Who I Really Am

Kai Ariga overcomes identity conflict to find his true self.

Kai works in a Japanese restaurant, and he wears a traditional Japanese style uniform and communicates fluently with guests in English. “Where are you come from? How can you have such a strong Australian accent?” This is a question that Kai is always being asked, and he is even a little impatient and helpless and with a self-deprecating tone to answer, “I am Australian, Sir.”

“No, I am asking, what are you really come from?” The customer stresses it again. It was obvious that this was not the answer he was expecting in his heart. Kai was a little taken aback, but out of courtesy, he patiently explained that he is Australian with a mixed-race heritage of Japanese. The customer suddenly realizes his mistake, “Konnichiwa,” he said with a lame Japanese accent and tried to show off the only Japanese word he knew.

Kai gets used to how people react to his identity, which it seems is determined what he looks like in other people’s eyes.

As a mixed-race person who has grown up with both Japanese and Australian backgrounds, Kai’s childhood was not as easy as other kids. His mother had to relocate to Kobe because of her husband’s job. It was 1995, and Japan was completely different in those days. The feudal culture could not accept that a Japanese man got married to a white woman. They could not even expose their relationship before marriage, so this secret love relationship lasted for three years until they got married. Kai’s father, who worked for a Swiss company in Japan, is an extremely career-oriented man with little concern for his family. “Although he can speak fluent English, his thoughts and being imprisoned by Japanese culture and society were ingrained for him, which is why we end up getting divorced.” Kai’s mother explained, as her eyes teared and her nose turned red.

The time in Kobe was her worst time, and she followed her husband to Japan for love, and she did not think it was the end of the relationship. “I was completely treated as a foreigner, and the local inhabitants would never call me Mrs Ariga, nor would they call me white, but instead they called me a foreigner. It was only then that I realized that I would never fit into this community.”

Kai spent four years growing up in such a traditional environment with racial discrimination. He still remembers seeing his sister being followed home by some Japanese boys, who berated her and pointing at her, saying, “You are a pig.” Kids’ jeers echoed through the streets, and she was mocked every day, whether in the local community or at school. Due to her half-white heritage, his sister’s figure would be stronger than those Japanese girls of the same age, so she had to suffer from the ridicule and blows of other Japanese children.

While Kai’s Japanese characteristics were more prominent than his sisters, so he was not as ridiculed and ostracized in kindergarten. “My mother, in order to keep me from being ostracized, she has to cut me the traditional hairstyle of a Japanese child just to protect me from discrimination to cover up my white side.” His last impression of Japan was that his mother took him and his sister by the hand, through the porch of the house, and everything was put into the trunk. “I didn’t remember to say good-bye to my dad either, and it felt like a nightmare, I was already in Australia when I woke up.”

Kai thought life in Australia seems to be much better, but he believed that it is inevitable that he will be treated unfairly. Most of the students at Kai’s School are white. There are no biracial students like him with two lineages. Sometimes when he interjects, he is riddled with remarks like “but you look like Japanese” or “you are not white,” he is unable to defend for himself because the half part of his blood that runs through his veins is quickly pushed to the side.

“Although I look more Asian to people in Australia, my personality is more westernized, and the environment in which I have been educated and grown has changed. On the inside, I am more like an Aussie than a Japanese.” When he said that, his eyes became firmer, and he knew exactly what he wanted to be and what he was supposed to be. Kai bluntly recounted the things he used to laugh at and taught jokes about his identity to ingratiate with others during high school, and now, in retrospect, he thinks that is the stupidest part. However, everyone will grow up and go through some immature times.

Jacqui Harding, the international student welfare advisor, explained that “If students with biracial heritage are not in touch with their true identity, they may face some potential issues with struggling to dispel the racialized projections other make upon them.”

“Life has to look forward, doesn’t it? I am an Australian citizen, my father is Japanese, and I accept the Japanese ancestry in me,” he said, with a hint of relief on his face. I saw the yearning and expectation towards this society in his eyes, even though racial discrimination is still happening in every corner of the world.

“I don’t know what happened to other mixed-race people during their growing experiences,” Kai said. “Yes, I’m Australian, I am also Japanese, but these two identities are the most important part of what makes me who I am today.”