What kind of Asian am I?

When I was college one of my poetry professors, who was Latino, asked me why I did not write poetry about being a person of color. The simple answer to that was that I didn't really feel like one, even though it is probably one of my most salient physical characteristics. There are a few different reasons for that which I will get into briefly:

• I did not grow up in a community of Filipino people, I don’t have an understanding of how being Filipino is different from being white besides a few culinary dishes growing up.
• I am half white and it was easy to identify with being white even though I do not look ‘white’. In college I actually had trouble relating to Filipino students from the Ethnic Student Center on campus. I did not feel ‘Filipino enough’.
• I felt that I was more defined by my sexuality, by the time I was in college I already identified as gay for many years and had actually experienced homophobia first hand.
• I did not recall a time when the fact that I was half-Filipino caused people to treat me differently in anyway (or at least that’s how I remember growing up).

College made me aware of my ethnicity, but I don’t think about it very much. Describing my ethnic identity would require a whole other entry, suffice to say, I identify as mostly white. Like most people I find it difficult to talk about race and ethnicity because it’s complex and weird and heavy and I can only tell you about what I think, and I am afraid that people will think what I think is incorrect.

Recently I saw this video by Ken Tanaka starring Stella Choe and Scott Beehner:

I laughed watching it, and I realized something: That actually happens to me, it has happened to me a lot. I have been asked ‘where are you from?’ hundreds of times in my life or have heard ‘I thought so’ when I reveal that I am half-Filipino. Just to be clear, everyone asks me this question, not just white people, though non-Filipinos tend to offer up their experiences with Filipino culture shortly after. “I have a Filipino friend,” or “I love lumpia,” are pretty common. Cool, I like lumpia too? Being mixed race gives me a kind of ‘mysteriously ethnic look’ and I’ve come to expect the question, but when Choe turns the table on Beehner in the video and asks him where he is from I realized something obvious, that this is not something that happens to white people (unless they have an accent probably) and I come butting up against my own ethnic identity. I am not really white, white people don’t get asked that question.

I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about my ethnicity, but maybe I should be more interested in it, because it seems like lot’s of other people are.