Gabby Douglas made history and became the first African-American gymnast with an all-around gold medal. That came somehow as a surprise to a lot of people because she seemed to come out of nowhere and snagged the gold medal with her winning personality, her megawatt smile and her impeccable skills. To me, what came as a bigger surprise was that, across the ocean, in her own country, among her own people, some African-American women tweeted about Gabby’s hair. "Gabby Douglas is an amazing gymnast, I just wish she would do her hair," the critic said.
Later, what came to me as an even more ironic surprise was that across another ocean, the Pacific, on the beach of Qingdao, Shandong Province, my home province, some Chinese women scared the shit out of other beach-goers by wearing face mask for the sole purpose of protecting their skin from getting tanned.
The two events might appear unrelated. However, to me , a mother of two kids who are mixed of African-American and Chinese, they are more than related; They are more like two coincidental storms that hit different parts of my nerves. My husband and my two kids visited my mother-in-law in North Carolina last month. He told me that he was a little mad at how much her mother and sisters spent on combing my daughter’s frizzy hair. It wasn’t just one time. They did her hair the first day they were there. And the next morning, they wanted to redo it and spent another couple of hours combing it and braiding it. It wasn’t their intention, but my husband felt, they were making him feel guilty as if we hadn’t taken good care of our kids. I was lucky that I wasn’t present at that time.
On the other hand, when I saw a Chinese couple, who came to the US recently, the first thing they said was: oh, not too dark, that’s good. They said it in a way that showed that they wanted to make me feel better, in a way that seemed to tell me, I could have done worse. Another thing they commented on, of course, was my kids’ hair, they marveled at the curliness and wanted to touch it, and complimented on it after confirming that it was real and natural. For that part, I felt it was a genuine “Girl, you have done well!” compliment, not a sympathetic one.
It seems I live in these two impossible and incompatible worlds which my kids don’t fit in. In the black community, their hair is too unkempt. In the Chinese community, their skin color is too dark; In the black community, we need to keep their hair well-groomed so that they don’t look ghetto. In the Chinese community, their skin color would easily make them considered as “peasants”. I am not trying to fit in either communities, come on, as a Chinese woman married to a black guy, there is not really a community for me to fit in anyway. And I am not angry. My occasional upset is not a feature I have acquired by marrying a black man and becoming a half-angry black woman. What ticked me off was the fixation of both African American women on hair, and Chinese woman on skin color.
In Chinese, we have a word(of course, we have a word for everything) for “being ghetto, being like a peasant, not cool, not educated, backward”. It’s 土. It’s the same character for the noun “dirt”. It is a big deal for Chinese to look not “土”. The face mask users on the beach of Qingdao went to the extreme to look not “土”. African-American women are obsessed with hair to fight off people’s impression of them being “土”. In “Good Hair”, Chris Rock’s documentary on this obsession, he showed us how much money and time African-American women are willing to spend to have “good hair”. It baffles me why women from both races are so fixated on trying to avert their natural looks and achieve some arbitrary standard set by their own communities.
Martin Luther King’s dream is for our children not to be judged by the color of their skin but the content of their character. When Gabby Douglas was judged favorably by the Olympic committee and everyone else on her skills, her personality and her tenacity, why are her own people criticizing her hair, which was actually kept in the way the Olympic gymnasts are supposed to be?
One day, I went to pick up my daughter (normally my husband does it as the preschool is close to his office). She saw me and shouted to her friend who was an Asian, “See, Grace? I told you my mom is yellow!” I was very happy to hear the pride in her voice. We have a Chinese song “The decedents of the Dragon”, “Black eyes, black hair and yellow skin, We are forever and ever the descendents of the Dragon”. But when people of the world accept that we are “yellow”, why are we trying to “whiten” our skin so that we don’t look like “peasants”?
