Comparing Two Identities

My mother and my father are two extremely different people. My mother enjoys the thought of an organized, tidy household that she can easily control. My father is a man who enjoys the relaxed and carefree type of parenting in which he only has to use his authority whenever something exceptionally horrible occurs. My mother likes to rise earlier than the sun, and my father likes to sleep in as late as a teenager. But there is one obvious difference that emerges whenever someone glances between them: my mother is Caucasian, and my father is Asian. And there I stand in the middle, a mix of those two races. Growing up, I never thought of myself as different from the majority of white children that I went to elementary school with. Of course, race
I became friends with more Asian children, but still held onto the friendships that I had from my past. I thought this would help me identify both races and cultures that I strived to maintain, but it created a monstrous dilemma. Suddenly I was split between two identities. They played a furious tug of war game over my mind, and my heart was torn between the two. My friends would joke that I wasn’t a true Asian whenever I failed to receive a high grade, and I forced myself to laugh along despite how internally conflicted I was. My cousin claimed that I was not proud to be Asian because I wanted to lighten my hair when I was ten years old. Shopping at Asian markets was like stepping into a spotlight as families would stare at me. To the passing strangers, I was a tainted child for being half of a true Asian. Even though they still love me for who I am, my father’s brothers and sisters saw him as a failure for marrying a white woman and having children with her because the family bloodline was polluted. The beginning of my teenage years weren’t the years of growing. Instead, they squashed the confidence I had in my identity and quickly became a time for grieving. I wasn’t whole. It felt like when I was born, the printer for my certificate ran out of ink and decided to play a cruel joke by letting me live like I was incomplete. I was simply half a human, made with the scraps that no one else wanted and stitched together