My fellow student looks at me, squinting, trying to answer his question before he asks it. We had been talking for only a few minutes, mostly about classes and units and about how yes, the weather had been pretty irregular lately. He appears to give up. “I can’t figure it out,” he says. “What are you?”
He catches me off guard. “You mean, what ethnicity am I?”
“Yeah, that’s what I meant.”
I run through the list in my head – the list of identities people assume that I assume. Lebanese. Argentinian. Native American. White. Indian. The list goes on. Guess, I almost want to say to him, to add another to my list. But I tell him instead.
“I’m half Mexican and half Egyptian.”
I am half Mexican and half Egyptian, reader, but don’t ask me what I am. Ask me where I’m from.
That way, it’s a conversation. That way, it doesn’t feel like yet another multiple choice question from yet another midterm. No, let’s make it more like a free response question.
That way, I could tell you I’m from the loud Sunday nights when the two sides of my family would converge over dinner. From the evenings when abuela (Spanish for “grandma”) and taeta (Arabic for “grandma”) sat side by side, like they always would. That although neither of them could speak English, both could cook. That I am from nights where the small talk was anything but small.
Sitting with my family, I heard cacophonous, consonant-heavy Arabic bring the best out of flowy, liquid Spanish. I saw mannerisms from cultures half a world apart play themselves out in my kitchen. The traditions, the values, the politics – they all mixed. And not in a way that I can do justice by just telling you what I “am.”
Growing up, I had the challenge of belonging to, but not fully identifying with, the two sides of myself. So you can see why I am hesitant to say that I am half Mexican and half Egyptian, when my two halves often fall short of adding up to one.
The mixed race population at Stanford is undeniably small compared to other ethnic communities on campus. Small, yes, but there. And, like everyone else on this campus, we have stories to tell. We just need the right prompt.
Now, reader, I turn the question to you. Are you from music, from the slow drop of a beat, from dancing? Are you from early morning jogs, from late nights spent reading marine biology books? Because, at this point, it’s hard to know what we are. We have the rest of our lives to answer “What am I?” – and the answer shouldn’t be limited to ethnic background. What are you right now? Where are you from?
Contact Amanda Rizkalla at amariz ‘at’ stanford.edu.