Hiding in Plain Sight

Whisky A Go-Go on Twitter: "happy birthday to EDDIE VAN HALEN  !!#eddievanhalen #guitargod #eruption #vanhalen https://t.co/BHtEl8BBsU"
RIP

It was only yesterday that I learned that Eddie Van Halen was half Dutch, half Indonesian. The thing I immediately felt, viscerally, was a sense of betrayal.

Is that fair? Probably not.

But growing up as a half Japanese, half Finnish kid in a place where being mixed race was a rarity (though there were some critical other folks in my life who were), a lot of my youth was a combination of being bullied, and feeling adrift from any kind of common culture.

“What are you?” was a common question. Getting the slanty-eyes ching-chong stuff was also common. It wasn’t from everyone – it was just from the regular elementary/middle/high school bully types. But how do you respond to that, when you also constantly wonder where you belong?

My culture wasn’t my parents’ culture. In Japan, I was always too white. In Finland, I was clearly too Asian. Sometimes I was white enough, sometimes not. Sometimes talking to other mixed-race kids, you could relate… and sometimes their experience was rooted in the particular mix of stuff they came from.

Most of the time, being “me” was enough. But in the times when I felt lost, there wasn’t much to hang on to.

I didn’t realize until yesterday how much I longed for someone in popular culture who I could point to and say, “Yeah, I’m like him.” I didn’t realize it until the moment I knew I could have had that growing up – it was right there, in front of my face – and didn’t. Van Halen was popular just at the right time where it would have made a difference. Eddie Van Halen was the kind of universally beloved, respected person you could have pointed to and said, “Like him,” and it would have made things easier. Less lonely. More understandable.

So I felt betrayed, because finding out that an anchor for my cultural identity was right there in front of my face the entire time, and wasn’t, because he never made a public issue of it (nor did Alex), when it would have been so great to hear someone struggling with that sense of otherness, of being bullied for who you are… maybe he did, but it wasn’t loud enough to help. And I know that’s not fair.

I wish the younger me had someone like him to look up to.

But I didn’t.

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