By Sharon Miki
@sharonmikichan
My blonde ambition is born a week after my wedding, when I impulsively chop off ten inches of shiny black locks at a random strip-mall salon.
I choose the place not because of reputation (in fact, its Yelp star-count is in the heart-poundingly low threes), but because it’s the only nearby place that does anonymous online bookings. I don’t want to talk about my decision; I can’t articulate my urgency to sever myself from my only conventionally attractive feature.
Since childhood, XXL-length hair’s been my trademark. A sometimes-frizzy security blanket though it all. When I gained weight and my skin stretched over two hundred pounds of sick and sallow flesh, I heard friends too-loudly praise my sultry waves while their eyes flicked with brief flashes of disgust and pity over my rolls. When my mother fought cancer and I stopped sleeping, my ponytail tickled my tailbone to keep me awake. It always had my back.
The stylist mournfully fingers my locks and tries to talk me out of the chop. She just knows that the blunt shoulder-length crop I request is in vogue for other girls, but it’ll magnify the curves of my moony face. She’s seen it a million times—girls who grow their hair out for the wedding, and then take things too far.
I hate that she makes my personal metamorphosis feel pedestrian.
I hate that I apologize repeatedly for wanting what I want.
I hate that I feel so guilty about my needs that I spend an extra $50 on product that will collect dust on the bathroom countertop.
I love the haircut.
The stylist is totally right: the cut isn’t flattering and it does make my face look rounder. Chubbier, yet older. A classic aesthetic don’t.
But I love how I don’t quite look like myself, and I’m addicted.
“How hard would it be to go blonde?” I ask.
***
“What are you?”
As a mixed-race person, I’m asked this more often than you’ll believe.
Most of the time, this casual probing of my basic existence is supposed to be polite—not who am I or even who do I think I am, but what am I. Racial semantics.
I’ve got a script: Half Japanese, half white. The white half is a bunch of things, but mostly Finnish and Scottish. My father was born in Canada. My grandparents too. We don’t speak Japanese. No, I’ve never been to Japan.
Sometimes, people don’t believe me. “You look more… Indian.” Or, “but you look Latina.” Or, “Oh yeah, I guess you do look Asian… but not Japanese!”
To this, I usually say, “Sorry.”—very Canadian.
Sorry about my confusing face.
***
When I officially decide to really plunge into blonde-dom, I ask my friend’s twenty-something girlfriend for advice.
She’s Instagram-model-gorgeous, half Japanese and half Italian, with the icy blonde locks of my dreams. She’s more than 10 years younger than me; a different generation. Unlike me, she’s grown up with plenty of mixed-race kids around her—it’s normal, cool even, and she knows her heritage.
When we first met, she held my hand and asked me: “do you speak Japanese?” “does your dad?” “have you been to Japan?”.
Her questions sting, because where my answers are cloudy—no, no, no—hers are breezy and clear: yes, yes, yes.
She is immediately supportive of my quest to copy-cat her depigmentation. She shares insider tips, “essentials” that sound fake but aren’t—purple shampoo. Milkshake conditioner. Olaplex sealants. A stylist that knows the intricacies of our kind of hair.
“Japanese girls got to stick together,” she says.
She doesn’t mention the “half”.
***
My Asian half is hard to talk about, because my family never, ever talks about it.
It wasn’t until I was an adult that I truly considered my father’s experience of being visibility Asian in post-war Vancouver—not just not white, but Japanese.
This is what I know:
Dad was born in the early 1950s, the second-youngest child in a family of second-generation Japanese-Canadians. As with many of this era, their relationship status with their “Canadian” half is complicated—the family was stripped of their property and dignity and imprisoned for years in internment camps because of their “Japanese” half.
Left with nothing, they fled to Lethbridge, Alberta after they were released. When my father was born, they returned to British Columbia.
I do not know why or how they came back.
I do know that when they returned to the mountains and the ocean where they were born, things were mostly the same but they were different. They did not speak their language. They did not pass down cultural traditions. They practiced their Buddhist religion so quietly that their children only thought about it at funerals, when cold circles of prayer beads were taken from storage and passed around for show. They took on Caucasian names like Jean and Ted and Don and did their best to fit in.
They disguised their heritage so well that, a generation later, I can only see it through the brown of my eyes and the questions I receive from others.
***
Don’t quote me on the science of going black to blonde, but this is what it feels like the day I do it: sizzling acid swallowing errant flakes and excess oil and tapping on bony skull. Fiery, noxious waves proving that beauty is indeed, pain.
The air’s thinning—once-good oxygen’s laced with cartoon skulls and crossbones and a hint of Mr. Clean.
I straight-up lie to the colourist: Can’t feel anything. Maybe, like, a bit of a tingling? Super mild.
The truth isn’t an option. Anna told me the secret: the second I acknowledge the pain, it’ll all stop, and I’ve come too far to be stuck with a creamsicle head and yet another corporeal failure.
In the mirror, it’s all a mess of tin foil and snakes of hair turning shades of turmeric. It hurts, but I don’t care. I’m not leaving until the bleach eats the pigment out of every cell.
Six hours later, my scalp stings and my newly porous hair wont dry, but it’s white blonde and I feel like someone else. Myself? I feel something I can’t quite put my finger on, but I can touch the straw-dry ends of my hair and I like it.
The stylist gives me a hand mirror and spins me around so I can see what I’ve done from every angle. For the first time in my life, I see traces of my mother’s face in mine when I see my reflection.
I put sunglasses over my Asian eyes and shake out my light locks; I walk out into the late-afternoon sun, wondering if I’m fooling anyone.
***
Last summer, I visited my mother’s hometown of Thunder Bay. It’s my first time there since I was a child. My mother rarely talks about Thunder Bay—the city she grew up in but fled as a teenager for the sun of the west coast and an interracial marriage. The city that’s been heralded as one of the most racist in the country, particularly amongst Indigenous populations.
My now-retired parents drive from Vancouver to Ontario—but I fly in.
Stepping off the plane, something’s off and I feel conspicuous. At first, I figure it’s because I’m limping after foolishly running a marathon earlier that day. Passersby’s eyes flit to my head, and I fumble in my bag for a hat to cover my messy, bleached-blonde hair that felt cool when I left but feels silly and out of place here.
I realize the reason I feel weird is because I’m the only non-white person in sight—until my Japanese dad drives up.
We visit my mom’s family at a barbecue. It’s a menagerie of aunts and uncles and cousins that I recognize vaguely by name, but not by face. Family, in theory, turned into strangers by time and distance.
My mother—an ultra-shy woman who sometimes struggles to speak even to me—fits in here. Though she hasn’t lived near these people for more than forty years, her voice acclimates, taking on their mid-western “you betcha” twang. She looks like them. The same round noses and light eyes. The same humble style—medium-wash jeans and cotton-blend T-shirts on plus-sized frames.
Dad’s overly eager here, shaking hands and making jokes with in-laws who smile politely but not warmly. His hair’s grayed to match theirs now, but he still sticks out. Even though I have the same round nose and light hair now, I stick out here, too.
“You got some crazy hair going on there, uh, Sharon,” my auntie Lee says, struggling to remember my name while bringing me a cup of tea. Hands to head, I glimpse my reflection in the glass of the microwave. I’m still holding on to the blonde, but dark roots are creeping through. I’m not fooling anyone.
***
I’m 11k into a training run and not in the mood for small talk.
I see him from afar, but hope that he doesn’t recognize me—he’s an overly friendly, older acquaintance from my running group, and I don’t want to chat.
I pick up my pace to pass him on the sea wall, but as I curve under the emerald scaffolding of the Lion’s Gate Bridge, he huffs along beside me.
“I thought that was you!” he puffs.
Yup. It’s me.
“I almost didn’t recognize you. Something’s different?”
I was blonde when you met me last month, I say, pointing at my freshly dyed, stubby brown ponytail for emphasis.
John looks me up and down, and I see the PC wheels turning in his head.
“Oh. So…. You’re very exotic. What, um, are you?”
Canadian.
“But ethnically?”
Half white. I pause. Half Japanese.“Ohhhhh. Never would have guessed it,” he says. “It’s so hard to tell these days. You know, with all these mixes, no one looks like what they are anymore.”
Sharon Miki is a freelance copywriter and semi-professional contest-enterer based in Vancouver. If she’s not typing, she’s probably long-distance running very slowly or Instagramming her Boston Terrier, Michael.
