#korracrat

When I was a kid, I used to get teased about my eye shape. They get crinkly and small when I laugh or smile, so in most pictures of me as a child, my eyes look almost closed. Even my family would laugh, saying that I only look Asian in pictures. I started consciously keeping my eyes open in pictures, just to get them off my back. I was proud of being half Asian, but I hated being teased. As I got older and my smile got more reserved, it was easier to keep my eyes open in pictures. Even in old selfies, my eyes are wide and open; the habit is so ingrained that I didn’t even realize I was doing it.

I’m trying to stop doing that.

I’ve always been proud of my heritage, even though the Indonesian side of my family is thoroughly Americanized. My family’s history is insane; my Oma escaped a war camp in Indonesia to live in the Netherlands, where she met my Opa, who had also fled the war on the island to Europe. Indonesia was a Dutch colony for a long time, so even when my grandparents were living on the island they felt a kinship with the Netherlands. Because our last name is Dutch, the Netherlands did not turn my family away like they were doing with other Indonesian refugees. My father was born in Amsterdam, and due to the social climate at the time (it was not safe to be Indonesian in Holland for a while), was raised Dutch. When my family moved to Massachusetts, they started being seen as Asian, although they held onto their Dutch heritage with a fierceness. My family denies being Asian, and I wonder if it’s because of the fact that they were raised to be Dutch rather than Indonesian. Even to this day, my Oma talks about any European heritage she has (barely any), and my father regularly checks off “Caucasian” on forms. They have completely removed themselves from the fact that my family, no matter where they lived, are from Indonesia.

When I was in elementary school, I was proud of being Asian. All of my reports were about being Indonesian, about being a first-generation American, and everything else. I grew up eating nasi goreng and sate with peanut sauce, and a mix of other dishes whose names I never learned, that Oma just calls “quick meat” or “fall apart meat”. I noticed cultural differences; I always took my shoes off in houses although my friends did not, I prefer to eat with a spoon and fork rather than a knife, etc. I loved summertime, because being outside so often made me nice and tan; no one doubted my ethnicity when I got so dark. 

I always resented that I look more Irish than Indonesian, and by the time I got to high school and college, my regular joke was that “if you mix an Irish woman and an Indonesian guy, you just get a short white girl.” I had grown used to pulling up images of my family to prove my heritage, and other people called me out, saying that I only talked about my family so much because I wasn’t really anything other than white. Even other people of Asian descent told me that I’m “not Asian enough.” I stopped talking about it. I kept my eyes open in pictures. I started talking about my Irish heritage more, because other people made me believe that half of my identity does not belong to me...while always reminding me that I wasn’t white enough to be seen as just white.