girl, so ethnically ambiguous

should we invite bella hadid or vladimir lenin to my bat mitzvah?

I was born on May 17, 1998, to an Ashkenazi Jewish father and a half-Kalmyk (Mongolian Oirat), half-Russian mother. Growing up with three cultures and religions around me, a circumference of complex who-from-where heritage dynamics, I knew from a very young age the world was a kaleidoscope of people who look differently, speak differently, and practice lifestyles vastly different from one another.

I’d go to Hebrew school every Sunday to learn about Jewish history, food, art, and the basics of Judaism. They’d introduce us to children’s songs in Hebrew, and judging by the shady looks occasionally thrown my way, it seemed I was the only one struggling to sing along — the other kids were near-fluent, most likely coming from fully Jewish families. Not my case, and tragically less than half so: my dad never felt a strong attachment to his ethnicity or religion, commonplace for the post-war generation of Eastern European Jews grappling with the echoes of antisemitism, so his attempts to denounce his ancestry only bolstered my indifference. I’d go to the local Buddhist temple every summer when visiting my mom’s side of the family in Kalmykia — with a deep appreciation for the spaciousness and serenity of the ornate interiors, Buddhism as a practice felt too out of reach and alien for me to identify with. Plus, I looked nothing like my Mongol cousins. My deeply religious Russian grandmother would occasionally take me to the Orthodox service, though I was reluctant and felt a strong disdain for the sounds and smells of the church. I was an amalgamation of things that aren’t supposed to go together but somehow do — juggling my prominent jewfro with a rough texture, large eyes with a barely detectable trace of a monolid that only other Asians notice, and my Russian citizenship, trying to mold that into oneness. No offense and none taken, but I felt like a poorly done Cubism painting rather than an intricate tapestry of heritage. My parents earnestly tried to shine a positive light on the uniqueness of my DNA, but their judgment was clouded as they struggled with self-acceptance in a predominantly white environment, too.

Looking back on how lucky I was to have exposure to every cultural flavor, a true all-you-can-eat buffet upbringing, I couldn’t care less at the time. Most positive things about the self are learned retroactively, and growing up, it was all a confusing and boring push and pull, often a burden. I hated being different, so much so that I wanted nothing to do with my many cultures, eye-rolling every opportunity to get closer to either side. I felt I was too difficult to explain, too much of one thing to fit into a secular space of another thing and vice versa, my complexity with its unbearable weight standing between myself and normal life, a big protruding ugly obstacle. The inner tension of otherness funnily coincided with the paradox of my ancestry: for Jews, one’s identity is typically passed down matrilineally, meaning that only someone born to a Jewish mother is considered fully Jewish. Your father’s lineage plays a role, too, but it’s not as strong of a currency and is subject to interpretation. For Kalmyks, it’s the exact opposite: your blood is exclusively determined paternally. Go figure. Only half-accepted on both ends, I remained on the sidelines, tumultuously trying to have my cake and eat it too, taking as much as I was given but struggling to find a comfortable nook to hide in. I worshipped celebrities of mixed races and ethnicities but couldn’t for the life of me find someone with a similar blood mix to relate to. Looking up famous Mongol-Jewish-Russian people, the only result I got from Google was Vladimir Lenin. Not the most glamorous role model for a teenage girl desperate to feel prettier, is it? I digress.

I wanted to be submerged in neutrality and baptized there: to dive into something ordinary, small, and unpretentious. I couldn’t pick and choose what to belong to: it had to be all at once because everything only mattered in tandem, and at the same time, none of it mattered at all. Occupying primarily white spaces certainly didn’t help my case: having acute awareness you’re almost like everybody else but not quite is damaging to the psyche. Resting on the margins of Slavic-passing but not in the same font family. That scene in Mean Girls with Karen going “If you’re from Africa, why are you white?” could sum up most of my adolescent interactions. I saw my heritage as something to be apologetic for, obliged to explain every time the big ol’ “Where are you from, like, originally?” subject would arise. “To be different from those that are different makes you the same — the Unconscious speaks in the form of otherness, the tethered shadow of deferral and displacement,” Homi Bhabha explains in The Location of Culture (1994), “The very place of identification, caught in the tension of demand and desire, is a space of splitting.”

In the absence of a clear cultural identity, I felt drawn towards the one universally spoken language of belonging: her majesty whiteness.

my favorite photo of my very cool parents circa 90s

I remember not thinking of myself as beautiful or ugly or anything in between — those concepts were on the other side of the playing field. The premise of my existence couldn’t be cornered into any comparison bias — I felt I was too different to earn a spot on the team to score any relevant points. Therefore, comparing myself to other girls and assessing how much or how little beauty capital I possessed wasn’t on the agenda. You’d think that would’ve absolved me of the terror of beauty standards, but if anything, it made my inferiority complex worse: I felt a strong need to go above and beyond to even get to the white-enough gates before I could begin to climb the attractiveness ladder. If you thought conforming to beauty standards was hard, try conforming to the ones that weren’t designed to include you. While I instinctively knew that the only way for me to find peace was to spin my uniqueness into a positive and use it as a token, it just wasn’t realistic: uniqueness is the last thing a teenage girl wants. You don’t know what to do with it or how to sell it — it’s too big in your hands, too bright, so you twist and turn it and hate it all and would rather throw it in the trash. You just want to hang at the mall with your friends and blend in with the crowd. You care about being pretty as long as there’s no steep price of individuality to pay. To stand out is to be in danger.

The first time a boy told me I was pretty was also the first time I showed up to school with my hair straightened, post-blowout silk n shine. Must’ve been a regular Wednesday, but oh what a fateful day, one that would define the next decade of my life. I decided, once and for all, that straightening my hair would be embedded in my routine forever and ever. Family expressed their disappointment with my strides to conform, but since they themselves had experienced racism and antisemitism, all that trauma coupled with gentle parenting left me lecture-free. I didn’t see a problem with using my hair straightener as a scalpel for the umbilical cord between self and heritage; I honestly just wanted boys to like me and girls to accept me. Even now, a decade later, with a much better grasp on white supremacy, race, and black hair* in particular, each time I attempt to reverse engineer to my natural curls, I feel disempowered and estranged from my reflection, as if it’s some hidden, inferior version of myself I’d strangled and buried around the age of thirteen. When your self-alienation process is as long and continuous as mine, the thing you were trying to get away from becomes the alien itself, feasting on its alien tail.

(*I fully acknowledge the limitations of my perspective: my hair struggles are trivial compared to the racism and colorism Black women with black hair have faced for centuries. Since my internalized hatred was rooted in those same racist ideologies, it feels necessary to bring this up, even if my experience is that of a white/white-passing woman. It’s not a woe-is-me, it’s a look at the insidious nature of white supremacy.)

You may be wondering whether this post is about belonging or chasing beauty. Well, both — I can’t talk about one without bringing up the other. My undying hyperfixation on appearance was shaped and later exacerbated by the fact I’d spent the majority of my youth craving sameness as a stepping stone to belonging before I could even dare to want beauty. The drive to conform was, in many ways, nothing more than a response to the absence of community. True beauty is bold and unapologetic, encompassing individuality, but that wasn’t what I needed. I wanted to obey mediocrity before I could outrun it — the idea of doing so seemed plump and soft, a cushion to protect me from all the evil in the world, the evil created and imposed by white supremacy. I often think about this Bella Hadid quote from her Vogue interview: “I wish I had kept the nose of my ancestors, I think I would have grown into it.” I, too, wish I had known that all the hatred towards myself was instilled in me, but instead, I saw tiresome self-eradication as some act of noble agency. Would I have gotten all my facial features restructured by age 17 if I had access to plastic surgery? Most likely — this is probably the only time I’m going to say I’m glad I didn’t grow up wealthy. Just how much of ourselves are we willing to deny, shedding our core layer by layer to reveal something easier on the eye, something that rolls off the tongue with no effort?

I might’ve falsely believed that aligning with the non-negotiable beauty standard meant I could finally fit into spaces that had always felt just out of reach. It’s less about self-adornment and more about survival, a way to navigate the terrain of identity politics without much leverage in your pocket. If I had felt more secure in my culture, I wouldn’t have spent so much of my life chasing ideals on begged and borrowed fields. Illusory and funny, this whole thing. Someone should’ve told me that while beauty and belonging can feel related, they aren’t. One can’t be won through the other: belonging can create beauty, but beauty doesn’t promise belonging.

Don’t get too discouraged: I found, to my delight and surprise, that belonging can be created, too. Fostered. Cultivated. Whatever you wanna call it. Belonging is growing into your features, the ones you hated the most. Belonging is learning about your culture as an adult, going back to fill in all the embarrassing gaps of knowledge. Belonging is reclaiming your agency. Belonging is realizing that as complex and chaotic your origin is, you wouldn’t have it any other way. Belonging is also tossing your hair straightener — even if just for a few days — as a mini-act of resistance. Belonging is an olive tree that grows from within, taking root in your identity and blooming outward — no need to bark up somebody else’s. So, if my belonging is somewhere at the intersection of Buddha, Passover, and an Adidas tracksuit, so be it. Where’s yours?