Fluid . . . : Identity in the Making

I get the "what are you" question a lot. I usually get a warning that the question is coming: a tilt of the head, a squint of the eyes, a puzzled look as the wheels turn in my questioner’s head. She or he will try to figure out where I fit, what possible combination or part of the world looks like me. And when the search of the database ends without a satisfactory answer, my questioner will ask, "What are you?"

For a long time, I didn’t like this question because I didn’t have a neatly packaged answer. "My dad is sansei, a third generation Japanese American, and my mom’s ancestry goes back three generations to France and Switzerland," I’d respond. Sometimes that answer would be satisfactory, but most often, it was not. "But what are YOU?" or "But you don’t look THAT Japanese" or even "Wow, your English is really good"—that’s what would usually follow.

When it did, I would feel like I had done something wrong, that I had failed, and that I should do more to explain myself. I wanted to be understood so badly that I sometimes tried to deny part of who I was in order to more successfully fit into someone’s perception of who I should be. But a few years ago, all of that changed. It wasn’t an overnight decision for me, but rather a process that was the result of many conversations, confrontations, and tears. At some point during my time in Burlington, I became comfortable with my biracial identity. More than comfortable, I became proud.

Indeed, there are many frustrations I still encounter. I stop when I get to the "check one box" section on forms because, no matter what I check, I always think there is at least one other viable answer and maybe I should go with that one instead. I struggle with feeling like an authentic member of the Japanese American community because I don’t speak Japanese or know many of the customs. While with people other than Japanese Americans, I get tired of keeping my guard up because I never know when the next unintentional insult may come. I live in a world in between.

But more importantly, beyond the frustrations of being biracial, there are many joys. As my brother Paul would say, "I have hamburgers and rice on the same plate; I get the best of both worlds." I have the opportunity to view life through several lenses; I’ve learned first-hand that there are many ways to view a situation or a person. Like the many facets of a Cubist painting, I became comfortable with the different angles of my own identity. As I’ve embraced these qualities in myself, I’ve learned to see them in other people as well.

There’s even an official term for the way I express these aspects and move in and out of different communities: fluid identity. The first time I heard it, I breathed a sigh of relief. For years I thought there was something not quite right with me because people would comment on how I was one way with them and another way with others; they assumed I was trying to be someone I’m not. What they failed to see, and what I failed to see, was that it was a natural process that comes with expressing the various aspects of my biracial upbringing.

I now see fluid identity as a strength. I like being able to move in and out of different communities, being able to express the cultural characteristics of my surroundings without much thought. Perhaps the best example of this came a few years ago while I was in line at Disneyland with a few friends. The women ahead of us were exchange students from Japan. We talked for the forty-five minutes or so it took to get on the roller coaster, and when we got off the ride, my friends commented on how I "became Japanese" as I talked with the students. "Your sentence structure changed. You bowed your head a lot. It was like you became a different person. Do you always do that around Japanese people?" Their questions truly caught me off guard, not because I felt insecure in who they perceived me to be, but because I really hadn’t noticed I did that. Fluid identity is just as it sounds: the ability to identify in a way that takes into account the cultural currents and adjust accordingly. The issues it raises permeate all aspects of who I am.

While I faced the struggle of understanding my biracial identity, I also struggled with my professional identity. I get the same head-tilted, squint-eyed, puzzled look after I tell someone that my graduate degree is in Higher Education and Student Affairs Administration. I watch as they try to categorize that into the majors they knew from college and come up empty. When I first graduated and told my family and friends that I was the director of community service-learning, they looked at me and asked, "So, what does that mean? Do you teach?"

The identity of the field of student affairs is a lot like the confusion that comes when I am asked to check one box on a form. Do I teach? Yes. In addition to the courses I’ve taught, I also seek to engage students in conversations that help them tie their academics to their community service. Students will often have an experience on site that causes them to think anew about a social issue, and they will come to me or someone on our staff to try to process it. One such example that comes to my mind occurred as a student was asked to clear an area of brush and weeds to make way for a playground. While completing this task, he came upon someone’s home: a cardboard box and some personal belongings that were hidden by the brush. He told me that he didn’t know what to do and after much thought, he moved the home to an area about 30 yards away. He kept the home intact, but by moving it, he was able to meet the request of the agency to prepare the way for the playground. With uncertainty in his voice, he asked me if he did the right thing. In the conversation that followed, I asked questions that helped him explore his own philosophy of social justice. He came away with a greater understanding of himself, the causes of homelessness, and how he wanted to address the lack of shelter in the community. For him, this was a pivotal moment in his education, even though it didn’t take place in the context of a classroom.

So, yes, I do teach; I am an educator in many interactions I have with students. But is that my job, per se? Well, kind of, but not really. My job description lists things like working with faculty to develop service-learning curriculum, developing service projects, serving as the University liaison with local and national service organizations, and supervising a staff. But like many in the field of student affairs, the education component is inherent in all that I do. In my attempts to explain that to those outside the field, I often get a nod, and even a smile, but most often, I can still see the puzzled look in their eyes.

When you ask multiracial people how they define themselves, you’re likely to hear responses such as "mixed," "hapa," "mestizo," "half," or "doubled." You may even hear a different response from the same person, depending on when or where that person is asked. It is common for me to refer to myself as hapa when I’m speaking with someone familiar with the Japanese culture, but I’ve used the terms mixed, half, and biracial as well. Recently, there was heightened media coverage over the term Tiger Woods uses to describe himself; I don’t have as many heritages in the mix as he does, but I suppose if I did, I’d come up with my own version of "cablinasian" as well. To those outside the multiracial community, the varied responses may be perceived as an inconsistency in the collective or personal sense, an inability to agree upon how multiracial people should identify. But really, the many choices which exist for how a multiracial person self-identifies reflects the great diversity that’s out there and should be seen in a positive light. As Maria Root—a noted researcher in the field of multiracial identity development—penned, it’s the right to identify differently in different situations. With the upcoming Census and other opportunities for people to self-identify according to the boxes, it will be interesting to see the choices multiracial people are given and how they/we respond.

When you ask someone in our field how they define themselves, it may be as a student affairs professional or educator or programmer. Or, maybe this person is in student personnel or even student development. Truth be told, we may each identify differently depending on the context in which we’re asked, by whom, or depending on what was on the schedule for that day. This is a right we have, and it’s one of the things that makes our profession so rich. Like the many racial and ethnic identities within the multiracial community, so, too, does our profession have a wonderful mixture that should be celebrated; it’s also something of which I am proud.

As I tell others about my profession, I’m always struck by the many ways I describe my job. I use different language depending on my relationship with them and depending on their interests and knowledge of the topic. With some folks, particularly faculty members, I talk extensively about service-learning pedagogy. With others, particularly students and community liaisons, I talk about the principles of good practice in combining service and learning and the importance of developing partnerships. Fluid identity exists in our profession, too. Some may call it wearing different hats or being a generalist or many other things, but in the end, much of how we define ourselves depends upon the currents with which we’re surrounded and how we adjust to them.

It used to bother me that I didn’t have a neatly packaged answer about my racial identity and that my brothers and I didn’t answer the question in the same way. And, it used to bother me that even after several conversations with my friends and family, they still seemed to have little idea of what I did professionally. But like my acceptance of self-definition when it comes to being biracial or hapa or both yet neither, so too, did I come to a point when I realized that it was okay to have different answers depending on the context in which the questions about my profession occurred.

This is not to say that we, as a field, shouldn’t have lengthy conversations about identity. On the contrary, it’s often through discussion that we learn; as a character from Shakespeare’s As You Like It states, "when I speak, I think." We need to explore our identity, to ask one another what’s at our core, why we believe what we believe, and why we do what we do. We need to talk beyond the semantics when it comes to how we identify as a field, or as a profession. But we also need to acknowledge that each person may define that differently, and that this is okay. It’s more than ok; it’s one of the things that makes our field wonderfully rich.

Though not given in the context of helping me wrestle with my developing sense of racial identity, Robert Nash said something in class that had a profound impact on how I viewed it. He spoke about the importance of thinking in ellipses, of letting our thoughts be ongoing rather than finished products. For me, particularly in a biracial sense, thinking in ellipses allowed me to view my identity as a process rather than a completed thought. It gave me a freedom to explore without feeling pressure to come up with an answer to give to whoever might ask the next question. It also made me realize that it was important to keep exploring what that answer could be.

I like to think of our profession in ellipses as well. The field of student affairs is constantly developing. Our work involves a population that continues to change, and because of that, I hope, we will not have a definitive, period-at-the-end-of-the-sentence concluding thought on exactly how it is that our profession identifies.

I still get head-tilted questions. I try to view them as opportunities to educate as well as opportunities to reflect upon how my answer then varies from the time prior. Depending on the day, where I was, with whom my time was spent, my responses vary. And whereas before that may have made me doubt myself, today that’s something with which I’ve reconciled. I’ve realized that identity, personally and professionally, is like that: fluid....

Amiko Ine Matsumoto graduated from Westmont College in 1993 with a B.A. in English and a minor in History. She earned her master's degree in Higher Education and Student Affairs Administraion from the University of Vermont in 1995. She is currently the Director of the Office of Community Service at The George Washington University in Washington, DC.