i went up to Beacon this weekend to see my oldest friend E. she took part in an open studios event and i thought it'd be lovely to see her. off i went with 3 peeps in Hubie2 Saturday morning.
i wont bore you with details about the day other than that we saw some lovely art, went to a vineyard, and crashed a house party.
what i came away with, (you knew this was coming!) was a realization about what dear E means to me and why i've always felt such a strong attachment to her.
picture it: we met when i was all of 8/9 years old. she was my 15/16 year old teacher in Saturday morning German language school. (my mother wanted me to learn the language since i'm Swiss.) she was smart yet chill, completely charming yet humble, one of the most approachable and accepting people i've ever met and to top it off...she's a halfie. she was my first halfie role model. you may not ever think of this, or maybe you do, but it's not often that i'm face to face with someone who looks like me.
whether you recognize it as important or not, i never realized that very fact until i attended a Loving Day event a few years ago and was in a room full of halfies. i daresay most of the others in that room probably felt the same as i did. it was neither a feeling of woe and isolation nor one of happiness, rather it was a feeling of shared experience and solidarity. as you know, i have some of the very best friends in the world but i believe even they would have a hard time comprehending the feeling of awe i felt in that room simply because it's not likely something they've ever encountered. and it's not something i'd expect from them as non-mixed people. why would i? would i say i comprehend the black experience to my black friends? no. it's one of the few things in life one has to be to understand.
so it was this past Saturday I fully recognized my connection with E and why I've always held her friendship so close to my heart. i saw her almost every Saturday for 5 years and to be as young as i was and see a well-adjusted, unaffected, and brilliant biracial, i think, really had an effect on me. as i've said before, being biracial is only a part of who i am and i'd never want it to be more than that but it's an important part nonetheless. there was so much that didn't need to be spoken. we just understood each other. at one point on Saturday she said, 'it was like i just heard myself' while she listened to me rant about my Loving Day experience. precisely, how i've felt in her presence my whole life.
i know i have friends who don't see me as biracial and i honestly love that they're colorblind to it. but it's something i've always been aware of. in my impressionable years, it wasn't something that conjured a feeling of pride. i had been on the receiving end of one too many racially charged comments. i knew people didn't accept my mother because she had a kid with a non-Chinese and out of wedlock nonetheless. gasp! undoubtedly some of it was also self-imposed. was it why my dad left? and where were the role models who could've showed me otherwise? so you see, all this internal and external loathing made an indelible mark.
the silver lining is, as i became more confident and self-assured, i came to recognize my difference as uniqueness. it didn't automatically make me less and just because i didn't see many people around who looked like me (and by extension, felt as i did) didn't make me less worthy, less loved or less worthy of being loved and i needed to stop looking at myself that way.
so, dear E, please know that in the 20 years i've had the pleasure of your acquaintance you've unwittingly become my main halfie role model in all realms of life. i know you're so much more than being someone of mixed race but that part of who you are has been important to me. thank you for showing me tolerance and acceptance.
p.s. apologies for not retaining a lick of German! :)
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