Response paper, very rough drafty, to Wendy Lee's "Peeling Bananas."
Though Wendy Lee would call herself a Chinese-American and Carolina Miranda perhaps a "Lots of places-American" (RCWW 179) my sympathies lie more with Lee than with Miranda. That's odd, because, so far as I know, my ethnic background spans German, English, Norwegian, American Indian, Spanish, and (probably) Miscellaneous. But the Chinese author is the one who has something to say to me.
Our family never had any hopes of turning out to be nobility. That was dashed when a bit of genealogical research discovered that we never did have an English coat of arms. The Allen family was pretty lucky to have a coat at all. My aunt was truly mortified to discover that my Norwegian side of the family preserved its records from the 1400s, showing that every one of them was an impoverished fisher, and that my grandmother was, by modern standards, an illegal alien. The English side, the one with the fake coat of arms, seems to have been minor shopkeepers and laborers—and their records only consist of cemetery headstones that go back two generations.
Though we sound like the Miranda family, the comment by Lee that the "strictly Caucasian" homes seemed to have "no traces of their heritages at all" (191) caught my attention. That's where I grew up: no trace of our heritage. Yes, my mother has collected antiques for years. The house is filled with old glass and old wrought iron, but none of it relates to us. There's almost nothing that she can point to and say, "My mother used a kettle like that" or "My dad worked with a tool like that." Much of her furniture is fake pioneer, with fake worn places (you have definitely made a mistake, though, if you add to the worn look). I managed to take (with her blessing and relief) several small things that relate me to my father: his fountain pen, his drafting set, and a lamp he made for high school shop class. But there's nothing very Norwegian or old country in the lot. My older daughter felt that sense of rootlessness. She said it was as if our family had simply risen from the sidewalk. That's why she had a tattoo of a Celtic knot on her thigh. She knew it wasn't our heritage, but at least it was some heritage. In a twist of irony, my younger daughter teaches Japanese in the Los Angeles public school system—a white woman teaching the children of immigrants how to speak their parents' language because the best they can do is the Japanese of a very small child. Visit her apartment, and you will see a lot more of Japan than of Norway or England.
I gave my brother a bit of a shock recently when I revealed that we weren't really Norwegian anyhow. We're Lapp. Look it up. We're descended on my grandmother's side from the wandering reindeer herders who live above the Arctic circle in skin tents. Did that change my sense of who I am? Not really. I doubt if I will ever own a "four winds hat"—that Lapp ethnic garment that resembles nothing quite so much as a court jester's garb. Unlike Lee, I'm not longing to return to my homeland, whether it's Lapland, England, Germany, or whatever.
One of my Japanese friends marveled that everyone in the USA is hyphenated: Chinese-American, Polish-American, Mexican-American. Nobody in Japan is hyphenated. They're just Japanese. Maybe that's why I wasn't too shocked to lose Norway and gain Lapland. I've never been hyphenated. But I think my older daughter would appreciate knowing that we came from somewhere.
