This may sound incredibly naive in this day and age, but I did not realize that I was biracial until I was about 11 years old. And how did I find out? By watching a talk show (probably Ricki Lake) about biracial children, and the struggles they faced. Someone on the show mentioned Asians as an example of a non-white race, which surprised me. I had previously thought that there were only two races, white and black, and that Asians were a subgroup of whites. I then did a bit of investigation (i.e. asked my Dad) about this, and confirmed that Asians were a different race. Thus, my biracial identity was born. Note that it did not coincide with my actual birthdate.

Most people feel a need to simplify everything around them, in order to make complex things more accessible, more understandable. They like clearly distinct labels and strict dichotomies. I often succumb to this tendency as well, although at times I try to fight it.

For whatever reason, we've decided that it's important to identify ourselves by racial category. This self-identification is reinforced every time we take a standardized test, apply for college, or fill out an application for a driver's license. In medicine, we're also taught to take the race of our patients into account, since studies have shown that different races as a whole have different risks for diseases, and different responses to treatment.

What happens when you don't cleanly fit into a single category? Others try to reduce you to one. Or they want you to talk about how you suffer from not having the luxury of belonging to a single category. Or they talk about how cool it must be to straddle several categories. They assume that it has a large part in shaping your identity.

When I interviewed for medical school, every interviewer (except the one for the school which I chose) asked about my "experience as a biracial person, and how it shaped who [I am] today." It wasn't necessarily insensitive or malicious; I could see that it was a misguided attempt to be politically correct. But being a biracial person (or at least, a Eurasian person who looks exactly like me) is not like being a person of distinct ethnicity. I was largely treated as a person without an ethnicity, since others were uncertain about what it was. Simply by looking at me, they could not easily categorize me. And I did nothing to advertise what my official category was. So, in a way, my experience was that of a person without race. I have never heard a racial epithet or a racial slur. The biggest annoyance is the "What are you?" question which people inevitably ask just seconds after learning my name. But I'm not about to spin a woe-is-me tale from that annoyance alone.

But apparently, people want to hear a dramatic story about how I never fit in with the Asian kids, and never fit in with the white kids, and suffered a tremendous internal struggle regarding my identity. I refuse to tell this story, because it's not true. Once I learned that I was not just white, but in fact biracial, there was no anguish involved. My mother was Korean, and my father was European-American, so I was half of each. Simple as that. I never felt the need to identify completely with one instead of the other. I was both and neither, and that was fine. I did not feel the need to simplify this complexity. I did have a hard time fitting in with kids, but this was because I was weird and a loner, not because I didn't fit into a single racial category. I never gave much thought to my racial makeup, and it did not affect my identity nearly as much as my sex (female).

However, I recently realized that being biracial has influenced my perspective in a way. I am more comfortable with complexity, with paradoxes, with mystery, than most other people. I'm drawn to artsy movies which are not easily resolved, with multiple meanings and open endings. For the most part, I don't need to divide people into strict, separate categories. I actually prefer for people to surprise my expectations, to show signs of breaking free of my initial impression of them. Several of my stories explore this idea. I strive towards nonjudgmentalness, and loathe stereotypes. I have a passion for freedom, particularly freedom of identity. It may also explain why I'm so fond of Percy Shelley's essay, "The Defense of Poetry." For Shelley, poetry is the yoking together of two disparate concepts or images, to synthesize something completely new and alive.