Malathi M. Iyengar is the author of Romina’s Rangoli and Tan to Tamarind: Poems About The Color Brown. She grew up in North Carolina and earned her bachelor’s degree at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She also holds an MFA in Music from the California Institute of the Arts and an M.A. in Education from the California State University, Los Angeles. She currently lives in Long Beach, CA with her husband and daughter.

My earliest and best childhood memories are of books.  My book collection, like my family, was an international mix.  There were the Aesop’s Fables I insisted upon hearing over and over again, the A. A. Milne collections, the Hans Christian Andersen tales … and there were the books that my relatives, on my father’s side, sent from India – folktales, classic fables from the Panchatantra, and original stories by contemporary Indian authors.   My books from India were especially important to me, not just because of the wonderful stories, but also because they connected me with my far-away family members, most of whom I rarely saw, and some of whom I had never even met.  Today, my most treasured books have become part of my seven-year-old daughter’s library, sharing shelf-space with bilingual titles by Amada Irma Perez, Francisco Alarcón, Jorge Argueta… a collection that is both international and made-in-California – like my daughter herself, a card-carrying Overseas Citizen of India, fluent speaker of English and Spanish, born with dark golden hair in Baldwin Park, California.

Contrary to popular stereotypes about “biracial” and “bicultural” children, I never felt “torn” or “confused” about who I was.  My lived culture was a hybrid formed from the distinct experiences, practices, and beliefs of my parents’ families; my culture was integrated, coherent, a unified whole.  Statues of St. Francis of Assisi surrounded by animals and of Lord Krishna with his flute shared shelf space in our house, where a typical meal might include rice and sambar and Midwestern corn-on-the-cob.  Was I confused about this?  Of course not – it was just everyday life; where was the need for me to be confused?  It was other people who were confused: the people who assumed my life must be some kind of ongoing identity crisis, the people who made it clear that they saw me as a sort of science experiment – those people were confused.  Once, when I was in high school, a classmate related how her little sister had seen my parents taking a walk in the neighborhood and had asked, “Why is that white lady walking with that black man?”  My classmate thought this question was funny and cute.  My classmate – it was obvious to me, though she herself clearly didn’t realize it – was confused. 

Growing up during the 1980s as a brown-skinned girl in an almost all-white neighborhood, I experienced a lot of bullying, harassment, and negative stereotyping.  Fed up with being marginalized and objectified by an anglo-centric, anglo-normative society, I was thrilled when finally, as a college freshman, I had the opportunity to join clubs and organizations run by people who looked like me.  Finally, I thought, I would be around people who wouldn’t make faces at my name, verbally assault me with inappropriate questions, or slap me with racial stereotypes. But in some of these clubs and associations I continued to experience stereotyping.  At meetings of our campus Asian Students’ Association and Sangam (a group for South Asian students), many members spoke deprecatingly of interracial relationships and marriages.  Since one such marriage had led to my birth, I wasn’t very happy to hear people bashing “mixed” relationships.  Suddenly I felt that I needed to defend my right to exist against people who claimed that mixed marriages diluted and destroyed pure cultures, that brown people who dated white people were “sellouts”, that Asians and South Asians in interracial relationships were “bananas” and “coconuts”, that mixed marriages were destined to fail because of cultural differences, and that the children of such marriages inevitably ended up lost and identity-less.

The mingling of peoples, languages, and cultures is nothing new, of course.  “Mixing” has been happening since time immemorial, and it is this mixing that has created the languages and cultures of the contemporary world.  I have always valued and appreciated the identifiable hybridity in my own life.  My parents, a “mixed” couple, have been happily married for several decades; and, as I mentioned, the lived culture of our home included elements from both of my parents’ backgrounds.  I identify strongly with forms of creative expression that consciously reflect cultural and linguistic hybridity and all kinds of border-crossings.  When working as a bilingual schoolteacher, I was fascinated and inspired by the ways in which my students and their families combined and adapted the cultural and linguistic influences in their own lives. 

Like millions of other Americans, I was thrilled to watch the historic inauguration of President Barack Obama last January.  I was thrilled because I hoped and believed that America had chosen the right man for the job, the president whose leadership would set the nation and the world on a path towards those ever-elusive goals of peace and justice, not just for Americans, but for everyone.  I was also, on a personal level, quietly thrilled for another reason.  Coincidentally, the new president also just happened to be a person who identified as coming from a multi-ethnic background.  He was “mixed.” Like me.

Of course, the election of President Obama does not mean that people no longer harbor stereotypes about multi-ethnic individuals and families.  But I do see more acceptance today than ten or twenty years ago.  When I was a little girl, I never saw a book about a multi-ethnic family.  Today, my book Romina’s Rangoli, whose main character is a little girl of mixed ethnic heritage, has won a Skipping Stones Honor Award in the "Multicultural and International Awareness" category.  When I was asked by PaperTigers to write about what the award meant to me, this is what came to mind.

The ways in which different cultural influences come together in our lives is complex, layered, not always easy to understand, not always visible.  When writing Romina’s Rangoli, I struggled with wanting to make the story simple enough to engage and entertain very small children, while at the same time trying NOT to promote the kind of simplistic thinking that reduces “culture” to food and holidays – i.e., Romina is Indian and Mexican, so that means she makes rangoli designs and papel picado!  I have often wondered whether Romina’s craft project isn’t too pat, too simple of an ending.  But in a society that still tells us, most of the time, to “Check only one box,” the very fact that we multi-ethnic folks actually exist is news to many children.  Hopefully, as children get older, they will begin to explore with intellectual rigor the subtle complexities of what “culture” means in people’s lives, and how various cultural influences converge in family life.

This is a topic I know I’ll continue exploring in my own life, and in my books, for a long time to come.  My writing, like my childhood book collection, will always be influenced by my family background: it will always be some kind of international mix.

Posted June 2009