Egg, Banana or Coconut?

If you are familiar with Asian American terminology, you would know what being called a "banana" means. The banana fruit is yellow on the outside and white on the inside. If an Asian person is called a "banana" (or as one of my China friends put it 香蕉人 - "banana person"), it means that he has yellow skin (or looks completely Asian on the outside) but his language, thinking and behaviour is completely western (or "white").

Eggs, on the other hand, have white shells (at least duck eggs and some chicken eggs do!) and contain a yellow yolk in the centre. My white American friend who lives in Hawaii calls himself an "egg". He has a Japanese-American wife. He is the opposite of the "banana". He may be a white American on the outside, but his thinking and value system is completely Asian.

My Samoan friend is brown-skinned. He grew up speaking Samoan, but he spent a large part of his life in the mainland USA. His thinking and behaviour is completely western. One day, when a few of us were describing ourselves as "bananas" or "eggs", he walked by and said, "Just call me a 'coconut'." We all promptly burst out laughing.

I have always considered myself a "banana". I was born into an English-speaking home environment. Nobody spoke Mandarin. Three of my four grandparents spoke English. The other grandparent was unschooled. She only spoke Cantonese. Since I was despised from birth since I am female, she hardly spoke to me. I attended an English-speaking Catholic school. All of us scraped through Chinese lessons, doing much better at English.

In my adult working years, I was thrown into a Chinese-speaking environment. I was forced to speak, and later on try to read the newspapers daily as part of my job. Many years later, I decided to start all over again, reading my Bible daily with a dictionary by my side. I am still not fluent, neither can I read well, but I manage. The greatest compliment I received sometime ago was from a friend from China. He said, "妳已经不是香蕉人了！“ ("You are no longer a banana!") He went on to tell me how much he enjoyed my sermons in Chinese because he received insights that he did not get from sermons in English. I was moved to tears.

I still consider myself a "banana" today. Will that ever change? I don't know. Suffice it to say that the colour of my skin does not define who I am. Neither should you be defined as such. Just be yourself!

Here's to individuality and diversity!