Chapter 1

Potatoes or Rice?


When you grow up different from everybody else, you tend to notice things at an early age. And those early memories, for one reason or another, whether they are painful or sweet mark you and mold you into who you are. My early memories do not differ very much from everyone else’s.

I remember running around the house and playing with plastic cars with my brother David. I remember the summer days the neighborhood kids played in the small trailer park that our family lived in off a busy highway in upstate New York. I remember my mother praising me when she compared my brother’s whining behavior at the attention Mother paid to our infant sister as I had not protested when David had been born. I remember Mom praising me for dressing myself at an early age – though I can’t imagine what I wore. I remember my father bent over the bathtub or toilet and Mother chided him for saying a bad word. I felt entitled to punish him by urinating on his leg. He wore plaid polyester pants. It is rather telling what one remembers.

When I was a boy, I asked what color my mother’s eyes were. She said brown. Then I asked what color was her hair. She said black. I asked Mom what color were my eyes. She said brown. And I asked her what color was my hair. She said black like hers. I asked what color were Daddy’s eyes. She said blue. “What color was Daddy’s hair?” I asked. Brown, she responded. I told her that I wanted blue eyes and brown hair just like my Dad.

My Mom didn’t say that I couldn’t have brown hair or blue eyes but instead said nothing. I could feel her become sad. She was so young back then and I never apologized for such a crass remark.

My father worked and would come home to meat and potatoes. Oma, my paternal grandmother, gave her classes on American cuisine. As my current size and girth attests, Mama was a great cook. She had made pork chops and gravy. My brother David had been slurping gravy and shoveling spoonfuls of white rice with a spoon. Mom too ate rice with a spoon and asked me, “Son, what do you want to eat rice or mashed potatoes?”

My father sat silent. He ate his meal with his elbows on the table but he ate potatoes.

I knew I was making a choice between that of my mother and father, in which cultural universe would become my lair. It was an important choice and every second felt like an hour.

“Mashed Potatoes,” I replied.

I know by saying this I will become the bane of multicultural enthusiasts out there – especially the Fil-Ams (Filipino-Americans) like me who will decry this disloyalty to the blood an affront to nationalism. And I may not be pure enough for them anyway as I am only “Half.” But I made a decision a long time ago to screw them. I was a coconut – brown on the outside, white on the inside.

As far as racial preferences go, I usually say off-white.

I would later grow up in Arizona and identify myself as a Latin more than an Oriental. I guess it would have been different if I grew up in Cerritos, California or Honolulu or even the Philippines. But I didn’t.

When people usually ask me: “What are you?” I take a smart aleck approach: “Has not a Jew not eyes? If you prick us, do we not bleed . . .” or I say, “I dunno guess?” Then they guess and I usually come up with all sorts of equivocating responses: Irish, Chinese, Scottish, German, Malay, Apache, Mexican, and recently Arab. They are not exactly the truth, but enough to keep them off balance.

A gay author on the radio program “Fresh Air” had been interviewed about one of his characters who was racially ambiguous con man masquerading as a feng shui consultant. This character would fake ethnicities. He would become a Dominican to one man and to another man, he was a North African. Though I couldn’t imagine myself living that lifestyle, I identified with being different things to different people as an Ottoman Jew residing Belgrade.

For a long time, I had always wanted to be white, because my father was white. I lived in the white culture. I wanted badly to fit in. It was a bit of culture shock to find out that when my mother told my Dad that she had enough of the upstate winters, that we would not be moving to Iowa, Indiana or another pale state but to Arizona – Hispanic, Arizona – Mexican, Arizona.