[This is for Yan, who asked.]

Being unencumbered as I was this last year by the demands of employment, I was able to spend more time with my parents than I ever have as an adult.  Surprisingly there was no bloodshed during our visits and even an occasional meeting of the minds.  It’s taken a couple of decades to reach the point where I understand their personal perspectives; becoming a taxpaying, mortgage-holding parent has brought me closer to them in alignment.

I’m still firmly to the left, though.  The folks identify as centrist Republicans, even when I can get them to agree that much of what they believe in is compatible with Democratic positions.  I don’t really know where this schism came from, why I’m not cut from the same cloth.

One summer day for no reason in particular I asked my mom why she thought that was, that I was such a lefty.  She said she thought it was because I was “hapa”.

Hmm.  In an odd way, it makes sense; being “hapa” allows me to comprehend many points of view at the same time.

“Hapa” in Hawaiian culture refers to people who are half-Hawaiian – or at least part Hawaiian and partly some other race, ethnic group or culture.  Although my father is Hawaiian-Chinese-Polynesian, he’s not seen as hapa in Hawaii; he’s seen as a kama aina, a local boy, a homey.  Mom is white, white, white, any way you slice it, even though she’s a polyglot of French, Finn, Irish and Native American.  In spite of their differences in backgrounds they’re both centrist Republicans; I’ve never really figured out how this worked out even after spending a big chunk of my life with them.  Was it their impoverished childhoods?  Was it coming of age post-World War II?  Was it just their mutual agreement that science can somehow rationalize everything else that they couldn’t resolve by faith alone?

You got me; I really don’t know.

Vietnam, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, Watergate and Iran-Contra strongly influenced my mores, although these events did not affect every political opinion and value I’ve acquired.  I’m sure that coming of age as a woman in the late 70’s-early 80’s also made a difference.  My mom became a nurse, falling into one of the two “acceptable” professions for women her age; I rebelled against that entire concept of limitations by gender.  I sought out non-traditional jobs and education in part because of that rebellion.  I still feel the pang of rebellion whenever I ponder on my mother’s career path.  She earned a bachelor’s in healthcare management decades into her nursing career; and yet, she’s still a nurse, has no desire to seek an 8-to-5 desk job.  This bothers me; I can’t imagine pursuing a degree program only to never apply it.  But then I’m squeamish at the site of blood and cannot really understand nursing as a profession, as a calling.  I’m sure this is a huge point of departure between Mom and me.

On the other hand, Mom bears much of the blame for the leftist leanings in me.  She was and is a rebel, in some ways more than I am.  Tell her she cannot do something and she’ll move heaven and earth to prove otherwise.  She’s never trusted “the establishment”, whether corporate or government.  Although it’s peeved her off to no end that I would use it on her, she taught me to question everything, accept nothing on blind faith.  I can see this in her, even as a child.  One early photo of her, sitting with her equally fair, equally cherubic brother on a bench in a studio, reflects their very natures.  My mother looks directly into the camera as if questioning it, a half-certain wary smile; my happy-go-lucky uncle shares his easy-going grin.

A recent visit with my mother-in-law jogged memories about the rebel in my mother.  MIL is very much a traditionalist; being ten years older than my mom, she has a very different perspective on politics and society at large.  I simply can’t discuss certain topics with her; they’re beyond the pale, either completely inappropriate in her mind or unfathomable.  Although MIL worked most of her life, she did so in the family-owned business and only in roles that kept her behind a desk crunching numbers instead of in the public eye.  It wasn’t until she was nearing retirement, in her mid to late fifties, that she came into her own and actively questioned her husband’s authority.  My mom and I have never been able to understand that; why wouldn’t a wife be a partner instead of a handmaiden?  Is this difference the break between generations, pre- and post-World War II?

My mother-in-law’s memory is going; we don’t have a firm diagnosis as yet.  It could merely be MCI – mild cognitive impairment, the cumulative affects of aging and genetics.  I don’t want to ask much about her life at this point since I’m not certain what I will get.  Pictures say much, though, answering the unasked questions.  A pretty, petite young woman, beaming as she holds the hand of a strapping and over-tall man-boy at the altar of the local church.  A bouncy, crinolined skirt and spiky heels, chasing active small boys.  The face of a middle-aged woman, turned upwards to look at her husband.  Very few if any pictures are of this woman alone – the majority of photos show her in the company of her husband or her siblings or sons.

I often wonder at the differences between these two women, my mother and mother-in-law, living only six hours apart as the crow flies.  MIL did not come from wealth; she was the baby of a large family, losing her mother as a toddler to be raised by older sisters and a housekeeper.  It wasn’t an easy life, being light on resources, and yet it was made easier by the riches of love lavished by many older siblings.  Mom came from impoverished but hardy stock; she was the oldest of three children who was responsible in no small part for rearing the younger two.  My grandmother was a fifth-a-day alcoholic who eventually succumbed to cirrhosis; she was not much of a parent to my mother.  Mom learned independence and responsibility very early in life.  The lingering effects of the Depression on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula also encouraged a certain kind of hardiness; nothing came easily, only the scrappiest survived in that clime.

I imagine that moving to the west coast shortly after marriage to my father was some sort of wild adventure for my mother.  Marrying a non-white was pretty shocking in the Upper Peninsula, but in California my mom and dad were a non-issue.  There were opportunities to grow and learn that they wouldn’t have experienced anywhere else.  There was a wildness that might simply have been the 1960’s in which they lived, the easy California lifestyle, some other factor I couldn’t grasp as a child.

One emblem of that period sticks in my mind: a smashed purple earring, swept up off the concrete patio slab.  Its mate hung around for days, a lonely swinging bauble that my mother bemoaned after a particularly wicked New Year’s Eve party.  Mom didn’t throw the earring out right away.  It was some sort of talisman, a reminder that life had once been harder and now could be as easy as a swinging earring, as open and brash as that glowing shade of purple.  Perhaps as easily brushed aside, if not captured and observed.  This image sticks in my mind like a picture; is there a photo somewhere of my mother wearing this?  I can’t recall for certain any such concrete image save for one of her, platinum blonde, stiffly starched cap set carefully on her coif, commemorating her graduation from nursing school, perhaps in the same year as the party of the purple earring.

Hapa meant having people puzzle over the oddness of my parents, once we returned to the Midwest.  Not so much puzzling over my mother; she looks like Any Woman in America, pale-skinned, light-eyed, average height and weight.  Occasionally the odd glance thrown in the direction of my folks was due to their salt-and-pepper appearance, as if condiment shakers had come to life.  The puzzled looks were directed more often towards my father; even other peoples of color puzzled over him.  What was he, that brown-skinned man?  Of Latin blood?  Perhaps Indio?  Philippine?  His face was always calm yet intense.  For years he terrified my aunt, ten years my mother’s junior.  My aunt could never read him as a young teenager, always jumping when her much older brother-in-law spoke.  It took a decade before she figured out he hid behind this mask of intensity.  Not that he wasn’t intense – my father still is – but he’s a bit of a card, too.  An introspective person, the kind who observes closely, keeps the laughter inward until it suits his purpose to release it.  His childhood was challenging, impoverished; perhaps this mask helped him find the way safely through it and out into the world.  He was eventually raised by an aunt and uncle, adopted within the family as many Hawaiians used to do.  Give a choice of two Midwestern colleges to attend after serving in the Navy in intelligence, he picked the one that had no entrance fee.  This school in a frigid Midwestern outpost is where he met my mother.  It must have been one hell of a cultural shift to navigate, from the warmth of the lush tropics to the bone-biting, snow-whitened cold.

There’s a picture of my grandmother, my father’s mother, young, poised like a bird ready to flit away from the sidewalk on which she is casually perched.  Bobby sox, saddle shoes, a light-colored long and floppy skirt spread like wings.  She wears an undecipherable expression, as if holding back an amused retort although confused or annoyed by the taking of this impromptu picture.  She is beautiful, her face lit as if from within, her hair pulled back, her softly arched Asian brow glowing.  In the background, barely visible in the shadow of the porch, a young boy wears a similarly undecipherable expression, looking intently in the direction of the camera.  It is my father, holding the front door open; is he coming or going?  What does he see from his position in the deep of the porch, in the cool of the makai breeze and the shade of tall ginger plants?

I wish I could ask her about this picture, but my grandmother died decades ago after a lengthy illness.  I’ve asked my father about his picture; in spite of his claimed inability to remember the circumstances in which it was taken, I know there’s more.  I can read in the closing of his face that there’s something more about this time and place if not the people in this photo.  It’s subtle, the closing, a flickering tightness that comes and goes.

None of this is obvious in its fit, though, at least to me.  How all these bits and pieces assembled into me, into what I am is as subtle and intense as my father’s face, as direct and inquiring as my mother’s nature.

In a disheveled, much-handled album is a picture that somehow puts this all together.   There’s a black-and-white photo of a young girl standing in the sand on a California beach, darker skin that might be tanned, hair that might be dark blonde or light brown, a face that might be Asian or Caucasian, furrowed forehead suggesting squinting in the bright sunlight or perhaps in puzzlement with the photographer.  Oversized sunglasses hide the expression, yet she’s looking dead-on ahead into the camera.  To her right, the ocean; to her left, the coastal highway rolls away.  Behind her on the beach a motley collection of people, all shapes, sizes and colors, as far as the eye can see.

Hapa girl.