"how to act white" by dax heaven
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Automatic doors slide open, decoying invitation. I follow my dad silently to the back of the store–wet boots squeaking softly on linoleum tile, a trail of puddles tracking us. He studies a bottle of red, nodding pensively. “Aus-tray-lee-ah,” he draws out the word, turning over the syllables in his palate before repeating it in mother tongue, “澳洲.” As if he hasn’t procured the same bottle of liquor for a decade. “Aus-tray-lee-ah 酒!” he declares.
At the counter, I grow ashamed, trying to look older than my age. I stand my guard in front of him, chest puffed beneath my snow jacket, cheeks reddened from the frosty air and from brewing a ferocity. I survey the body language of the cashier, waiting for the twist of the lip, or the sideways glance. Snaggletoothed and snarling, I am ready to strike at any moment. But like clockwork, my father greets our foe with a polite hello. After mumbling pleasantries about the grisly weather, he recites his thank yous, and we are homefree.
When did he learn this?
I cradle two bottles of Shiraz in my arms like a newborn. Snow packed flat by tirelines and a long winter, I clink down the white parking lot, quickening my pace to match his.
“Dad,” I beam up at him, my breath warm and evaporating slowly. “Your English is so good.” The words dissolve into a cloud of smoke.
He considers this. “Really? I don’t think so.”
My father lives in a white suburban town deep in the Alberta prairies, surrounded by miles of dry farmland. In the winter, it is blankets of snow; in the summer, suspended wildfires. Twenty years, he has lived here, running the only Chinese restaurant in town. I grew up watching my parents belittled by white people who reduced their migrant story just because of a mispronounced word or a mere twist of a grammatical technicality. With sentences structured in Chinese, their English words tumbled out desperately, tongues searching and pleading for understanding.
“To grow up Asian in America,” Cathy Park Hong writes in her essay collection, Minor Feelings, “is to witness the humiliation of authority figures like your parents and to learn not to depend on them: they cannot protect you.” I learned apprehension when I felt the burning of prying eyes on my yellow skin. I learned to be guarded when I watched bewilderment warp my mothers face after a white person didactically explained things to her like she was a child. I learned to act out of survival. How to act white. Instinctively unloading a can of fresh laundry-scented aerosol room spray before my friends came over, masking the smell of steamed fish, red date soup, and century egg congee.
In trying to protect my parents, I was an unknowing soldier of whiteness, straightening out my family's “unacceptable” behavior, defending them with polished English, and rewarding them when they “said the right thing.” As if a strong handle of this colonial language is the highest praise. As if it isn’t the same one that white people use to spit obscenities at my father over pork fried rice.
I forget that my parents existed in this country before me and without me, made it here without a lick of English on their tongue. With no money to pay for education, neither of my parents studied past eighth grade. And at 2AM, cram-studying for my college finals, I lulled myself with the lullaby: this is what they worked for, this is what they never had.
They are the ones who put me here, who carved out a place for me on this Western map. Who am I to correct them, grown adults? Who have I become but the very colonial patrol of the whiteness we are forced to reenact?
I learned the language, the mannerisms, the rules, and the racialised hatred. I view myself through the lens of my oppressors, hoping self-imposed racism means I’ve outsmarted them. To sense a flicker of imminent danger in tall grass before it can strike, before it can hurt your loved ones. In this country, this body is war, waging an internal battle every time I see white. I am on guard, breath shortening, eyes deadly, constantly occupying the peripheral.
My elongated eyes, my dark hair, my yellow skin,
my tiny mother, my infant father, my precious kin.
I’m fourteen and a pile driver for a Costco shopping cart I can barely see over, trailing my mother around like a puppy dog.
Grocery shopping is hard, strenuous work. My mother and I are a two-man-team of movers deadlifting cans of oil and bags of flour into the back of her car. She runs a Chinese restaurant in white suburbia and plays owner, manager, line-cook, runner, and janitor. When I'm older, I will learn that to suffer and to live are not mutually exclusive.
Reaching to grasp this colonial language, my parents spoke through food. Please try the culture of our motherland! We made it palatable for you, in a combo meal for $29.95 including our special sweet and sour pork and pork fried rice!
And yet, at the cashier, there is ear to ear laughter as heads swivel backward, tracking us up and down, left to right, with nowhere to hide in a single file line. A scrawny Chinese girl and her tiny mother, diminished further by a mountain of flour and sugar bags. The lady at the counter playfully asks if we’re having a birthday party, and blood floods to my cheeks. My mom, silent and stoic, pulls wads of cash from her counterfeit Louis Vuitton bag.
“Something like that,” I announce in my perfect English, faking a laugh while reciting, in my head, like a prayer: Mom, you have to be good. You have to say “please” and “thank you” at the right time and make just enough small talk to portray us as friendly, well-mannered citizens. But don’t reveal too much–don’t overstep.
My dad calls me one late evening after closing. He’s still in the kitchen – I can hear my uncle’s booming laughter, the clank of metal, and running water. He tells me he got in an argument with a customer over the phone, when he was called a chink and told to “go back to his country.” My stomach collapses. Short of breath, I asked him how he responded. He scoffs, blasé when he announces, “I said fuck you!”
Dax Heaven 許雅慧 (they/them/theirs) is a writer and photographer raised on Snuneymuxw territories and currently living and working on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh and səlilwətaɬ. Their writing is informed by formlessness, motherhood, and a continuous grappling of identity. You can read more on their blog of personal essays, bunnys alcove. Follow their work on Instagram (@daxheaven) and their website.
