“I Only Love to Be So”

I often tease my wife that she is the least Japanese Japanese person I know. Mostly because she hates seafood and because… um, well, mostly it’s just because she hates seafood. Buried within this playful banter is a whole set of assumptions about what a real Japanese person would do. Sit cross-legged on the floor in a kimono, I suppose. Eat sushi and squid with perfectly poised chopsticks in a general Zen state of tranquility. Be really into kintgsugi. Something like that. My wife usually reminds me, with no small amount of exasperation, that she’s just as German as she is Japanese (her father is Japanese, her mother is German). To which I helpfully respond, “that makes you two thirds of the axis of evil.” After which she usually leaves the room. It’s all very edifying and enlightening, as you can no doubt imagine.

How we inhabit our various identities is, of course, a very fraught question in these days where it seems that little else matters. My wife looks more Japanese than German (at least to my eyes) but in many ways, not least in her culinary preferences, she is every bit as German as she is Japanese. Perhaps even more so. But again, we’re back in that awkward territory. What does it mean to be more German than Japanese? Is there one way to be these things? To be any discrete identity? Yes, we can paint in broad strokes. Yes, there may be certain tendencies, traditions, dispositions. But never in a “one size fits all” way, surely.

I recently became acquainted with the British author Zadie Smith. I heard her on a podcast and was instantly impressed with how she thought about the world, with her ability to speak with nuance about difficult matters, with her reticence to dive into the useless polarities that define so much of our cultural discourse, with her loathing of and abstinence from social media. I promptly took out every book I could find of hers in the library and have been enjoying making my way through her catalogue ever since.

Smith also has some thoughts about identity. She is half black and half white. And being part anything is a tricky business in this world where identities seem to exist only to be essentialized and compartmentalized and weaponized. I was struck this morning by one passage in an essay called “Speaking in Tongues” from her 2009 collection called Changing My Mind. In it, she mentions a girl named Joyce who struggles with her multiracial identity, seeking always to downplay her “blackness”:

But to mention the double is to suggest shame at the singular. Joyce insists on her varied heritage because she fears and is ashamed of the singular black. I suppose it’s possible that subconsciously I am also a tragic mulatto, torn between pride and shame. In my conscious life, though, I cannot honestly say I feel proud to be white and ashamed to be black or proud to be black and ashamed to be white. I find it impossible to experience either pride or shame over accidents of genetics in which I had no active part. I understand how those words got into the racial discourse, but I can’t sign up to them. I’m not proud to be female either. I am not even proud to be human—I only love to be so. As I love to be female, I love to be black, and I love that I had a white father.

I was struck by a few things in this passage. First, it’s hard to believe how much has changed in the fifteen years since this essay was published. I don’t know for sure, but I doubt the word “mulatto” is acceptable in the estimation of the gatekeepers of language anymore. And what’s she talking about when she says she’s not “proud” to be black or female?! In 2024, we can scarcely imagine not affixing the word “proud” or any of its cognates to our various markers of identity, whether they are connected to race, sexuality, gender, or even mental health categories. Pride in our myriad identities has blossomed into something like a cultural imperative, so long as it’s in the socially approved categories. This is almost certainly part of what’s behind my teasing of my wife. For there is a value judgment lurking behind my banter, isn’t there? Japanese (non-white) = good; German (white) = not so much.

But what I love most about this quote is Zadie Smith’s use of the word “love.” I’m not even proud to be human—I only love to be so. “Love,” thus employed, seems somehow so expansive and generous and hopeful. It reflects an openness and a receptivity that “pride” can easily obliterate. To love who we are is, at least on some level, to accept that our identities are given to us not ultimately created by us. The “accidents of genetics,” as Smith puts it. “The gifts of a loving and creative God (who clearly has a sense of humour!),” as I might put it. Either way, not something for which we should obviously take a great deal of pride.

Yes, we shape our identities. Yes, we grow into them, wrestle with them, push against them in countless ways, make peace with them, even submit to them. Identity is complicated, particularly in 2024. But to reach a state where you could say something like, “I’m not proud to be who I am, I only love to be so?” Well, that would be something, wouldn’t it?