Looking "normal" in quotes

It's kind of a joke to say that all Asians look alike. It's still rare enough to see an Asian woman in just a regular role on TV that even my mom thought that Sandra O and Lucy Lui were the same person. I say even my mom because she is full blood ethnic Japanese, although born and raised in Canada. And I'm a generation later but I was 22 before I ever saw something that looked like my own mixed race family on television and we're now a generation past that.

I was at a funeral for another one of us mixed people, hapa. I looked around with a kind of befuddlement at this family that looked like mine but was not mine. Big blond hakujin and small black-haired men and women eating sandwiches and sushi, Nanaimo bars and manju. My people, yet not mine.

And my red-haired, green-eyed child who looks like someone elses' kid although he's birthed from my body and I've got the stretch marks to prove it. He does not look alike with even me.

But he is beautiful, like someone on TV. And a generation after me his family is just starting to look normal.

May 10, 2014