San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Pair of mixed-race daughters reflect changing face of the new America
My mother used to say she wanted to couple with a man of every color. A doctor, she felt cross-breeding strengthened genetics.
She didn’t succeed, producing two Caucasians with dirty-blond hair and blue eyes. We’re half-Russian, quarterScots-Canadian, a pinch Corsican, so we’re probably not “European” enough to get an invitation to be alt-white Americans.
My husband is the most honest, most compassionate, most charming American I know. When I met him, I admit I had to rethink Prince Charming. In my mind’s eye, I had pictured someone who looked like me. But every prince I met that looked like me wasn’t charming at all.
I married a Japanese American. I soon discovered he was much more American than I. His family’s been here longer, loves baseball, no longer speaks Japanese, owns homes and businesses. His cousins are doctors, sheriffs, FedEx drivers, florists, engineers. Even though America made his aunts and uncles live behind walls for four years, his father went to Europe to liberate the death camps. So why must we still call him “Japanese American”? Nobody calls me Russian American.
My brother married an Iranian American. Thirty-four years ago, her family escaped bad political juju in Iran by crossing the mountains on horseback, just like the von Trapps crossed the Alps singing at the top of their rebellious lungs. In Iran, they were artists, professors, doctors, lawyers, entrepreneurs. Here they settled in cities and suburbs, and she went to college.
As far as I know, my sister-in-law doesn’t identify as any of the many religions with ancient roots that blended in Iran thousands of years before Betsy Ross stitched those stars and stripes, but she does still identify as an “Iranian American.” The first time she felt simply “American,” she says, was the day Barack Obama was elected president.
She has a daughter, and I have two; and my blue-eyed mother now has three brown-eyed granddaughters, ages 6 to 24. They don’t look much like the lady doctor, but the square chin, the long toe, the brains and the balls are all there in one form or another.
Yes, balls. It took balls to go to MIT at age 16, among the first women ever admitted as freshmen, and bigger balls to choose medicine as a profession in the 1950s. My mother’s tall, but the glass ceiling was pretty high back then. She wore suits, hairspray and heels to work with her white coat.
Her granddaughters are all white enough to pass. Three beautiful girls with dark hair, patchy skin, open minds, and no patience with dumb blonds of any sex. They belong to a proud community of mixed-race Americans that doesn’t spend a lot of time tooting their own horn. If you saw them in the street, you might think Italian, Spanish, Egyptian, Hawaiian, but it would be better if you simply thought American. And hold the catcalls. We’re all past that, aren’t we?
As an American woman and mother of women, I’m worried. Marching women and #MeToo are a start, but we’re still in the hands of a bunch of backward boys who want to put us back in flowery aprons and black-lace corsets and take away birth control. I’m mortified that my daughters have to hear so much racism, sexism, evangelism and capitalism passed off as what makes America great.
What was great about America was the mix-up, the blending, the good intentions and legal protections of boundless, color-blind, unisex liberty and justice for all. We found a way to run the country, not rape it, and we need to find it again.
My mother, the doctor, isn’t holding her breath. She wants her blue-eyed offspring and brown-eyed grand-girls to move to Canada. But she raised us to dream, fight, work, experiment, help not hurt. So we must stay and be those Americans of many stripes. We must show, not tell, as they say in writing class. Greatness isn’t a color or a sex or a faith or the almighty dollar. It’s the better part of human.
Ariel Rubissow Okamoto is an essayist and environmental writer who lives in San Francisco. To comment, submit your letter to the editor at SFChronicle.com/ letters.