Delicious ambiguity: the permanent inbetweener.

MaiLynn Stormon-Trinh
New Zealand

I am the only child of an American woman of Norwegian descent born in Fargo, North Dakota and a Vietnamese man who moved to the US in the mid-seventies and cut all his Vietnamese familial ties. I look more Asian than white, but culturally, I was raised in a white world, with a white family and predominately white friends. As an adult in my mid-twenties, I feel like I am the permanent inbetweener, stuck in the fringes of both the worlds my parents have come from. At times, race has made my life a lonely, mixed up (no pun intended) place. But I am learning that there can be great power in being multiracial. My race, and thus my identity, is not spelled out for me through history and stereotypes. I have a freedom in obscurity that Gilda Radner called: “delicious ambiguity”.