Colorism, Code-Switching, and Shapeshifting: Readings on Biracial Identity

“ETHNICITY: MIXED/OTHER.”

This was how my identity was recorded when I was granted British citizenship, at nine years old. Those three clinical words, innocuously stamped into my paperwork, went on to capture the feeling of spacelessness, of otherness, that being biracial often arose for me. I have a Korean mother, a Turkish father, and I grew up in predominantly white spaces in the UK; my identity, as a result, has become a very fluid thing, contingent on time and place.

I was twenty-three when I first read a book with a biracial protagonist. Until then, I didn’t understand why I wore foundation three shades too light for my skin tone in Korea, or why I went to extra lengths to appear well-spoken around my white friends. I was shape-shifting, doing my best to accommodate the multiple cultures I straddled.

From colorism to code-switching, it’s through reading that I learned the language behind the behaviors that have underpinned my life. The below books explore the breadth of what it can mean to be biracial, and have held me as I grappled with what it means to me.

For this same reason, it was important that my debut novel, Jaded, was also told in the voice of a biracial protagonist: a twenty-something lawyer named Jade whose career is on the rise, until a work event goes terribly wrong. In the aftermath, Jade is left making sense of the life in which she has never truly belonged, and picking apart the person she has been for everyone else. It’s about identity, messy relationships, consent, and finding your place in the world.

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Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart

Following the tragic loss of her mother, Zauner’s memoir is a stunning exposition of complex mother-daughter relationships, where the two generations were raised in different languages and cultures. Zauner not only grieves her mother’s passing, but also what she fears is her connection to her Koreanness.

It is a question that sits with so many biracial people: is my parent the only bridge to this country I come from, that otherwise seems so far away? What happens when they are gone? How will I remain connected to my culture? The dismantling, and tentative rebuilding, of Zauner’s identity is both painfully tender and freeing to read.

Wiz Wharton, Ghost Girl, Banana

The title of this novel—taken from racial slurs used against the mother-daughter protagonists—sets the tone of othering and reclamation that is woven throughout. Ghost Girl, Banana is a story of home-going, after Lily, who lost her mother at a young age, is named the beneficiary of a mysterious stranger’s fortune. As she travels to Hong Kong to investigate her newfound inheritance, she ends up tugging at the threads of who her mother was, and unravelling deep-rooted family secrets.

I found so mesmerizing the way Wharton depicted how, to biracial children raised in the west, our parents’ past lives can often feel so inaccessible, mired in a history and country that perhaps we can never fully understand.

Celeste Ng, Everything I Never Told You

Following a Chinese-American family reeling from the death of the favorite middle child, Lydia, this book vibrantly portrays the quiet, simmering tensions underlying an inter-racial relationship, that ripple through the lives of their biracial children. We feel the father’s ache for his mixed-race children to assimilate into American life, the painful subtext behind the mother’s naive statements about race, and Lydia’s desire to dutifully conform to the competing, irreconcilable demands of her white mother and Chinese father.

Brit Bennett, The Vanishing Half

Two runaway identical twins choose entirely different paths: Stella lives a lie with her white husband and daughter, passing as a white woman; Desiree has a child with a Black man, and finds her way back to their Black community. The repercussions of these decisions rise to the surface when the twins’ daughters’ worlds collide.

This novel explores the dynamics of racial passing and colorism—something that has to be considered on a daily basis by some biracial people—and the effects and privileges of shape-shifting one’s identity.

Ella King, Bad Fruit

A searing account of colorism and intergenerational trauma, Bad Fruit’s biracial protagonist Lily yellowfaces herself with hair dye, makeup and colored contact lenses. Lily minimizes her white features, having internalized her mother’s distaste for them, finding safety in appearing as close to the “Chinese version” of herself as possible.

As she models herself in her mother’s image, Lily and her mother’s memories begin to overlap like a sewing pattern and she starts to have flashbacks that shed light on her mother’s dark childhood.

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Jaded by Ela Lee is available via Simon & Schuster.