She bounced a superball against the polished floor tiles of the mall as she approached. Among my daughter’s cluster of high school classmates, she was the only one not clutching a Forever 21 shopping bag.
“Didn’t you buy anything?” I asked.
“Just this,” the girl replied, holding up the blue-gray rubber orb. She tried to sound cool and nonchalant but her eyes betrayed timidity.
I then remembered what my daughter had told me about this particular friend – an African American attending their Connecticut boarding school through a scholarship. She was brilliant and had a love of languages – she even dreamed of spending a summer in Seoul to learn Korean. It suddenly dawned on me that this young lady attending one of the most expensive high schools in the US was also someone who could not easily afford to buy anything more expensive at the local mall than a vending machine toy.
I glanced around at my daughter’s other friends: a blonde MENSA girl who came from a broken home supplemented by food stamps; another African American from a rough-and-tumble district in Brooklyn (Bed-Stuy); a mixed-blood girl who was half-white, one-quarter African American and one-quarter Japanese. In a school where more than half of the students were either Northeast-establishment kids or Asian super-geeks, this was a decidedly offbeat bunch. A cabal of outsiders.
I had earlier asked my daughter whether she was close to the students who, like her, had grown up in Hong Kong, China or Korea. She had shaken her head. “Nah, they mostly just hang around each other.” Her reply recalled the cocktail reception on the school’s orientation day when the Headmaster had approached a table of Hong Kong parents and offered a word of advice: “Encourage your kids not to just hang around other Hong Kong kids. Have them get to know Americans.” Those words had apparently gone unheeded.
My daughter grew up as a third culture child – a half-Korean, half-American expat in Hong Kong. In Asia, national identities and ethnicities are as distinct as anywhere – sometimes violently so. Chinese are Chinese and Indians are Indians, even in Singapore and Malaysia where multi-racialism is a core tourism-board PR refrain. Koreans, meanwhile, may be the worst offenders of all when it comes to nationalistic clubbiness. In such a region, kids who don’t easily plop into a specific ethnic bucket often have to fend for themselves to find social circles. Luckily, Hong Kong is a true World City, and there is sufficient diversity that my daughter has not felt detained in some far-off Island of Misfit Kids. She has found close friendships (BFFs, she called them) among a wide swath of ethnicities. Of course, some are Hong Kong Chinese, although not many, since they tend to stay behind the barriers of impenetrable Cantonese and local traditions such as Sunday family yum cha. There are overseas Koreans, Indians, Lebanese. And naturally, there are the other mixed blood kids. One is half Aussie, one quarter Thai, one quarter Korean. Another is half Chinese, half Portuguese. Yet another is half Indian, half Japanese.
Her experience has mirrored my wife’s and mine over the past twenty-plus years living in Asia. During that time, we have been regarded as outsiders anywhere we are – in Hong Kong (me, someone from the land of kimchee and K-pop married to a Mandarin-speaking gweipo), when we traveled, even in Korea. However, while there have been the occasional pangs of separateness, we have also enjoyed the advantages of orbiting local cultures just beyond the fringe of belonging. We have been excused from having to follow common customs (just when and how is a proper wai done in Thailand, anyway?). We have been forgiven for asking silly questions in the name of exploration (is Cantonese simply a dialect or a distinct spoken language?). And we have frequently been asked to dispense tidbits of observation from the perspective of someone on the outside looking in. In short, we have been free to be ourselves. But most rewarding of all has been our freedom to befriend whomever we wanted, based not on historical ties, but on common interests and a shared need to carve out new identities and secure like-minded friendship in foreign lands.
As I spent these few days during a long weekend with my daughter and her new friends in the similarly alien environment of a New England boarding school, I was certain that similar thoughts have spooled through her mind since she arrived there from Hong Kong six months ago. No doubt she initially felt insecure and alone. Perhaps she was not sure what to make of the differences between her and the majority that swarmed around her. Fortunately, she now looked comfortable and happy. She acted like any adolescent girl as she mall-walked her way through a Sunday afternoon, alternatively patty-caking, girl trash-talking and superballing as she went. She may never actually revel in her status as an “other”. But in this company of similar outsiders, that distinction seemed to evaporate, replaced instead by a unique society – a small one, perhaps, but one forged by those with an indomitable sense of self.
