I learned a new word today, just fifteen minutes ago. I also now have a new category on top of many others. I am a hapa. I just read about it in the Courier, a free bi-weekly tabloid published here in Vancouver. It is quite a mainstream run-of-the-mill sort of rag. Rather conservative with contributions from or about smug home-owners having conniption-fits about stray mushrooms growing in their front lawn and bike helmets. There are also interesting community articles such as the one I just read about hapa, a Hawaiian word for persons of mixed heritage. They are going to have a festival sometime later this month but I don't plan to attend. I simply don't do these events any more, but I'm not going to say why right now as that would be material for a future post and I'm making no promises.
I never thought much nor anything extraordinary about my hapa status. Indeed I didn't think there was anything special about it at all given that racially I am still more or less Caucasian but even that is up for debate because I seem to have inherited from my German descent mother such enormous cheekbones as must be of Indigenous Canadian heritage, possibly Cree or Blackfoot given that she was born in Saskatchewan.
This for me is where the family plot really thickens, but first let me explain a genetic detail or two. My late father was born to Scottish immigrant parents in this country in 1928, city of Winnipeg, or Winterpeg when you factor in the brutal winters, or the namesake of Winnie the Pooh, already mentioned in an earlier post, I cannot remember which and I don't feel like looking for it right now so find it yourselves. It'll give you something to do and maybe even get you to read some of the many fab articles on this blog that you've been previously ignoring.
It was considered kind of a big deal that my father was Scottish descent, making him British, sort of, regardless of the outcome of yesterday's Scottish independence referendum and my late mother was German-Canadian even though no one in her family tree had anything to do with that goddam war. They married each other in 1952, seven years after the war ended and my mother's new mother-in-law, my Scottish Granny silently and irrevocably hated her. I never learned anything about this till long after my parent's bitter and ugly divorce. Even though my mother's grandparents immigrated to Saskatchewan as pioneers from Russia with absolutely no relation to Nazi Germany or either of the World Wars, to Grandma Greenlaw she was unforgivably German. A Hun. A mortal enemy. No one could convince her that our ancestors moved to Russia around 1800 at the bequest of Catherine the Great.
In the sixties this of course made me exotic since there weren't a lot of visible minorities living in Canada then. Even the very idea of "miscegenation" or racial intermarriage was considered unthinkable. The idea intrigued me of course and while Mom tried to get my brother and I to promise her that we would never marry black women, or Asian or any other race or colour, I couldn't help but entertain the idea. And even Mom more than once mentioned that children of mixed unions are often better looking and more intellectually endowed than either of their parents given that Ma Nature always tries to bring the best out of our genes.
I still feel Scottish in that I did follow carefully yesterday's referendum but I also feel a bit relieved that Scotland didn't secede from the United Kingdom. I don't think I can really rationally back up my position since it is kind of intuitive and gut-level. I somewhat regret that some may still consider me too white to qualify as a full-fledged hapa, though it seems that race here is not an issue, simply mixed ethnic heritage.
And I do suspect that I might be part Cree or Blackfoot. My mother's paternal grandmother was something of an anomaly, an apparently very angry, disturbed and frightening woman. I wonder what must have happened to her to make her that way, because her son my grandfather has the cheekbones not of a German but of a North American Indian. I will probably never know. As a Scottish-German by way of Russia Canadian with possible native genes and fluency in Spanish as a second language what can I say but Oh Hapa Day.
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