By Michelle Robin La

My kids have told me they feel lucky to be unique, belonging to two cultures. At other times, they’ve said, “I don’t want to be half. I want to be one or the other.”

Name, address, birthdate. Those were easy questions to answer. I sat at a low table on a tiny chair in an elementary school classroom filling out forms so my oldest daughter, Trinh, could enter kindergarten in the fall. Then I got to the boxes. Check one. One? When the 2000 census forms arrived, I checked off multiple boxes for each of my three children to define their race. Which box should I check when my child fits into more than one category? White like me or Asian like her dad?

“Your daughter doesn’t look anything like you,” the owner of the photography shop said when he developed our family pictures. “It looks like you didn’t have anything to do with them at all,” a family friend told me. I had laughed away these comments. But when I was forced to choose one box in which to define my child, I didn’t want to justify these comments by checking a box I didn’t fit into. My dad had joked that because my husband was half Chinese and half Vietnamese, but three of my grandparents were Swedish, the kids were mainly Scandinavian. There wasn’t a box for that.

Despite our superficial differences in appearance, whenever I take my kids to school, the store, or a playground, no one asks if they are mine. Maybe it’s because we live on the West Coast, where interracial marriages are common, or because people mistakenly assume my children are adopted. Or maybe it’s because when a child runs to his mother for comfort on the playground, no one questions the bond. Well, there was my mother’s elderly friend who asked, “Where did you get your children?” When I told her I got them from inside of me, she argued.

I can’t remember which box I checked to enroll Trinh in kindergarten. I probably checked different boxes for each of my three children when I registered them. Trinh, on the other hand, showed no hesitation when her fourth grade teacher had asked which box to fill in on the standardized tests. “Asian,” my daughter said. I was surprised she was so definite. Do people always identify with the most unique part of them? Didn’t my daughter feel she was part of each? Was it the Asian last name? The coloring of her features? The rice we ate every night?

I asked my younger daughter, Emily, which ethnicity she identified with. “Asian, of course,” she answered. “My hair and eyes are brown, so I look it.” She laughed. “Besides, I’m smart—I fit the stereotype.”

I was happy for my daughters to have their own look, different from mine. I resembled my mother so much that people made a joke on her name and called us “Dot and ditto.” Although I take it as a compliment now, at the time, I just wanted to look like me. People used to think my daughters looked so much alike they’d ask Trinh about the smaller version of her they saw.

My son, Kien, looked uncomfortable during these discussions. When I asked what he considers himself, he said, “I’m not anything except me.” When Kien was a toddler, his wispy baby hair was a strawberry blond. I held it up to my own hair and it matched. Later it turned a light brown. People say my son looks just like his father. Now that my daughters are older, people don’t say they look just like their dad. But my friends say they see my smile or expressions in their faces.

My kids have told me they feel lucky to be unique, belonging to two cultures. At other times, they’ve said, “I don’t want to be half. I want to be one or the other.”

Back in Seattle, people thought of my girls as white because there were so many Asian kids, a lot of them their friends, who had both parents from Asia. But, when we moved to Santa Barbara, people seemed to think of them as more Asian because there were so many Caucasian and Hispanic kids but not many Asians. My husband says we’re all-American.

When the 2010 census came, I checked multiple boxes for all my kids. But when Trinh handed me the form for a college class she was applying to for the summer, she had only checked the “Asian/Vietnamese” box. “You can check ‘white,’ too,” I suggested.

Emily—my daughter who said she fits the Asian stereotype—has said people mistakenly refer to her as Irish or Japanese. After her trip to Europe with her grandparents, she became interested in that part of her heritage. We joined the local American Scandinavian Foundation and she’ll be Lucia in their Christmas festival this year. Emily started to check any box she could on forms: Swedish, German, Chinese, Vietnamese. When her AP exam results came, I noticed she checked “white.” Puzzled, I asked her why.

“I could only check one,” she said. “I usually check ‘other,’ but they didn’t have it. I don’t feel Asian because I didn’t grow up in an Asian country. Maybe if both of my parents had come here from Asia….” I told her that on her college application she can check both.

Like my husband, I can only check one box. So it’s interesting to see which boxes my kids choose and how their reasons for checking them change. Curious, I asked Kien which box he picks. “I usually check ‘Asian’ because most of our relatives are Asian.” When I told him his sister usually picks “other” he gave me a funny look. “If I could, I’d check every single box and say I’m human.”

Michelle Robin La is the author of Catching Shrimp with Bare Hands, the true story of her husband growing up in the Mekong Delta during and after the Vietnam War. She lives with her husband and three children in Santa Barbara, CA, and blogs about her culturally-blended life at michellerobinla.com.