(no subject)
E came back from her weekend at my brother's house saying, "Your brother is a nut." This isn't a new piece of information, and it continued to be old news as she gave me more detail. "He kept following me around all day, (she was there to build a fence and do other fix-it chores) going on and on (my brother talks incessantly) about this crazy thing he made up (my brother is known for his elaborate ridiculous theories) called the Hapa Meter."
The Hapa Meter. Just another one of my brother's crazy conceptions, the kind of thing most people only wax on about when they are drinking with a lot of their friends but my brother spouts constantly.
My brother's wife looks generically like E - a big tall redhead. When they were pregnant with their oldest, E said that when the baby was born it would be the closest thing we would ever see to a child that she and I might have together biologically. My nephew M looks so much like R that they have been mistaken for siblings. Now they have twin baby girls. One looks a lot like M and R. The other baby, L, has blue eyes and red hair. My brother threatened to go on Jerry Springer to claim that he wasn't L's father, but he was the father of her twin sister. (Later, one of their friends called to say that they had to turn on Jerry Springer right now because there was a guy claiming to be the father of only one of a set of twins. For real.)
My brother goes on and on about how he can't possibly be L's father, even as he gets up with her in the middle of the night. What he means is that he can't believe he has a little white baby.
Fifteen years ago, before I had children, a work colleague said the same thing to me: I can't believe I have a little white baby. She was half white and half Asian, too, and married to a white guy and they'd just had a baby. When I was getting pregnant with B we tried mostly Asian sperm because I could not bear the idea of having a white baby.
This is one of the catches of being mixed race: you probably won't have a baby who looks like you. There are the rare couples like the family at B's school where both parents are mixed Black and white. For the most part, mixed race adults don't marry other adults of the exact same mix just because it's so statistically unlikely to meet and fall in love with someone like you.
There's the reverse: my Japanese-American uncle and his Japanese wife adopted two girls from China. They look like they are a family with the same ethnic origin. Nobody looks at them and thinks that the parents aren't the same thing as the kids. In fact, the girls look nothing alike because they are from different parts of China. However, my uncle (who is just as much of a joker as my brother) does not go around making jokes about how he's going to go on Jerry Springer.
So my brother wants to make the Hapa Meter which would record how much everyone looks white or Japanese relative to how much they actually are white or Japanese. He's going to put L at a negative 8, E reports. And then he's going to make a website where people can look at pictures of hapa kids and guess how white or Japanese they are.
It sounds like a drinking game to me. It also sounds like my brother and I have the same misconception about ourselves. I think I look Japanese-American even though I know I don't. My brother and I grew up in an extended family where everyone around us was Japanese-American. It was natural for us to think that we look like everyone else in this family we fit into. My parents did a great job teaching me and my brother how to be mixed race. We strongly identify with all of our cultural and religious heritages. We don't feel less Jewish because we are also Japanese-American or vice versa.
This thing about how our kids look, though, is a hard one. I want to look at my children and see something I recognize. If R looked like L, blue eyes and red hair, it would shock me in the same way I think it shocks my brother. I would feel like there was something essential about myself I had failed to pass along to my children. The killer is, though, that if they look like little white babies or if they look like little mixed babies it is only the smallest measure of who we teach them to be. It's so much harder to build up their identities with religious practice, family holidays, cultural specifics. Those things are also more important and significant than how they look.
Still, as much as my brother jokes about it, I know that it kills some small part of him that nobody is ever going to pick his daughter out of a crowd as the little Japanese girl.
The Hapa Meter. Just another one of my brother's crazy conceptions, the kind of thing most people only wax on about when they are drinking with a lot of their friends but my brother spouts constantly.
My brother's wife looks generically like E - a big tall redhead. When they were pregnant with their oldest, E said that when the baby was born it would be the closest thing we would ever see to a child that she and I might have together biologically. My nephew M looks so much like R that they have been mistaken for siblings. Now they have twin baby girls. One looks a lot like M and R. The other baby, L, has blue eyes and red hair. My brother threatened to go on Jerry Springer to claim that he wasn't L's father, but he was the father of her twin sister. (Later, one of their friends called to say that they had to turn on Jerry Springer right now because there was a guy claiming to be the father of only one of a set of twins. For real.)
My brother goes on and on about how he can't possibly be L's father, even as he gets up with her in the middle of the night. What he means is that he can't believe he has a little white baby.
Fifteen years ago, before I had children, a work colleague said the same thing to me: I can't believe I have a little white baby. She was half white and half Asian, too, and married to a white guy and they'd just had a baby. When I was getting pregnant with B we tried mostly Asian sperm because I could not bear the idea of having a white baby.
This is one of the catches of being mixed race: you probably won't have a baby who looks like you. There are the rare couples like the family at B's school where both parents are mixed Black and white. For the most part, mixed race adults don't marry other adults of the exact same mix just because it's so statistically unlikely to meet and fall in love with someone like you.
There's the reverse: my Japanese-American uncle and his Japanese wife adopted two girls from China. They look like they are a family with the same ethnic origin. Nobody looks at them and thinks that the parents aren't the same thing as the kids. In fact, the girls look nothing alike because they are from different parts of China. However, my uncle (who is just as much of a joker as my brother) does not go around making jokes about how he's going to go on Jerry Springer.
So my brother wants to make the Hapa Meter which would record how much everyone looks white or Japanese relative to how much they actually are white or Japanese. He's going to put L at a negative 8, E reports. And then he's going to make a website where people can look at pictures of hapa kids and guess how white or Japanese they are.
It sounds like a drinking game to me. It also sounds like my brother and I have the same misconception about ourselves. I think I look Japanese-American even though I know I don't. My brother and I grew up in an extended family where everyone around us was Japanese-American. It was natural for us to think that we look like everyone else in this family we fit into. My parents did a great job teaching me and my brother how to be mixed race. We strongly identify with all of our cultural and religious heritages. We don't feel less Jewish because we are also Japanese-American or vice versa.
This thing about how our kids look, though, is a hard one. I want to look at my children and see something I recognize. If R looked like L, blue eyes and red hair, it would shock me in the same way I think it shocks my brother. I would feel like there was something essential about myself I had failed to pass along to my children. The killer is, though, that if they look like little white babies or if they look like little mixed babies it is only the smallest measure of who we teach them to be. It's so much harder to build up their identities with religious practice, family holidays, cultural specifics. Those things are also more important and significant than how they look.
Still, as much as my brother jokes about it, I know that it kills some small part of him that nobody is ever going to pick his daughter out of a crowd as the little Japanese girl.