By Sonja Swanson
The Bat, the Birds, and the Beasts
A great conflict was about to come off between the Birds and the Beasts. When the two armies were collected together the Bat hesitated which to join. The Birds that passed his perch said: “Come with us;” but he said: “I am a Beast.” Later on, some Beasts who were passing underneath him looked up and said: “Come with us;” but he said: “I am a Bird.” Luckily at the last moment peace was made, and no battle took place, so the Bat came to the Birds and wished to join in the rejoicings, but they all turned against him and he had to fly away. He then went to the Beasts, but soon had to beat a retreat, or else they would have torn him to pieces. “Ah,” said the Bat, “I see now. He that is neither one thing nor the other has no friends.”
—From Aesop’s Fables, translated by Joseph Jacobs, 1894
I remember quite vividly reading Aesop’s fable about the bat as a child—the poor bat, turned away by birds and beasts! I must have been five or six, and it occurred to me that maybe I was somehow like the bat, in a way I didn’t quite have an explanation for yet.
My junior year of college, I lived in La Maison Française, and it was there one sunny afternoon sitting on the back patio with a few fellow residents that I had a curious experience. Catherine, a petite, blond senior who was half-French and very proud of the fact, was extolling the virtues of French patisserie. Then it got weird. “I mean, take Korean desserts. They put red beans in them. Who does that? That’s not a dessert,” she exclaimed.
Merriam Webster defines dramatic irony as the “incongruity between a situation developed in a drama and the accompanying words or actions that is understood by the audience but not by the characters in the play.” As she continued and the dramatic irony ballooned between us, I finally spoke up. “Um. You know I’m half-Korean, right?” Her mortification was palpable, her apology sincere, and my reaction more bemused at her ignorance than anything else, but it left me wondering how many other times my Koreanness had gone unnoticed in situations far less blatant, in situations where I had benefited from passing as white, or something like it.
After college, when I was living in Korea, an old man passing me in the street jumped back just inches away, startled. “Ah! Waegukin ida!” A foreigner! Up close, anyhow. In taxi cabs, I could sometimes pass for Korean at night. In subways, I have been asked for directions in Korean and been offered assistance in English. When I show childhood photos to friends, they’ll point out images where I look “so Asian” and others where I look “so white.”
Even back in the U.S., I’m not always quite sure how I present: recently, a grocery store employee bowed to me—repeatedly—while apologizing for being out of radicchio. A few days before that, a white woman next to me at the nail salon murmured something in a conspiratorial voice about certain people “not paying taxes.” I left before my nails were dry.
There is privilege in being half-white, in having access to certain kinds of capital and, often, in passing. Learning what this privilege means and what to do with it is an ongoing process. But I have also learned over the years that how I am perceived racially—Asian, white, mixed, or something else entirely—is not always predictable. It shifts with age, weight, hair and makeup choices, whether I am tan from summer or pale from winter, the lighting in the room, what angle you view me from, and who is looking and deciding. If anything, my growing awareness of this dynamic underscores the fact that race is in the eye of the beholder, a construct made real not by my image but by the frames that others set around it.
The fable of the bat is not a perfect analogy; I am not being asked to choose sides in a battle. Rather, the fable is a cautionary tale against choosing positions of convenience. I understand this, while I also know that the little girl that was me was troubled by the story. I wanted the bat to say, “I am a bat, not a bird or beast, but a bat.” I wanted the birds to let the bat fly with them sometimes and the beasts to let the bat eat fruit with them sometimes.
Years ago, some time after my Korean grandmother passed away, my mother showed me her jewelry box. There were heavy jade rings and fanciful bracelets that I examined curiously under the light as my umma told me stories about them. Then I noticed the tiny bats engraved along the sides of the box. “Why bats?” I asked, thinking of garish Halloween decorations with a grimace. “The Chinese character for ‘bat’ sounds like bok ,” she explained, “and bok means ‘good luck.’” Bats, as it turns out, are a common motif in embroidered pillows, furniture and roof tiles and are revered as symbols of longevity. I still think about this imagery sometimes, not only because my five-year-old self would have felt strangely vindicated, but because of how quickly my frame of reference was shifted, the power of a fable, a story and a symbol.
Sonja Swanson lives in the American Southwest with annual trips to Korea, her home of seven years. She was an editor at Time Out Seoul, worked in radio and marketing, and co-founded the Korean food blog Bburi Kitchen. There is always something fermenting in her kitchen (and only sometimes by accident).