the block by marrying a girl of so-called Amish descent, so his two children (with a third on the way) are mixed. No longer did I feel like an outcast, and no longer could the family shun anyone for marrying outside of their race.
Today I am happy to say that my difference is no longer an issue. My 100% Asian friend sometimes teases both my mixed friend and I about only being half Asian, but it's all in good fun. Sometimes I feel awkward when I'm with family, but not as often as I used to. There is one thing I need to get used to, though... And that's with the fact that I look more Hispanic than I do mixed-Asian...and that's extremely odd. :P
