What Does a Multigenerational Mixed-Race Family Look Like?

In the first minutes of my daughter’s life, as she lay on top of me in the darkened delivery room, she locked eyes with me. Her eyes seemed impossibly large in such a small head, her gaze steady despite the cataclysm of having just burst into a new world. They were calm eyes, discerning—and blue-gray.

Many babies are born with blue or gray eyes that will take months or even years to morph into their final shade. Depending on how much melanin the irises hold, they might end up brown, green, hazel, or blue. Until then, they’re this preternatural shade, a placeholder, a question mark.

When I was born, my mother says, my eyes were like two black olives. There was no question they’d be dark. But when I was in sixth or seventh grade, I realized with a kind of glee that my future child could have blue eyes. In science class, we studied dominant and recessive genes, drawing Punnett squares. My eyes were the dark brown of my Japanese American mother, but I discovered that in my genes I also carried the blue eyes of my white American father. His eyes were the ones that always stood out in the family portraits I scribbled as a kid, when I’d choose a different set of crayons to draw my dad than my mother, my sister, and me. In class, a Punnett square revealed that with a mate who also carried the recessive blue-eyed gene, I would have a 25 to 50 percent chance of passing on that hue.

I grew up in what is currently the whitest town in California, a picturesque enclave north of San Francisco with lots of open space and liberals and not a lot of diversity. It wasn’t a question, then, whether blue eyes were desirable. Blue eyes were an emblem of whiteness, and as a child I aspired to whiteness, wanting to fit in.

I faced racism that devastated me: a supposed friend telling me that I had “Chink hands”; a friend’s brother confused about whether I spoke English or not; kids stretching back their eyelids. I directed my anger at my Japanese first name. “How could you do this to me?” I wailed to my parents. No one could pronounce it; it seemed to trumpet my Otherness.

“Pick a new name,” they suggested. “Or go by your middle name. You can be Nicole.”

Neither seemed possible. Although I didn’t want to be Akemi, I couldn’t imagine slipping on a new identity like a fresh T-shirt. The future, though—maybe that I could change. Someday, I could have a child with blue eyes.

*

The first time I locked eyes with the man who would become my husband, I glimpsed something familiar. It was a June afternoon in San Francisco, at a café in Cole Valley beneath the fog line, where wisps of fog dissolved into blue sky. He wore a plaid shirt and jeans, and in his eyes I perceived a sensitivity, a way of seeing the world that I recognized. Over beers on the patio, we talked about what we shared: His mother was white; his father was from Kobe, Japan.

By then, I was no longer the girl who had studied Punnett squares. I had realigned my brain in college ethnic studies courses, lived in Japan and Honolulu, and come to embrace my name and racial identity. I no longer wished for blue eyes. Nor had I been looking for sameness.

But talking with this man at the café, I sunk into the comfort of being with someone who seemed to know much of my life story without my having to telling it. As the fog thickened overhead, prompting us to reach for our jackets, we found how easy it was to talk to each other. So much was simply understood.

I never thought about what color his mother’s eyes were until after our daughter was born. Then, meeting our baby’s knowing gaze, I wondered who she would become.

*

Articles about infant eye color explain that babies born with question-mark eyes are “Caucasian,” while babies of color have brown or black eyes that stay dark.

In my college ethnic studies courses, I learned the costs of focusing on and dissecting the features of mixed-race people. Proclaiming someone is “exotic”—oh, how interesting, you have this type of hair, but that shade of skin! Look at those freckles!—can make a person believe their self-worth, their identity, hinges on these traits. And yet, looking at my daughter, I can’t help but wonder at her fair hair and skin, her eyes. Sometimes I study her as if her features hold her fortune. How will people code her? How will she move through the world?

My husband and I should be the perfect guides for her. We share her ethnic background, and have already gone through our own clichéd journeys of identity as biracial people. We should be able to pass on what we know, spare her at least some of the angst. We should know, more than our monoracial parents, how to raise a mixed-race child. But in the early days of my daughter’s life, I found myself wondering just how much I’ve really figured out.

I’m only one step removed from the neat racial categories our society likes to impose. My daughter is two steps removed, second-generation mixed-race. 

The first major choice we had to make was her name. Should it be Japanese? I have come to like my name, its uniqueness and the way it ties me to Japan, but sometimes it does feel like a wall between me and those who can’t remember it or are afraid to try to say it. Sometimes people assume I’m a foreigner; an American couldn’t have such a name, they surmise. My daughter’s last name, passed down from her father, is Japanese. Her full name should be balanced, I thought, reflecting all aspects of her heritage—I didn’t want to foist only one type of identity on her.

In the end, we settled on Nina—because I liked the way it sounded with her last name, and because it felt universal: easy to flow off of anyone’s tongue. It was a name that would help her move among worlds. It also contains Japanese syllables, so we could choose characters; she would be able to write her name in Japanese.

Yet I started having doubts at the hospital. After a nurse learned my husband’s and my names, and complimented their “unusualness,” she asked about our newborn. Nina? she said. I had expected something unusual, too. I looked over at the tiny, placid face of my daughter, asleep in her hospital swaddle and cap, and unease wound through my chest.

During World War II, my Japanese American grandparents were incarcerated along with tens of thousands of others the US government deemed “enemy aliens.” In the camps, they learned to lose everything Japanese. My grandmother, who on her birth certificate is Tamaye, went by Mary. She became a Christian, learned to cook meatloaf and pot roasts, and later named her own daughters Karen and Nadine.

When my parents named me, they were going rogue, resurrecting a lost culture. Naming is a political act, and in adulthood I have come to enjoy asserting that yes, my name is American, too.

My daughter belongs to one of the fastest-growing groups of Americans—those who are multiracial—yet we still have insufficient language to talk about who she is

The truth is that my name charted my life course. It forced me to grapple with my ethnic identity early on: I was constantly having to tell people the name was Japanese, I was Japanese. At the same time, I didn’t feel Japanese. So, in college, I studied Japanese and lived for a year in Japan. That led me to pursue a book project set in Okinawa—a book that would occupy me for more than a decade, sending me back again and again to Japan. If I had been an Amy or a Jennifer, I wonder whether I would have headed in another direction.

A name like Nina, universal, points to nowhere in particular. Was that a kind of freedom, or a missed opportunity? Had we smoothed our child’s path, or hurled her backward into assimilation?

*

Beyond my daughter’s name, there are more questions about what to call her. She belongs to one of the fastest-growing groups of Americans, those who are multiracial, yet we still have insufficient language to talk about who she is. Despite changing demographics, our country holds fast to racist and binary structures. Some people remain uncomfortable with those they can’t quickly race-place. They will want to know her story. She will be asked again and again some form of that question all mixed-race people know: What are you?

And she may have an even harder time answering than I did. My biracial identity is framed within the existing racial structure—half this, half that, with two parents from two identifiable races. When people looked at my family portrait, my mother with her black hair and my father with those blue eyes, they could figure us out—or they often believed they could.

I’m only one step removed from the neat racial categories our society likes to impose. My daughter is two steps removed, second-generation mixed-race. Her existence challenges, even more so than mine, the limited system we use to order people. In our family portrait, we all sort of look like each other, but not like any of the boxes we’re asked to check. The more mixed we become, the more convoluted the math gets to explain who we are in racial terms.

I know better than to think my child or children like her will be the key to “post-racial” harmony. If that ever happens, it’s not happening anytime soon. She’ll have to search for ways to describe herself. Many multiracial Asian Americans, hungry for a self-identifier, have embraced the Hawaiian term “hapa,” but I’ve learned that many Native Hawaiians object to this use, seeing it linked to the history of settler colonialism and oppression of Native Hawaiian people. My daughter could choose to call herself half-white, half-Japanese, but that reduces her to fractions and implies she has two monoracial parents of two different races. “Mixed” or “biracial” is equally vague.

I’m realizing that, more than being her perfect guide, someone with all the answers, I can only aspire to be beside her as she asks questions. 

Maybe she can be just Japanese American. Today, many Japanese Americans have blue eyes, a consequence of the high rate of outmarriage after the war. These Japanese Americans may be “half” or a “quarter,” but many are claiming that part of their identities. Maybe they’re learning the language, or attending the annual crab feed at the local Buddhist temple, or going on pilgrimages to World War II incarceration camps, or becoming curious about their family’s history and buying plane tickets across the Pacific. Maybe they’re doing none of these things. However they’re choosing to explore who they are, they’re showing that the old rules about who looks like what, who belongs, don’t apply—and in fact, never did.

*

Nina is three months old now. Her eyes are ever more discerning—and still a deep blue-gray, like the Pacific on a foggy, white-caps day. This is a temporary color. Maybe they’ll become brown like her parents’. Maybe they’ll become blue like her grandfather’s. Maybe they’ll become some new-to-the-family shade.

With time I’m realizing that, more than being her perfect guide, someone with all the answers, I can only aspire to be beside her as she asks the questions. The lack of clear answers—the unknown, the muddling-through—is how, in this world, we are made.

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