on cultural identity
I'm almost done reading Namesake, a novel about a boy named Gogol Ganguli, a US-born son of Bengali immigrants who for most of his childhood resists his cultural heritage, but ultimately comes to embrace it as a young adult. As a US-born son of immigrants, I thought there'd be something in the book that I could relate to, but it turns out that there isn't. Unlike Gogol, I don't really have a cultural heritage to resist. I consider myself to be American, but that is mostly a declaration of citizenship, not a declaration of cultural identity. In fact, I am comfortable declaring my self an American precisely because of the lack of any cultural identity such a label would imply. We spoke Japanese at home, followed some Japanese customs, but I was never socially acculturated in Japan, which makes me, culturally, a foreigner (a fact, unfortunately, that Japanese people won't admit to due to my appearances and lack of any noticeable accent). I also don't consider myself Japanese American, or Asian American; both of which imply a relatively well defined subculture.

The odd thing is, I don't spend a lot of time thinking about my cultural identity at all. True, I don't fit in anywhere. I have a hard time finding people I can relate to. But to me, all these things are orthogonal to my heritage. I don't fit in because I'm different. It's not because we spoke Japanese at home. It's not because I didn't grow up in the US. It's not because I grew up in Germany. It's because I am who I am, and who I am is very different to those around me. In reality, yes, I am different, at least partially, because of how and where I was raised. But that history offers me no solution. Unlike Gogol, I can't go marry someone from my childhood community who was raised in a similar environment as I was (not that that worked out for him), because no such community exists. I don't know a single person who's a US born child of Japanese immigrants, who speaks Japanese and English natively, who grew up outside the US, and is now back in the US (not even my own brother fits this description). So what difference does it make? I might as well be a weirdo from Idaho.

Most of my friends, and all my past girlfriends, have been white Americans. Although this may be partially circumstantial, I think I am more comfortable around white Americans than non-white Americans because white Americans don't think of themselves as having been shaped by their heritage. For me, when I say I'm "Japanese", it's similar to when someone from Minnesota says they're "part German, part Swedish, part Irish". Sure, I might speak my ancestral language and know more about its culture, but as far as I'm concerned, it doesn't define me. This is less the case with non-white Americans, who have a much stronger racial and/or cultural identity. Sometimes I'll joke that I'm a banana or a twinkie, but the whiteness implied in those terms also differ from how I see it. As darkness is the absence of light, I see white as the absence of color. To me it is a blank slate, a fresh canvas, a post-racial, post-cultural identity. It is the promise of being an individual here and now, unburdened by one's heritage, free to color it, or not, as one wishes. It is the color of freedom, and that, is what I identify with.