Interracial Couple

I was inspired recently by a blog that my Best Friend Since Preschool recommended.  The Offbeat Mama blog (found here) is written by a wife/mother and about her adventures through both.  The blog entry was entitled  Why Our Multi-Cultural Family Rocks and talked about her experiences in being married to and having children with her husband, a man from Cambodia, and all the things she learned from such.

Quite similarly, my fiancee is quite the nuance to some.  Over the phone, you'd never mistake him for anything but the Kentucky boy that he is, especially when he feels passionately; that draaawl slides out and sticks right to my heart.  In person, however, he's 6'1" and looks decidedly... ethnic.  Bobby is 3/8th's Chinese; his father is 3/4's Chinese, his grandmother's father was English, her mother Chinese from Hong Kong, where both grandparents still live today.  Bobby's mom is Irish and Native American, all of which boiled down together to make a very tall ethnic lookin' man who, with short hair looks sorta Asian and with long hair sorta Indian.  However, he was raised in Kentucky, played football, baseball, soccer, ate fried chicken and mashed potatoes, watched Saved by the Bell, and wears jeans and white or black undershirts most of the time.  He's a blend of different ethnicities but is culturally American.  I don't much think about whether he's Chinese or Caucasian or Indian (I like referring to him as "ethnic" just because it tickles me), I just think he's amazing and I want his last name.

Back to the blog- I began wondering whether Bobby and I were an quote-un-quote interracial couple.  I don't necessarily feel interracial because, unlike the Offbeat Mama, my future husband was raised in Kentucky, not Cambodia.  I wonder, though, if people see us as interracial.  I broached the subject with Bobby the other night, who is so very good about my exploration into the idea of "I'm not marrying a blonde-haired white kid who's six generations are from Alabama" (like me).  I get tickled when people mispronounce his (our) last name, Kwok, which is pronounced exactly phonetically; I love hearing about his grandmother's doing Tai Chi in her backyard; I fantasize about people's reactions when they see my last name before meeting me; I looked up the Chinese symbol for Kwok only yesterday, which, by the way, is 郭.  Between Bobby and I, we have determined that sometimes we are interracial and sometimes we're not.  To us, I think we're just Heather and Bobby, the dynamic sushi-eating, nerf-gun shooting, happy life-ing duo; to some, they see us the same way.  To others, I think we're the nuance that they sometimes see Bobby as, especially when they hear our last name.  We've also decided that we don't much mind either way.  To be thought of as just a couple is freeing; never mind what we look like, we just are.  On the flip side, it opens an opportunity to show people how not-different we think we all are.  Somewhere over the course of my 6 years in college and graduate school, my unconscious perception of the gap between "me" and "them" narrowed.  I like to say that in my hometown, there are two religions, Baptist and Methodist, and that pretty much describes the cultural make-up of the town: white and black.  Meeting so many different people in college slow weathered away the differences in my mind, until I don't make as many assumptions any more.  For those that do see us as an "interracial couple", maybe there's a possibility that the ethnic Kentucky boy and the blonde Alabama girl can throw a little dirt in that gap.  And for those that don't, well, we watch the Bachelor together just like everyone else.

I'll tell you what we are definitely, and that is happy