Rant: The Eurasian Menace

When I was a kid Mom told us we're tan because we're part Navajo Indian. Off and on for years as an adult I figured Mom must have been Jewish, what with her using a lot of Jewish terms like "bubula". "I figure Mom was a Mexican", one of my younger sisters said. "I'm not sure what we are, but we're 'something' because we're olive-skinned", quoth my oldest sister.

A DNA test and some sleuthing has me convinced we're Tatar on Mom's side. Not a bad thing to be, really, as "Martha Stewart" and Charles Bronson, as well as Lenin Himself, had/have Tatar ancestry. Nobody around here knows what the hell a Tatar is and even I had to do some reading on them, but if I went to any ex-Soviet bloc country and said I'm Tatar they'd know what I'm talking about.

I was really hung up on the Jewish thing for a while, though. It's hard not to want to be a part of this wonderful people. I've really tried to get enthusiastic about learning Hebrew and converting, and retiring in Israel.

But I am not the least bit Jewish, and it is really not who I am. I am Eurasian. Back in Hawaii when I was a kid there was a store called Eurasian Antiques, and my mom being something of an antiques nut I heard the name come up fairly often, and I always liked the sound of it. Of course it was a store that sold antiques from Europe or at least European cultures like the US mainland, and also from Asia.

Well, on my father's side they're all pure WASP in fact one aunt or something is or was in the Daughters Of The American Revolution, which are the sort of people Himmler would have gotten along fine with. From the information I've been able to weasel out of my mother's sister, still alive in her 90s, their people were pretty dark. "From sitting in the sun when she was little" she said about her mother or mother's mother. Groups have stayed pretty insular until the last 50 years or so, and if you were a Lithuanian Tatar, you married another Lithuanian Tatar, marrying a mere Lithuanian was probably unlikely. They did settle and raise a few generations in the Pasadena area, where there's a big Lithuanian church dedicated to Saint Casimir.

My mother was a profoundly unhappy person. It may have been simple mental illness, poor diet, not enough sun, a number of things. The not enough sun would be because Mom would get really brown. And in 1950s/60s Southern California it was not good to be really brown. Nor, really, in 1970s Hawaii, between the snobbish Japanese and the WASPy types Dad had around him.

I think Mom really wanted to be in the mainstream of US society, and I think really tried her best to become a WASP. She eschewed religion, and good on her for that, read a lot of books, had us call her "mum" when we were little, and tried to pass herself off as some kind of Eastern European nobility. In fact, my older sister once showed me a newspaper clipping about my parents' marriage, and it said Mom was Lithuanian nobility. Yeah, well, Tatars served the nobility but they were not nobility themselves; they were a warrior class. But that explanation was necessary because Mom, in the photo, looks "ethnic". My older sis also told me that Dad's folks were very angry about the marriage, that their "purebred" son should marry this "steerage immigrant".

I think the move to Hawaii was for a number of reasons. Dad thought he's hooked up a good job there (he got bait-and-switched, as whites can be cheated with impunity there) and had bought a fixer-upper house he did a lot of work on, and his aunt, my "Aunt Mary" was there and probably encouraged him, and I think part of it was in Hawaii no one would sneer at a very white dad with a brown wife and gaggle of brown kids. In fact, we never thought about it.

So I grew up with a lot of European culture, foods, books, etc. Dad played lot of classical music when he wasn't playing Herb Alpert or "world" music. But I also grew up profundly non-European. Especially after we became very poor, one has to "go native" to survive. So I have lines of thought and tastes in food and views on politics and society that are really Asian, not European.

In Hawaii, I am pegged as white, the hated "haole". Here in California I am "white enough". In flyover country I'd be considered "something" and probably be accused of being Jewish behind my back. Some kind of non-white commie ratbastard. Maybe a Middle-Easterner, out to bomb us all! Yeah, I'm not gonna go live in the Midwest.

So, with my WASP-with-a-tan looks, if I wanted to become something else, some other nationality and go live in that nationality's land, converting to Judaism is the most sensible choice. But .... I am not Jewish. The idea of a god that's made a pact with a particular people is ... interesting. But I can't shake that I'm a Buddhist and we Buddhists think that all kinds of ideas of god are interesting and fun, and sometimes not, too, but the whole "no other god before me" is just nuts.

Back in time, especially during the Cold War, much was made of the Russians being "Asiatic" and the "Asiatic hordes" but this is what I am - a combination of WASP and Western Asian, Tatar. I look European maybe with a bit of a tan but European, but I didn't grow up being that little white boy in the book "On Cherry Street" towing a wagon etc eating ice cream from the Good Humour man. Instead I was running to the beach with a surfboard and sucking on some delicious Yick Lung li hing mui. We did the Hokey Pokey in school but we also did Okinawan folk dances.

The surprise of a mainstream white American if they know how different I am from them could only be matched by the surprise of the lady who runs the Nichi-Bei store in Japantown when I was telling her all the Japanese things and customs I grew up with. "He's more Japanese than us!" she exclaimed.

So yeah, race and culture mixing for the win. The Eurasian menace is here.