Weird but Normal Read online

  Dedication

  For you, mostly,

  and a little bit

  for me

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Preface/Intro/I Don’t Know What to Call This

  Part I: On Being Human™

  I Am the Girl from Your Tampon Commercials

  White Friend Confessional

  The Happiest Place on Earth, God Dammit

  A Time Line of My Online Personas

  You’re from the Midwest?! What’s That Like?

  Mamma Mia

  Depression Isn’t a Competition, but, Like, Why Aren’t I Winning?

  Part II: On Being Professional

  How to Quit Your Job and Change Your Life

  Work Orientation for Women

  College 101

  How I Take My Coffee

  Procrastination but Make It Look Put Together

  My Dog Explains My Weekly Schedule

  Part III: On Being Domestic and Beautiful

  Mustache Lady

  I’m a Guy’s Girl

  National American Miss Pre-teen Wisconsin

  Hollywood and Media Representation Presents: How Women Age

  Bath & Body Works Is the Suburban Nonsense I Crave

  Items of Clothing, Defined

  Does This Count as Exercise?

  Part IV: On Being Horny and in Love and Sometimes Even Both

  All the Things I Thought Sex Was

  Attention Target Shoppers: This Store Is Now Rife with Sexual Tension

  How to Date Online

  Treating Objects like Women

  A Nice Piece of Satire You Can Take Home to Your Parents

  I Don’t Know How to Be a Bride

  The Holy Sacrament of Birth Control

  Part V: On Being Human

  Learning How to Not Shit Myself

  Daily Affirmations for My Sister

  Father Mia

  Can I Be a Good Girl While Still Getting Fucked Up?

  Can I Ask This Person About Their Race: A Guide

  All Rise for the Honorable Mia Mercado

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Preface/Intro/I Don’t Know What to Call This But It’s Like

  * * *

  THIS IS WHAT THE BOOK IS ABOUT

  PLEASE DON’T SKIM

  OKAY YOU’RE SKIPPING IT ENTIRELY

  NEVERMIND

  * * *

  I spend a lot of my time wondering what it would be like to feel normal all the time. To wake up, refreshed, after exactly eight hours of sleep and walk through life feeling confident and self-assured. To breathe in the new day and think, “I bet everyone I encounter will want to hear what I have to say.” Never stopping to wonder, “Maybe my third-grade teacher hated me and I didn’t know?” To fall asleep so, so easily, never worrying about the dumb thing I said earlier that day or the dumb thing I might say tomorrow or the dumb thing I said in Sunday school a decade ago.

  I don’t think anyone feels completely normal all of the time, but I do feel like I’ve spent much of my life being highly embarrassed by my body, my brain, and my whole entire self. I am wildly comfortable with being uncomfortable in my own skin. I’ve tried to wax, pluck, cleanse, ignore, self-care, ironically joke about, and self-deprecatingly tweet the discomfort away, and wow, can you believe it, the feeling of not feeling normal has never actually left me.

  This is not to ignore the many cis, straight, able-bodied privileges I have been afforded. I know checking one’s privilege has become an empty rallying cry for anyone who wants to talk about the intersection of the personal and the political. Often, I wonder whether I’m different enough to have any authority on the subject of feeling strange. If my face passes as white when my summer tan fades. If my brain passes as healthy when I don’t talk about my depression. But it would be a lie to ignore the ways in which I’m constantly reminded I’m different. Being out of place feels as normal to me as the air we all breathe.

  My discomfort with those differences has led me to preemptively tell everyone all the ways in which I assume I’m strange. (Would Defense Mechanism be a good name for an emo band?) I’ve thought, “Maybe if I tokenize my half-Asian self in this wholly white room, one of the multiple Megans will not do it to me.” Or, “Perhaps I can fill my Twitter feed with these deeply negative feelings and each Like will give me one (1) serotonin.” But, oops surprise, talking about hating yourself does not a personality make. It isn’t a fun, quirky brand of comedy. It’s just really draining. And ultimately, sad.

  So, I’m trying this thing where I acknowledge the parts of myself that make me feel weird without quantifying them as “bad.” Because, oops surprise again, a lot of the parts of ourselves we assume to be strange are actually really common. Despite the dozens of bottles I’ve bought since 2001, I cannot be the only person keeping Nair in the hair-removal business. Because I have eyes and ears and a Wi-Fi connection, I know I am not the only one screaming for the world to love them while also tweeting things like “lol @ that feeling when ur just a big trash dump!!!”

  These parts of ourselves are often internalized and intentionally hidden. They’re associated with shame, guilt, and panic dreams where Sarah from Catholic confirmation class tells everyone, “Mia thinks premarital sex is bad, but joke’s on her because she is years out from seeing even one single penis!” If we talked about these awkward parts more, we’d realize many of the things we think make us weird are astonishingly normal.

  While we’re obsessing about things that are actually quite ordinary, there are lots of legitimately strange things we should be directing our time, tweets, and energy toward. Weird things we’ve come to culturally accept as normal, like expecting women to wear uncomfortable shoes that make them taller—but not so tall as to scare straight men; how we shave some body hair while conditioning others; and the fact that we light a cake on fire and sing to it to celebrate being alive. Sometimes all I want to do is rip off my BOGO heels and scream, “WHAT IS EVEN GOING ON HERE?”

  There are rituals, specifically those of womanhood, that I follow blindly, only pausing briefly to contemplate why I think I need a $25 candle that smells like an ocean that doesn’t exist. Going on a Target run makes me feel seen on a spiritual level, and I have, more than once, eaten Halo Top ice cream and called it self-care. I am not above admittedly absurd, ritualistic ways of living. I am deeply in the trenches of them, holding my breath and trying to make eye contact with someone else down here who shares my discomfort with the whole situation.

  I know I don’t have all or perhaps any of the answers when it comes to feeling normal in our weird human flesh. I don’t know all the steps to freeing either the nipple or my increasing number of nipple hairs, but I do know that I can’t keep up with all the tweezing, tittering, trimming, and shrinking socially required to be a “normal” human woman in this weird-ass world.

  I’m fucking tired. At the end of the day, sometimes I just want to laugh. Or half-smile. Or do one of those appreciatory silently-blow-air-out-of-my-nose-but-not-really-laugh laughs. Maybe we can all exhale a little together.

  Part 1

  On Being Human™

  These are stories about our outward-facing selves. The face we put on when we leave the house. The assumptions people make when they see that face. As much as I’d like to mask the ways in which I feel strange or uncomfortable or out of place, the world is going to see me however they see me. These are stories about people’s assumptions about me because I’m half-Asian, half-white, from the Midwest, female, racially ambiguous, violently beautiful, aggressively charismatic, humble.

  These are stories about how
I’ve hidden behind the people I’ve pretended to be and the people I’m expected to be, how I often feel I’m performing normality rather than just living it. They’re about the fact that these are all standard practices of being a person.

  I Am the Girl from Your Tampon Commercials

  Everyone starts out strange. As children, we’re all just tiny, little weirdos testing the limits of what is normal, acceptable behavior and what makes our parents blush or swear in public. “But I wasn’t a strange child,” you say, actively blocking out memories where you shoved bundled up socks down your pants or played a made-up game called Dead Girl where the whole premise was that you were a girl who was dead. I promise you, all children are fucking weird.

  When I was little but not little enough for it to be cute (nine or ten-ish), I used to play a game called Orphans with my sister and cousins who were all five to seven years younger than me. The game went like this: we were orphans trying to escape an orphanage. That’s it. That was the whole game. I think I saw Annie once and let it become my entire personality for most of elementary school.

  When playing the classic game Orphans, you start by making up orphan names and identities. I, the oldest and therefore bossiest/bitchiest of the group, took to writing down each of our names and personas in a notebook. This was the majority of the game. My sister, whose non-orphan name is Ana, would be a Jessica or Stephanie or Cassandra. My cousins would be a Stephanie or Cassandra or Jessica, depending on who Ana didn’t want to be. I would almost always be Molly, a brunette with freckles.

  I could have been Esther, a fairy trapped in a human girl’s body, or Indigo, an alien with three-foot eyelashes, or even Debra, a bucket with arms and legs. But my dream Orphan Girl was Molly, a brunette with freckles.

  That, I suppose, was the epitome of a “pretty girl” to me, as someone who was/is/always will be half-Asian, half-white, and wholly racially ambiguous.* My hair is technically brown. I do have these faint, freckle-adjacent things dotted around my eyes and nose. But no one has or will ever describe me as “a brunette with freckles.”

  The thing about racial ambiguity is it is never self-assigned. You first dip a toe in it when you don’t know what racial box to check on a form. (Who gets to claim “Other” in the Race Wars???) You wade in further still when someone makes a comment about those people in front of you, a member of those implied people. You realize you’ve been completely drenched this whole time after enough people ask, “What are you?” In those moments, you wish you were Debra, a bucket with arms and legs.

  One of the first times I realized the world had dubbed me “ambiguous,” I was about eight and in a library in suburban Wisconsin. My family had come for a free children’s program where someone from the zoo brought in animals. This was both so kids could learn about animals and so parents could pretend their kids were learning about animals while they could have one goddamn brief moment of peace. After showing off snakes and various bugs for kids to ooh and ugh at, the speaker brought out his grand finale: a porcupine.

  “Who wants to come feed the porcupine a banana?” the animal man asked, like it was a normal thing to say. In a rare moment of extroversion, I raised my hand. He called me up, and I made my way through the small group of kids seated cross-legged on the floor. He asked me my name. I said, “Mia.” He asked where I was from. I said, “Glendale,” the small city outside of Milwaukee where I’d lived my entire life. It was also the place where the library and, in turn, all of us were currently located. “No,” he asked again, probably chuckling a little, “Where are you from?”

  Now, in my late twenties, I’m all too familiar with this line of questioning. The little laugh that comes along with the change in emphasis, like I’m the dum-dum for not realizing how racially unidentifiable my face is. “What ethnicity are you?” or a question along similar misinformed lines is something I’ve been asked so frequently my answer is not only well-rehearsed, it comes equipped with a brief lesson in Filipino history and the etymology of my last name. I’m working on a choreographed musical number called, “Spain Colonized the Philippines and All I Got Was a Spanish-Sounding Last Name and a Whole Lot of Catholicism.”

  My dad is Filipino; he came to the US at sixteen. My mom is white, most likely German and Irish and sometimes she throws in something spicy and exotic like French. Despite what “multicultural” marketing campaigns would have you believe, our house was not some bicultural mecca, equal and distinct parts Filipino and white. Sometimes we’d eat chicken adobo and I’d hear my dad talk to his siblings on the phone in Tagalog. We also ate a lot of cream cheese and saw my mom’s side of the family for most holidays. My siblings and I frequently asked my dad things like “How do you say ‘pass the juice’?” (Paki abot ng juice) and “Do we have accents to you?” (No). That was the extent to which any of us questioned our own race.

  At eight, I hadn’t given much thought to being biracial, let alone being “racially ambiguous.” So, when a man I’d just met with a porcupine I’d also just met asked where I was from, for a second time, I simply replied, “. . . America?” I was about to feed a banana to a porcupine in a public library in Wisconsin, and somehow I was the most foreign part of the situation. I’m sure he laughed at my naivety. I wish I would have laughed at his.

  I’ve learned my assumed race changes depending on where I am. When my family moved to an even more suburban town in Wisconsin, one I now know has a population that is about 97 percent white, people thought I was Chinese.

  When other kids, and adults for that matter, would call me Chinese, I didn’t really understand the nuance, but I knew they weren’t trying to start a dialogue about race. Could you imagine, though? Me and A.J., two nine-year-olds from Grafton, Wisconsin, having a thoughtful discussion on the sociopolitical implications of race and not being white in America? Mrs. G asking if my lack of participation in class was influenced by my assumptions about being female, being Asian, or both? I couldn’t even articulate why the Blue Power Ranger was my favorite. I obviously was not about to talk eloquently about race with anyone. (In hindsight, I realize it was because Billy, the Blue Power Ranger, made me the horniest.)

  Sometimes people would identify me as Chinese, but like a question rather than a statement. As if they knew they shouldn’t be assigning my ethnicity to me but couldn’t keep themselves from blurting it out. “You’re . . . Chi . . . nese . . . ?” they’d say, waiting for me to confirm or disagree or clap or laugh or, perhaps, implode entirely.

  This is about the time when I met my friend Racial Ambiguity. We’ll call her Rachel, for short. We’re on a first-name basis, me and her.

  Rachel was cool! Rachel was mysterious! Rachel was my best and closest friend!!! Being Racially Ambiguous™ (cue rainbows and sparkles) was my exit ramp from being seen as Exclusively Asian/Chinese/LOL ARE THEY EVEN DIFFERENT THOUGH HA HA WAIT WHERE ARE YOU GOING?

  Rachel and I lived in our own post-racial world. We took it as a compliment when people assumed I and the only other Asian kid in my graduating high school class were either dating or related (it was actually neither!!!). We bragged to our friends senior year when Blake, a decidedly hot boy, called us hot!!! Leaving out the part where he said, “for an Asian girl.” When other people got yearbook superlatives like Most Likely to Succeed and Most Likely to Get Arrested (2008 in suburban Wisconsin was weird), we obliged when our friend said I looked like Brenda Song and agreed to have my face on the Celebrity Look-Alike page. I guess, if you think about it, my superlative was Most Asian. Rachel and I suppressed that memory from middle school when two girls we didn’t know called me a “monkey” at the public pool. We tried not to think about how that happened the summer when our skin was darker and we hadn’t yet learned about Nair for Facial Hair. Rachel Ambiguity was my best, most delusional friend.

  College was similar. Rachel and I either believed ourselves to be white-passing enough for people to say nothing or we ignored race altogether. I realize this is a strange sort of privilege, to not feel an urgency t
o confront your half-whiteness. To have your ethnicity seen as “exotic” instead of overtly threatening. To have the racism you experience be coded instead of explicit. This is not meant to be an excuse for the undeniably awful things people have said to and about me. It is, hopefully, a bit of consolation to some other biracial kid out there, staring at themselves in the mirror, playing the “Which parts of my face are Asian and which are white?” game. The answer is all of them are both.

  The first time I felt Seen™ was a 2010 Kotex commercial. It showed a “believably attractive, eighteen- to twenty-four-year-old female” walking confidently around an all-white set. “You can relate to me because I’m racially ambiguous,” the actress said, cheekily. Yes, Rachel and I whispered, staring at this facsimile of our own unidentifiable features, we relate.

  I remember a flood of Othering moments. A catalog of times I ignored my own differences, hoping it’d make them disappear to everyone else. But it hadn’t stopped that guy in high school who, when we were out bowling with our friends, wrote my name down as “rice picker” on the TV screen that keeps score. It didn’t stop someone from shouting, “Asians are gay! I hate Asians!” as I walked home from babysitting one evening.* It didn’t stop a girl during my senior year of high school from playfully talking about how she wished she could “borrow” my skin for scholarship applications.

  After going to college, based solely on the color of my skin, of course, I moved to Kansas City for a job. There, I magically became a proud Latina woman! My first day as a full-time employee, I was included on an email with a handful of other people, asking about our experiences with quinceañeras. (I had never had one nor been to one.) When my team was developing products specifically targeted toward Asian American consumers—yes, the word used is “target”; the thing about corporate America is it is often extremely gross and disgusting!—I offered my opinion. Saying I was ignored is almost being generous. I’m assuming I wasn’t “Asian enough” or “the right kind of Asian” or, as they likely would have put it, not within their “target demographic” (AKA I wasn’t Asian enough). In one meeting, comprised of about ten people, one of whom had “Vice President” in her title, people were talking about “Trends Among Hispanic Consumers” or some other euphemistic way to say “Oh, LOL, we should talk about Latinx people, huh?” The Vice President turned to me and said, “Do these insights resonate with you?”