Legal Alien – Pat Mora
Bi-lingual, Bi-cultural,
able to slip from “How’s life?”
to “Me ‘stan volviendo loca,”
able to sit in a paneled office
drafting memos in smooth English,
able to order in fluent Spanish
at a Mexican restaurant,
American but hyphenated,
viewed by Anglos as perhaps exotic,
perhaps inferior, definitely different,
viewed by Mexicans as alien,
(their eyes say, “You may speak
Spanish but you’re not like me”)
an American to Mexicans
a Mexican to Americans
a handy token
sliding back and forth
between the fringes of both worlds
by smiling
by masking the discomfort
of being pre-judged
Bi-laterally.
If you haven’t met me before, allow me to describe myself. I have chestnut brown hair, hazel eyes, light skin and freckles. Essentially, I look white. But at least half of me, my mother’s half, the half that grew up in Saigon, the half that eats eggs with nước tương and drinks whiskey with trà đá, is very much Vietnamese.
At school, once a year, everyone was invited to abandon their bland white and beige uniforms, and come in wearing something that expressed their national identity. While some went all out and came in their traditional dress, like a hanbok or kebaya, others simply put on a red t-shirt with a yellow star, or put on a baseball cap and called it American. Regardless of how much effort they put in, it was a day that everyone looked forward to.
One year, I decided that I wanted to be Welsh, so I got a big white t-shirt out of my closet and took to Google Translate to help me colour it in Welsh words. At the time, it made sense, I didn’t speak a lick of Welsh or know the first thing about Welsh culture, but my grandmother was Welsh, and Jones is a Welsh surname, so why not. It was a pretty shabby costume as you can probably imagine, but no one questioned it, or the idea that I was Welsh.
On my last International Day, I wore an áo dài to school. I felt good about it, I’d grown up there, with a Vietnamese mother, and I felt if I truly was anything, it was Vietnamese, and I was proud to be. Or at least I was, until I was met with weird looks and guttural laughs from a fair few Vietnamese people. Then, and many other moments, I wished that I didn’t look so… white.
Everyday, I took any opportunity I could to speak Vietnamese, whether it was to the lady taking my order, or the man driving me home, and with every conversation I had, the more I felt like my Vietnamese identity was at least valid. To me, there was almost no better feeling than hearing the words “Ủa, chị là người Việt hả?” It felt like a confirmation, that behind my light skin and freckles, someone still recognised that I was Vietnamese, even if it wasn’t their first impression.
One day, the Grab driver taking me home was commenting on how fluently I spoke, to which I replied “Em là người Việt”, but he corrected me, saying I was in fact a “người Việt lai.” I’d never heard the term before, but it instantly brought me an overwhelming sense of peace. No longer caught between the binary of being either a người Việt or người nước ngoài, pushing as hard as I could to be interpreted as the former, I felt like I could exist in between and still belong in Vietnamese society. But of course, the feeling was fleeting, and my struggle with my mixed race identity did not end there.
In England, as white passing, I blend right in. Over the years I even picked up a relatively authentic British accent, God forbid someone thought I was American. So, until told otherwise, I was just another British girl, except I really wasn’t, and my Vietnameseness remained unseen, unneeded, irrelevant. Truthfully, I felt something like an undercover alien, lost.
In somewhat of a soul-searching mission, I recently embarked on a semester abroad in Australia, where I was surprised to find out what multiculturalism really looks like. Walking down King Street, one could buy gỏi cuốn from the nearest supermarket, and choose from about 6 different Vietnamese restaurants in a 1 mile radius. My friend and I could walk 3 minutes down the road and order food in Vietnamese, and for a moment it felt like home. Or at least a home away from home.
But even there, I still felt insecure in my identity. When asked, if I told someone I was from Vietnam and England, a lot of people ignored that I’d even said Vietnam, and just asked me more about England. If I just said Vietnam, it often confused them, unsure if I was joking, or just strange. But there, spending time with friends from Saigon, joking in Vietnamese, talking about the culture in which we grew up in, and how it was still vastly different to the culture that surrounded us, it allowed me to acknowledge, express and appreciate the duality within my identity.
In La conciencia de la mestiza: Towards a New Consciousness, Anzaldúa explains how the mestiza lives “in a constant state of nepantilism, an Aztec word meaning torn between ways” or in-between-ness. We get clashing messages from often incompatible cultural frames of reference, and it can make us restless, insecure and indecisive.
In an interview for The University of Arizona Poetry Center, Anzaldúa defines the ‘new Mestiza’ as “a kind of border woman who is able to negotiate between different cultures and cross over from one to the other and therefore has a perspective of all those different worlds that someone who is mono-cultural cannot have.” Being able to jump from one language to another, one set of social rules to another, is not so much of a talent, so much as it is a necessary adaptation.
You’d think it would be confusing, but with every time I jumped back and forth between English and Vietnamese it felt like I was threading the two halves of me together, mending a void that had grown larger and larger with every month I’d spent in England.
As I write this, I’m home, in Saigon, and I feel… whole. I hate to be that gal, but yes, I went abroad for a few months and found myself, as horrendously cliché as that sounds. I doubt I’ll still feel this secure in a couple of months when I’m back in England, but for now, I feel like I’m exactly the person I’m supposed to be, and I like her, she’s pretty cool.
This post serves as an introduction to what I hope will be followed by many more stories about the mixed race/bi-cultural experience. Some of my own, but also those of others, as they are in no way all the same. I will say none of them are easy, in fact they can be quite difficult, and even traumatic. But I would like to believe there are commonalities in our experiences, and things we can learn from each other and be inspired by in the different ways in which we cope, heal, and prevail, stronger.
SOURCES
Anzaldua, G. (1990) ‘La Conciencia de la Mestiza: Towards a New Consciousness’, in Anzaldua, G. (ed.) Making Face, Making Soul = Haciendo Caras: Creative and Cultural Perspectives by Feminists of Color. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Foundation Books: 377-389.
Mora, P. (1990) ‘Legal Alien’, in Anzaldua, G. (ed.) Making Face, Making Soul = Haciendo Caras: Creative and Cultural Perspectives by Feminists of Color. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Foundation Books: 376.
Blanco, P. (2015) ‘An Interview with Gloria Anzaldúa’, The University of Arizona Poetry Center. Available here.
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