Colonize This!: Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism (25 page)

This is the real India,
they seem to say. As if poverty makes it more real. Something just ain’t right about the glorification of poverty by those who have a $1,200 airplane ticket in their hidden chest pouches. So that leaves the Indophiles with a very romantic perception of Indian culture. Few of these enlightened white men are aware of India’s complex history and social structures, nor are they familiar with the racist stereotypes, harassment and violence that Indians and other people of color face daily within the United States.

Dude, chill out . . . Indian people are interested in our sicko culture, so why can’t we learn all the beautiful things about theirs? It’s about sharing, not commodifying. You see, people say that to me all the time. Indians come here and are taking advantage of the motels and the tech companies. They love to listen to the Backstreet Boys and eat at McDonald’s. Why is it any less ethical to go to India and take bits of their culture and religion?
This is when my eyes go big and I start shouting about power and who’s got the power and how the wrong people are getting empowered, but nobody seems to get what I’m saying.

I don’t think that white men see themselves in a constant position of power. It’s just an equal exchange to them. They aren’t the ones that deal with discrimination, stereotypes and colonialism. It has never been an equal exchange. South Asian immigrants provided the technical and medical expertise the United States was begging for, particularly in the sixties and seventies and currently in the Silicon Valley. Americans benefit from highly trained professionals without having to spend money educating them. In most cases Indians leave their homeland and come to the United States to make a new life for themselves. Americans go to India to check it out. They’ve got that ticket in their chest pouch, remember? So the exchange is not equal at all.

Since this most recent obsession with India has begun, I can’t say that the lives of most Indians have improved. We have no greater political voice in the United States, even though all our gods and goddesses are in all the head shops and henna is sold at beauty salons everywhere. While we deal with the reality, the white men have chosen to deal with the fantasy. The fantasy of India. And that’s exactly what it is. Ask any nonresident Indian if the India they know is the same as the India the white men know. I guarantee the two experiences will be as paradoxical as chai in Orissa and chai in Oregon.

 

I called my mom the very next morning after that horrible evening of charades and asked her about my name. “It means ‘dream’ or ‘good dream,’ right?”

“Yes, it does.” Sigh of relief.

“It doesn’t mean ‘meditation,’ right?”

“Well, yes, it does.”

“What?!?!”

“It also can mean ‘emotion’ or ‘thought’ or ‘wish.’...”

“But, Mom, I want to know what it means exactly.”

“Dhiku,
your name means many things. It is very difficult to translate to English.” Right on, Mom. You heard it. Aw yeah. Another deeper sigh of relief.

Some things just can’t be translated.

 

 

Rebecca Hurdis

 

 

 

 

 

This essay isn’t just about an adopted, woman of color feminist; rather, it is a story about how I came to believe that I was worthy of all of these identities. It isn’t just a story about feminism or solely about adoption. It is an exploration of where the mind stops and the heart follows. It is too easy to distract myself with ideas about “deconstruction” and “critical analysis,” terms that lack the emotional depth to explain my experiences. The struggle is not to find one place where I can exist, but to find it within myself to exist in all of these places, uncompromisingly. To live a life of multiplicity is as difficult as it is to write about it.

All of my life I have been told the story of when my mother held me in her arms for the first time. It was late at night at the airport in Newark, New Jersey. My mother, father and two brothers, along with my grandparents and uncle, were all waiting in the terminal lounge for my plane to arrive from Seoul, Korea. There were other families also waiting for their new babies to be brought off the plane. My mother tells me that she watched in anticipation as all the escorts walked off of the plane with small bundles of Korean babies. Each time they walked toward her, they would pass by, giving the babies to other families. My family grew anxious and nervous as the flow of people exiting the plane grew sparse. My chaperone and I were the last to deplane. The woman walked toward my family and placed me in the arms of my mother. I was six months old. I clung to her, put my head on her shoulder, patted her back and called her “mother” in Korean. The year was 1975. The day was Mother’s Day.

Growing up in a transracial adopted family, I was often confused by the images of the “normal, nuclear families.” We didn’t look like any other family I saw. I couldn’t comprehend how I could love my family, feel accepted by them and believe that I belonged to them as much as my phenotypically white brothers. Yet every time I looked in the mirror, my reflection haunted me, because the face that stared back was not the same color as my family’s. This awareness was reinforced by the sometimes brutal questions of others. I constantly had to explain that I really was my brother’s sister. He was not my husband but truly my brother. I was not the foreign exchange student that just never left. Embarrassed by the attention, I tried to ignore the differences. I took the negativity and dissociation I felt and began to internalize the feelings. I fooled myself into thinking and acting the role of a “good little Asian saved from her fallen country and brought to the land of salvation.” I began to believe the messages about being an Asian girl and about being adopted. This compliance was one of the only ways I learned to gain acceptance and validation as a child. I realized that my identity was being created
for
me not by me.

When I was ten years old, we moved from a progressive city in Maryland to a small town in Connecticut. Aside from the infamous New England fall foliage, the only color I saw was white. I suppose it wasn’t such a radical change for the rest of my family, because they didn’t need the difference and diversity I required for spiritual survival. I quickly realized the key to acceptance was to not be too ethnic, or ethnic at all. To be accepted, I had to grasp and identify with whiteness, completely denying my Asian self. I spent my teenage years running away from myself and rebelling from the stereotype of the “good, cute little Asian.” The only images of Asian Americans that I saw came from the television. I accepted the misrepresentations as real and accurate because our town only had a few people of color to begin with. I always thought they were the exceptions to the stereotypes. We were the “fortunate ones” and we self-perpetuated the lies about ourselves and about our people.

I fooled myself into believing that life was so great. I was accepted and had all of the things that I thought made me just like everyone else, yet I couldn’t understand why I still carried around a sadness. I was playing out the script that had been given to me, yet I kept feeling as though I was in the wrong play. When I would talk to my friends about it, they wouldn’t and couldn’t understand. I was told that I was making too big a deal out of being Asian and besides I
was
just like everyone else. They thought that I just worried too much. My friends went so far as to convince me by telling me that “I wasn’t really Asian, I was white.” But the truth couldn’t be denied, just as the color of my skin couldn’t either. They thought that because we were friends they were entitled or allowed to nickname me “Chinky.” They tried to justify it by saying that it was only a joke. My boyfriends were ashamed that they had an Asian-American girlfriend. They assumed they had a right to physically, mentally and sexually abuse me because they thought they were doing me a favor by lowering their standards to be with a woman of color.

 

I came across feminism as a first-year student at Ohio State University. I was extremely depressed at the time. Everything—my created identity, the world of whiteness that I knew, the denial of my race—that I had worked so hard at repressing and ignoring throughout my life was finally surfacing and emerging. I no longer had the validation of whiteness to protect my false identity. The world that I had understood was changing, and I was confronted with defining myself without the associations of my family and friends. I was forced to step outside of my white world, shedding my blinders to find that I wasn’t white and that I had never really been so. The only illusion was the one that I had created for myself, the one that had found acceptance. But I was beginning to realize the cost of this facade.

Yes, I had a large circle of white friends and boyfriends throughout high school. Despite their acceptance, however, I was simultaneously cast as the other. I was undeniably Asian. I was the subject and the object. I was the china doll and the dragoness. The contradictions and the abuse confused me. How could my friends and boyfriends love me, yet in a heated argument spit out “chink” at me? How could they respect me, yet sing the song that had been popularized from the movie
Full Metal Jacket,
“Me So Horny?”

My first women’s studies course focused on the history of the women’s movement, the social context and the contemporary issues facing feminism today. We looked at issues ranging from violence to sexual orientation to women-centered spirituality to representation in music and film to body image. I began to recognize my extensive history of sexual, mental and physical abuse with boyfriends, and I started to comprehend the cycle of abuse and forgiveness. I was able to begin to stop blaming myself and shift the responsibility back to those who had inflicted the abuse. Initially I had disconnected the abuse from racism, even though it was heavily intertwined and simultaneous. It was just too large for me to understand, and it was still too early for me to grapple with race. I still was thinking that I just needed to become the “right” kind of Asian American and then everything would make sense.

I know that for a lot of women of color, feminism is perceived as being a white woman’s movement that has little space or acknowledgment for women of color. I understand how that is true, but back then this class became a catalyst for change and healing. It was a major turning point in my life, where I was able to break my silence and find empowerment within myself and for myself. Women’s studies offered me a place where there was validation and reason. I was uncovering and understanding how my own internalization was tied to ideologies of racism and sexism. Although the analysis of racism was somewhat limited in these courses, it served as a lead for future interests. Women’s studies and feminism was a steppingstone toward striving for a holistic understanding of myself.

Initially I identified my experiences as being part of a larger discourse and reality. I named the abuse and trauma of my past and could therefore heal from it. I proudly began calling myself a feminist. I viewed feminism broadly as the eradication of sexism, racism, ageism, ableism and heterosexism. It was a social and political commitment to a higher vision for society by resituating women from the margins into the center. I began recognizing and naming what I believed was sexism. The summer after my first women’s studies course, I returned home and wrote a dramatic letter to the Congregational church of which I was a member. I earnestly asked them to remove my name from their list because “I did not want to support or be affiliated with a patriarchal institution such as a Christian church.” I felt this act was a rite of passage, my initiation into the feminist movement.

But I left college feeling as though there was something missing to this feminism. Professors would talk about Black feminism or women of color feminism, but merely as another mark on their feminist timeline. Little time was dedicated to really examining the intersection of race and gender. Back home I went to my local new-age store (which also doubled as the feminist bookstore) and stumbled on
This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color
(edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa). It was the first time I had found a book that had the words “women of color” as part of the title. It was as if I had found the pot of gold at the end of the feminist rainbow. Even though I didn’t find myself completely represented in the book, specifically because none of the contributors had been an adopted child, I did find my thoughts, anger and pain represented through the eloquent voices of other women of color. Their writings incorporated race and sexuality.

Reading this anthology, I realized I was entitled to feeling something other than apologetic. I could be angry. I could be aggressive. I could be the opposite of this little china doll that everyone expected me to be. Given my background, this book was life-changing. It represented one of the first moments where I could claim something that was mine; something different from my parents, my friends, my community; something other than whiteness. I remember sitting at the town beach on a hot and humid August day, flipping through the book, my mind exploding and expanding. As I sat there frantically reading, I recall looking up at the sun, closing my eyes and thanking the goddess that I had found this work. Through this discovery I had found that I was not alone. Not only was I feminist, but I was a woman of color feminist.

What makes my relationship to women of color feminism different from most other women of color is how and why I entered the conversation. I began looking at race through gender, where most have the reverse experience. This idea of entry point is crucial. I call myself a woman of color before I call myself an Asian American. It reflects how I have come to see myself and how I understand my own identity. The term “women of color” seems broadly inviting and inclusive while “Asian American” feels rigid and exclusive. Women of color feminism took me from being a victim to being a warrior.

 

I am now in an ethnic studies graduate program trying to explore if women of color are within feminism’s third wave, and if so, where. I began this project as an undergraduate but I had hit a wall. It was difficult locating voices that represented generation X or third wave women of color feminism. Not much had been written, as our voices were just beginning to emerge. I found women of color feminists in alternative places such as zines, anthologies, magazines and pop culture. I felt frustrated that our voices were deemed not “accredited” enough to be represented in the mainstream.

I held a certain expectation for Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards’s book,
Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future.
This book markets itself as being the text for the third wave of feminism, and I had high hopes that it would address issues of race, gender and class sexuality. Instead, I found the specific history of white (privileged) women. This is a great book for the college white woman who has recently been inspired by feminism and wants to know about the past and how she should contribute for the future. Yet this history is complicated by the fact that the authors do not honestly acknowledge that this is their intention. Rather, they assert that this book is a history of all women, dropping the names of such women of color as Rebecca Walker and Audre Lorde.

I found it astounding that there is no extensive discussion of women of color feminism. This indicates that Baumgardner and Richards feel as though this is a separate issue, a different kind of feminism. It is as if their work is the master narrative of feminism, with women of color feminism as an appendage. I had hoped that they would have considered such books as
This Bridge Called My Back
and Audre Lorde’s
Sister Outsider
as groundbreaking, as they are deemed by most generation X women of color. These books were life-changing to me not only because their critiques have historical value, but also because what these writers were saying in the 1980s was still relevant in the 1990s.
Manifesta
is successful in creating momentum for young white women’s activism through the attempt to move feminism out of academia and back into a social and political movement. But the book’s greatest contribution was that it raised a need for creating a lineage for women of color feminism.

 

Is it possible to construct a feminist genealogy that maintains inclusivity? Does feminism still exist for women of color or is it just a “white thing?” Are generation X women of color participating in feminism? These questions propelled me to further think about the connections as well as the separations between women of color and feminism. In the exploration of the third wave of women of color feminism, I talked to several women of color professors and students at the University of California at Berkeley. Their responses and our conversations together were incredibly helpful. These women challenged me to further think about my own conceptions surrounding feminism.