My mixed race family
My mother, father, older brother and youngest sister. My oldest brother my younger sister are not pictured
I come from a mixed race family but I am not mixed race myself. I was born in Korea and, presumably, both my biological parents were Korean (although this has never been confirmed). I was adopted as a baby by an all white all-American family. My two older brothers and younger sister were blonde, blue-eyed children who looked like my parents. And then there was me, dark and oriental. When I was 10, my parents adopted another Korean child two years younger than me. Our family was mixed race and my mother came across prejudices here and there as did both myself and my Korean sister (and come to think of it, probably everyone in my family came across it) and although racism has always been a part of my life, I have learned to deal with it and the older I become, the less it hurts when it happens. I write more about racism in an earlier blog post, Racism in Britain.
My own children are mixed race and come from a mixed race, cross-cultural family. Their father is British caucasian and their mother is Korean American. In my opinion, of course my children are beautiful and they will no doubt become beautiful adults. We don’t really talk that much about the fact that they are mixed race. They do know this, I am sure, but because they know nothing different, it is a completely natural and normal thing for them.
Sometimes when I see photos of them, they seem to look more Korean, more oriental looking. My husband has a baby picture of our daughter as the front screen on his phone. If you just glance at it, she looks 100% oriental. A colleague of my husband’s asked who it was. When my husband told him, he seemed surprised but also relieved. We are sure he thought to himself but was too polite to say, “Why does Nick have a photo of a Chinese baby on his phone?”!
Being in a mixed race family is pretty good I think. It was when I was growing up and it is now for my own family.
When I went on the Chrissy B TV chat show, I met an amazing woman who has made a documentary about racism in Hong Kong. Her name is Jody-Lan Castle and she blogs about being mixed race and being in a mixed race relationship, humanitarian and cultural issues. She is a journalist, photographer and film-maker. She is awesome. Here is her blog Humanitarian Focus http://jodylancastle.wordpress.com/
I think for me, personally I am sometimes embarassed about looking ‘different’ so I don’t bring it up as a conversation topic. I don’t want to make it a huge issue in our family. Nick is more at ease about talking about it and has sometimes suggested that we talk about it more. I explore this in more detail in my book, Bringing Up Brits.
I would really love to hear your comments on this topic. It is sometimes a lonely place to be. I was delighted to meet Jody-Lan Castle because even though she is probably two decades younger than me, we had so much in common and so much to talk about. I enjoy reading her blog posts.
I look forward to reading your comments about being in a mixed race family or having mixed race children.
My youngest sister with her youngest nephew, Jonah Fenn
Anna Grace, Jonah, Samuel
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To start off, I love to read your blogs. And being an expat in a mixed race family living in the uk, I can identify to your stories.
Here some experiences from me:
When we lived in my husbands country and the first time I would come to a party of his work, people looked shocked to notice that he had married a white lady.
And vice versa it happened as well. People automatically expect that a white lady marries a white man and vice versa. It always amuses me.
Or when we and the kids are flying together one of us is holding the boarding cards. Most of the time they will ask the person without bording cards where their card is…. The first time it happened was with my husband, so you automatically think about racism. So we changed roles, but it also happened to me. And that while we clearly showed 4 boarding cards!
Having lived in Africa I found it sometimes easy to look different as people would not expect that I know all the rules of the society. Being white in England, I am expected to know all the social rules although they are different from my country!!
It almost feels that I am less a foreigner than my husband, although for both of us it is a foreign country!
Hi Marie, thanks so much! And thank you for your comments – I totally know what you mean. When we were living and working in Tokyo, people would automatically look to me but in actual fact, it was my white boyfriend (now husband) who could speak Japanese better. Even though he was speaking Japanese, they would still only look at me! I looked Japanese so people expected me to be Japanese. It was very interesting – for the first time I fit in perfectly in terms of race (even though I was actually Korean) but I felt totally foreign.
My wife is black and I’m white. We live in the US and most of the hostility we face is from black women who do not appreciate that my wife married a white guy. In one particularly depressing/amusing instance, I was having a disagreement with a guy about something and he (of course) said I was racist. My wife arrived just then with our kids in tow. He looked at them and back at me and reaffirmed by racism. I didn’t know whether to laugh or despair.
Oddly, we had more of these types of incidents when living in oh so tolerant and liberal NYC vs. the south. In the south nobody batted an eye and neither of us ever had a problem. Odd thing that.
Thanks for your comment. I am surprised about what you say about NYC. I never would have thought that.
I think the South went through its racial strife an animus in such an open and nasty way that when it was over, it was really over. The northeast never really had that steam valve release so that pressure is there more. I don’t know. YMMV.
This is a fascinating post, Meghan. I am in a dual heritage family too – I’m White British & my husband is Black British (Caribbean). Interestingly our son says he is ‘black like daddy’ but one of his close school friends who is also dual heritage but the other way round says he’s white like his daddy. Maybe it’s a father-son identification thing? I wonder if it would be different if we had girls?
Thanks for your comment Shanta. Very interesting! Yes I would say it’s a father/son thing here. I wonder if it’s the same with girls and their mothers. I know my daughter looks more like me than her father but she’s never told me which race she feels more like – perhaps I’ll ask her. And I’ll ask my older son as well.
I never asked him either, he just came out with it! I was a bit taken aback at first, as it seemed like something a teenager might say rather than a 6-year-old. But I love that he’s comfortable to say how he feels. And, of course, his views on race, heritage and identity will evolve as he grows.
Thanks for your comment Shanta. That is surprising and I can see why you’d be taken aback. I think children can be VERY perceptive but they just see things as they are and don’t analize them (like I do!). My daughter says that she knows she has a darker skin tone than her father and most of the other girls at school. (But she’s not as dark as me.) She also said that most people ask her if she’s Chinese or Asian. She said that she does relate to me, how I look, but if she was in amongst 100 people, you would not be able to pick her out as a Korean girl. (I think she means she would blend in more.)
It’s funny because I view my children to be more white, like their father. Don’t know why actually. Maybe because they are growing up in their father’s country??
I grew up in a Korean-American family in the Midwest and my husband is Caucasian and from the South. We adopted our son from Korea and live in Britain now. I love being here because no one here thinks that our son is adopted- we can just focus on being a family (whereas in the US, our friends knew we had adopted and so would talk about it more).
I have wondered what the experience will be like for my son, who is 100% Korean like me. I do feel that racial typing is more common here and that people assume that I am Chinese or that I can’t speak English. I can understand this because there aren’t all that many Asians up here in the northeast.
How has it been for your kids in school? Do the other kids treat them differently? The same? I should say too that I grew up in a predominately white neighborhood and so I have some idea of what it is like to be the only one that is different, but that was in the 70s. Do you think things have changed much? I feel that in the US, kids today don’t think as much about race as they did when I was coming along. What do you think?
Your kids are gorgeous by the way!
Yes, kids are more aware of different races and cultures now – I think schools help with that. My kids get called Chinese in school but not all that often. When asked outright, their peers think they are Chinese. Chinese seems to be the main race that people think they are. But, it’s clear when they speak that they are British. People think I’m Chinese too, but people here are way too polite to mention it unless I bring it up and I almost never do.
Thanks so much for sharing your experience here. I think it’s important to share stories and raise awareness. There are so many people in our similar situations.
Did you know I was adopted too? I was adopted into a white American family though so people always knew I was adopted. My mother got some very rude comments when I was little.
Great blog! I can relate moving to the UK and being lost whenever pop culture was discussed. I felt uncomfortable reading your description of yourself and children as orientalise as it is used only for objects(I’m of East Asian heritage as well) and is a racial slur.
Thanks for your comment Elliot. Hope you feel more settled in now and you’re getting used to the pop culture. I know I am and chuckle whenever things like The Great British Bake Off or Dragon’s Den make headlines because everyone seems to know (not just one area like in the States).
Yikes, I did not intend to cause any offence or uncomfortableness and I’m so sorry that I did, by using the term Oriental. When I was young, my mother always referred to me as being Oriental. Nowadays, not so much, but I never thought it was a racial slur nor have I ever heard of that until now. I’m really sorry. I won’t be using that anymore. I was a child in the 70’s and 80’s so I guess a lot has changed since then! Let me know how you’re doing getting used to life in the UK and where you’re from.
Hi Meghan,
I am sorry to comment on an old point but I found this topic so very interesting. I am American, my husband is British, and my visa application is currently being processed by the Immigration Office in Sheffield (the ridiculousness that is the post-2012 Family Settlement Visa is an entirely different rant). I have loved reading your blog because I will probably be raising my own half-British, half-American offspring one day (not just yet, though).
This topic really intrigued me because I suppose you could call my family multi-racial. My mother, father, and younger brother are all as-white-as-they-come-in-the-Midwest Americans. We adopted my younger sister when she was a month old. She herself is multi-racial (white, black, and Native American- we had to get permission from the Cherokee tribe to adopt her). We are so fortunate to live in such an accepting community because, even though she is usually the only person of American-American heritage, it’s a non-issue. The fact that she was adopted is just the means through which she entered the family, not something that defines her. My mom often jokes that she was her favorite baby because she came pain free! I like to think that, though she obviously knows that she is phenotypically different than her siblings and parents, she knows that she is as integral a part of our family as the rest of us. Because I don’t think of her as ‘my black sister,’ there have been times when I forget to mention that fact to people and they are so confused when they meet her. My parents love the ‘let me guess whose parents you are’ game at parent-teacher conferences. We did face some discrimination during a trip to the south when she was a baby but, other wise, never an issue. Some people assume that she was adopted from Africa which is really funny because she was born closer to where we currently live than the rest of us. I have asked her and I think she kind of likes the fact that she is a bit different, and especially likes that she’s not ‘crazy’ like the rest of us (as any 17-year old would). Regardless, she’s my little sister and I love her all the same.
What really interests me is that, though the US is supposedly the more ‘racist’ country, inter-racial adoptions are not uncommon here. However, my husband’s nan made the comment once that my sister never would have been placed with a white family if she had been adopted in England. My husband’s father, paternal aunt, and maternal uncle are all adopted so his family is familiar with the process. I thought it was very interesting that a society that is supposed to be more culturally inclusive would find the purposeful creation of mixed-race families taboo.
Sorry for the long post but it is just something that I found interesting (and different) about the US vs. the UK. I am loving the blog and look forward to reading your book!
-Sarah
Thanks very much for your comment Sarah. I loved reading it. I have noticed that adoption is less common overall in the UK as compared to the US. I knew so many kids who were adopted when I was growing up. It seemed very normal and was the norm. Here in the UK I come across it a lot less and know very few people who have been adopted or who have adopted children. Perhaps that’s because I know fewer people here. However, I have noticed that people seem more shocked and upset by it or expect me to be upset by it. That is very different here. It’s not really talked about here – as with most things, it’s considered impolite to ask people about their lives unless you know them very well and even then, people can be very private. One of my neighbors has clearly adopted two children from Africa and I’m dying to ask her about it but she is British and I’ve made the mistake of offending people before without intending to so don’t dare talk to her about it unless she brings it up which is highly unlikely. I live in a very white town so there’s not a lot of mixed race families around. I’m sure it’s different in London and larger cities. But yes, adoption here is less common overall.
I hope you enjoy my book, thanks so much for reading it 🙂