I stepped into a clearing
with only birdsong and
pine-needle-whispers as
company, and asked myself,
“How could I share this?”

Would the tall, straight
lines of a letter “T”
conjure the proud lines of
the shedding trees, here for
years, watching over you
now when you enter?

What could I write down to
help you feel the spongey
earth cradling each step,
rotting leaves that break
each time they hold you up?

The writer Thomas Merton
once prayed that, even when
we try and struggle and fail,
“the desire to please You
does, in fact, please You.”

I pray that, in attempting
to share the moment, it could
somehow be enough for you. That
you will find the wind draped
around your shoulders, kissing
your forehead, asking you to trust.

Or get the gift of a sudden
rain as you come into a clearing,
washing away everything around
you except the next step you need
to take to finally come home.

I hope that in reading this, you
will trust that there is a place
where you’re met with birdsong
and pine-needle-whispers, that
will hold you up, beloved.

Full Disclosure: This title is riffed on Dr. Christopher Emdin’s amazing book, For White Folks Who Teach In The Hood (and the Rest of Y’all Too), which you should read now. Like, right now.

“So, if I’m white, can I only write white characters?”

This is a paraphrased question I’ve seen and heard a lot over the past few weeks. “White” can be substituted for lots of different aspects of identity: men writing women, straight and/or cis people writing as members of the LGBTQ+ community, etc.

It’s not a new query– it’s a long-standing debate, but with the controversy surrounding American Dirt (which is discussed more here, here, and the pieces that best resonate with my feelings here and here), it has come up more and more. Should writers attempt to tell stories from characters that they do not share the background of?

And my gut reaction, to be frank, is no. Of course, that’s not my whole answer, because the situation is actually much more nuanced than a simple “no” implies. There are, no doubt, authors who have written wonderful characters who had vastly different backgrounds than they did. There is no hard-and-fast rule with this.

The place my “no” comes from isn’t a desire to restrict who can write what, but rather a story of hurt, frustration, and sadness. It comes from my own experiences as a reader and writer. It comes from my perspective as a Mexicana-Filipina-American, with all the beauty and hardship that entails. It has to do with two important aspects all writers (and people) should consider: authenticity and power.

If someone is going to write about a community they don’t come from, it has to be authentic. It has to reflect the actual, powerful, and nuanced stories that comes from any place or people. A novel that feels like it combined and repackaged a number of the same hackneyed tropes of Latinx people and concepts of “The Border” does not ring as authentic. A novel about Mexicans in a border town that felt inauthentic to many Mexicans and Chicanx readers should be a sign that perhaps the author’s story didn’t actually represent the people she claimed she wanted to.

The thing is, it’s really difficult to be authentic about something that you haven’t actually experienced. You can try to research and listen as much as you want, but actually being from and living in a community or culture will lead to a perspective that is honestly difficult to capture with research. It’s not impossible, but it’s really hard to do authentically. It’s hard to fully capture all the shades, subtleties, and layers of a situation when you only see it from the outside. It’s difficult to grasp the full context and history of a world when you were not involved in the creation or experience of living in it.

Which leads to our second, bigger problem: power.

Someone could write a story that, while inauthentic, is still seen as a great read. While that may not seem problematic, we don’t live in a vacuum. Because we still live in a white dominant society, we are more likely to advance, market, and accept ideas from white voices instead of writers of color. The publishing world is still incredibly white and the books that are bought, packaged, and marketed are still overwhelmingly white.

If readers are more likely to accept white voices, it means that stories about historically disenfranchised and underrepresented communities are more likely to be received when they come from white names. Society often accepts a secondary source’s narrative instead of reaching for the primary source voices who have actually lived that story.

Frankly, an outsider perspective is more likely to be inauthentic, yet white outsiders stand a better chance to be published and praised. So, the rest of the world gets to read and then believe that inauthentic narrative– tropes, stereotypes and all– instead of the perhaps more complex reality a community may really face. Because the majority of our stories are told by people that lack the lived experience, there is nothing to counteract these clichés. Inauthenticities are not just annoying byproducts of shallow storytelling, but instead become the very problematic beliefs that we internalize about an entire people, culture, or place. 

Furthermore, most writers of color (myself included) can tell you a story where their name or identity automatically made their writing viewed as “niche” or “[Ethnicity] Lit.” Whether or not we want to admit it, the belief prevails that readers are more likely to see “Jeanine Cummins” as an author they think will speak to them instead of, say, “Reyna Grande.” We still live in a world where having a white name is more likely to get you an interview of any kind. What does it mean when the people at the top are mostly thinking about whether that name, splashed across covers and marketing materials, will “sell”? Power affects not just what stories are told about communities of color, but who is able to profit from telling them. Profit dictates trends, trends dictate public interest, public interest leads to profit– the cogs of the machine roll on and crushes the voices of people of color underneath it.

So, when I am asked, “Can white writers write non-white characters?”, my negative gut reaction comes from growing up in a world where I was given a cheesy narrative like Puerto Vallarta Squeeze long before I actually saw myself in a piece of writing at age 16. My reaction comes from understanding the pain my friends, who also failed to see themselves in the stories they were given, felt.

My reaction isn’t about restriction, it’s about pushing the person asking to consider their place in the scope of authenticity and power. What does it mean when a white person is more likely to get the chance to tell a person of color’s story? What doors opened for them because of their whiteness? If they walk through that door, whose space might they take and thus profit from once they enter?

For white folks who want to write our stories (and the rest of us too), I hope you ask yourself if your work will fully center and share the complex voices coming from the communities you claim to represent. If not, it is merely taking the easy-to-digest sound bytes and packaging them as truths that will unfortunately play on an overpowering loop that drowns out the real people living in the world you stole.

I’m currently working on a longer piece (meaning I started it on my birthday, wrote 3000 words, then haven’t touched it until now) on my body at 32. This is part of that piece.

I was 19 when I got my first and only tattoo. My best friend in college, Carolina, had gotten a few around her waist— all in places that would be hidden by a bikini, but still visible to her, an internal rebellion of our Catholic, conservative, Latino families. She had adventured from rosaries to balloons. I had never, ever thought about getting a tattoo in my whole life. But, my whole world had shifted, and I needed to do something drastic.

It was six months after the assault, when I woke up and realized that I had lost my virginity but didn’t remember any of it because I had been given Asahis and maybe something else. My “boyfriend” (a tough word to use, when he wouldn’t acknowledge me anywhere, wouldn’t meet my parents, and would really only be affectionate when we were in private), was 10-years older and a microbiology grad student and TA at the university I attended. He held me when I cried, and when I told him I was sad I didn’t remember what happened, he tried to tell me a version of the story, as if that made it okay. Years later, I would seeing him walking by the campus while I got ice cream on a break from teaching, and have a panic attack in the middle of the street, a fellow teacher crouching down next to me and asking me what was wrong. Continue reading →

“So… what are you? Like, where are you from?”

Like many mixed-race and/or “ethnically ambiguous” people, I’ve spent quite a bit of time explaining myself. I grew up in a mostly white suburb in Southern California, I’ve spent a lot of my time (and writing) trying to explain who I am (my dad is Chicano and my mom is Filipina. My brother and I call it “Mexipino/a”).

Being mixed-race in the U.S. was and is confusing at times. In a society desperately trying to slip an easily-read label, we struggle to fit that narrative. We get told we’re “not-_______ enough,” or not really _______ , as if our mixed status means there’s a quantifiable amount of culture we’ll never be able to maintain.

And, like it did for a lot of mixed race folks, those words hurt. A lot. They made me question myself and my identity, they made me feel less than to my community in a world that already looked at Brown people as less than. Yes, my parents helped me try to navigate these waters and helped me be proud of both cultures, but it was hard when people I thought would get me still made me feel alone. It made me feel as if I had nowhere to go.

I grew up, though, and began finding power in being mixed race, and learning to claim both my AAPI upbringing (most of my friends were Asian-American) with the truth of both cultures. I learned Spanish and danced Tinikling. While I still got the looks and the questions, knowing that I wasn’t alone in my responses and frustrations made it more bearable.

Instead of feeling alone, I learned the stories of others who shared my struggles, or struggled so that I could have more. I learned how to ask my family for their stories: Why did we eat the food we did? How did we end up in America? Where did my hair come from? I was surrounded by people who had so many amazing stories to help make sense of my own– I just needed to listen.

Through the magic of the universe, I found even more stories last night, when I discovered this NPR LatinoUSA piece on being Asian and Latino.

When I shared this online, Darren Naruse showed how this affects the next generation as well.

This made me realize how, even when it was hard, I felt extremely happy to be mixed-race. As one of the participants noted that being Asian-Latino helped him to essentially code-switch between cultures, finding the similarities between the two that helped him navigate both well.

In reminiscing on my own experiences, I realized the blessing, in some ways, of being “othered.” Having others frequently question my identity forced me to dig deep to actually figure out who I am and what my cultures mean to me. It meant learning how to be “fully me,” as Darren put it.

Being mixed race is a sometimes-confusing but ultimately beautiful journey. The additional challenges are rooted in a journey of deep, powerful self-discovery that have made me who I am now. It pushed me to learn the stories of both my cultures to find pride build strong connections with them. The questions and push back I got ultimately led me to learn and develop those cultural understandings even more as I got older.

Then, I moved to Hawai‘i.

Hawai‘i is unique in that there is no ethnic majority, and if there were, it wouldn’t be white people. Many residents are AAPI, and its the home of the largest mixed-race population in the United States. The cognitive dissonance I’d had on the mainland growing up began to melt away. I do get asked what my ethnicities are, a common practice here rooted in discovering common ground–the people asking are often mixed themselves. As Darren points out, living in Hawai‘i means that it’s easy to not think about race, at least in terms of “belonging and not” on a daily basis.That sounds impossible to non-white folks, but it’s true.

There’s a blessing and a curse to this, though. Of course, not feeling othered where I live is a huge blessing. However, I’m now largely removed from Latinx culture, since the Latinx population is about 10%. This can feel hard, since it feels like half of my story no longer had anyone to connect with. I wrote about in 2016 for Honolulu Civil Beat:

[The tamale woman] was there every Saturday, yelling with a sense of tired, joyful urgency. It was like a breakfast-and-supper song: “Tamales, tamales ! Tamales de POL-lo, tamales de QUE-so, tamales tamales !” My housemates hated her, and I wasn’t always a fan, but now, in Hawaii, I miss her voice.

I miss her singing, her call, and her food that makes us special. I miss the small, daily reminders I am not just American — even if the United States is a place I feel lucky to call home — but that there is another language, culture and history waiting there for me whenever I want.

In moving to Hawaii, I now walk a weird line. I’m an outsider, but not really. My dark skin and mixed roots make it easy for people to assume I’m from here. It took a 3,000-mile journey, but I found a place where I can walk nearly anywhere and feel like, at least at a glance, I belong.

But in another way, I am a minority again. Half of my culture is completely visible here, but another half feels like it has been lost. I search for that half, seeing her curly hair, the poetic words she knows, and the palate of memories that include my mom’s mole and my grandmother’s noodles.

I know my mother is in me, forever entwined with an Asian culture that is just as beloved, just as precious. But I worry that, being here, the blossoming of one half of me is threatening to overtake less cultivated roots on the other side. I fear that if I am far from the consistent reminders of one culture for long enough, it will slip away into silence.

Is there a place where both of my cultures can live and thrive side by side? Is there ever a stable, fertile ground to place both feet firmly and grow roots, instead of the balancing act I live each day? Is there some way, some place where I can feel whole?

I don’t have the answers. I wonder if anyone does.

As I revisited this piece, and with three more years under my belt, I’ve realized that I have to create the place where I feel whole. It’s up to me to look ahead and create a spaces and connections.

Being connected to my cultures is active work that I have to initiate, instead of waiting for the world to push me there. It means practicing my Spanish when I can, making it a point to make, find, and eat Mexican food. It means finding Filipinx groups to connect and organize with. I am no longer seeking connections in response to being othered, I must actively seek these stories because I know they are important not just for me, but for the next generation as well.

When my children who, of course, will be mixed themselves ask me those questions, I can no longer rely on others to share those stories. It is my kuleana– privilege and responsibility– to share the stories and pride of both cultures with them. This means that I have to keep learning, connecting, and developing my understanding of them, even when it feels easier forget.

I can no longer just keep the stories handed to me by others, I must be the one seeking and sharing those stories too. In doing so, I am able to help the next generation write theirs, as I continue to write my own.

This blog post is part of the #31DaysIBPOC Blog Challenge, a month-long movement to feature the voices of indigenous and teachers of color as writers and scholars. Please CLICK HERE to read yesterday’s blog post by Julia Torres (and be sure to check out the link at the end of each post to catch up on the rest of the blog circle).