Shoes
by Rebecca Creger
“Hey, John’s going to the John!”
My uncle’s voice rings out gleefully as my dad excuses himself after three glasses of red wine. It’s my Jewish grandpa’s birthday and we’ve all descended upon his house in Palo Alto for dinner out in the back garden between three big circular tables. There are nine cousins, ages 11-19, sitting at a table reserved especially for them, and at another, the eight parents and my grandparents. The patio is full of tipsy adults, downing merlot liberally to dull their various aches and pains and calling out randomly to the kids, chattering boisterously about politics and telling jokes and bizarre stories to everyone in the vicinity.
My aunt Austen is the tiniest and the loudest adult there, exclaiming, “That’s so AWESOME!” as my sister Hana and I fill her in about what we’ve been doing lately.
After dinner there are furious games of ping-pong and badminton going on simultaneously as my technology-savvy grandma brings out her laptop to show us a slideshow of the thousand of pictures she’s taken on her trips to France with my grandpa. Tiny lap dogs scamper underfoot as I play my tipsy uncle Phil at ping-pong and he stumbles and misses the ball.
“Wow!” he shouts, “You’re JUST like your dad! You’re SO good at ping-pong, you’re TOTALLY CREAMING me!!!”
Later, when it’s almost time to leave, my sister, my cousins and I sprawl tiredly on the stairs in the front hall. We’re recovering from the evening and too much chocolate ganache and chatting amongst ourselves.
“I wanna go back to Quail Lodge,” my cousin Abby says, sighing nostalgically.
For my grandma’s 80th birthday my grandpa had treated the entire immediate family to an overnight at a resort in Carmel.
I nod fervently in agreement,
“That was so nice. I hella want to go back there and order room service and watch movies all day and just charge it to Grandpa’s room.”
“Yeah, I’d want to get a massage and spa treatment if I went back—their bathrobes were fantastic,” Abby says reminiscently. As my mom passes up by to grab her coat from the closet I remember,
“I just found out that my mom stole like, twelve pieces of silverware from the dinner table when she was there.”
“Wow…that’s a little out of character--why did she do that?” asked my cousin Elizabeth, laughing.
“It was hella random of her to do something like that,” I said shrugging, “She said she thought they wouldn’t miss them because she said it was such a hoity-toity place and she wanted to have silverware in the car when she gets take-out for lunch.”
My Chinese Grandpa’s birthday is a much quieter affair. We often go out for dim sum at a fantastic Chinese restaurant. There is a certain tension and irritation in the silence before the food comes as we smell the heavenly fumes issuing from the kitchen and other tables who are already eating their pork buns enthusiastically. After the formalities of “How’s school?” and “What colleges are you applying to?” and the replies of “It’s okay,” and “My classes are all right,” there isn’t much to say. I’m always relieved when the food comes so that I’ll have something to do. There is a big anticipation, one in which I can feel a huge lack of things to talk about because there’s this great impatience for the arrival of the food, which is the big attraction of the night. My Grandpa pipes up huffily from across the big round table.
“Where’s the chicken feet? We already ordered them especially!”
My aunt shouts into his hearing aid,
“SHE’S COMING WITH THE CART. SHE HAS TO SERVE THEM FIRST.” She gestures to the neighboring table. My grandpa nods, anticipating his favorite dish, and as soon as the cart rolls around the corner and the plate touches down upon the table, his chopsticks shoot out to seize a breaded glazed foot. He strips it down to the bone rapidly, concentrating deeply on his plate, head bowed.
Another cart rolls around and the server pulls back the wet bamboo lids of the dim sum steamers to display assorted dumplings, miniature buns, and sticky rice wrapped in banana leaves. Steam rises from their fluffy rice skins and the delicious smell washes over me, making my mouth water slightly. My aunt and uncle are arguing fiercely over what type of dumpling to get from the cart.
“Just get the hac gao! And the shu mai,” my uncle Henry shoots at my aunt Lolan.
“The shu mai here doesn’t look that good and we’re already getting pork buns, we don’t need any more pork!” my aunt hisses impatiently back.
“Pop wants another plate of chicken feet,” my mom calls from across the table.
Finally, when the table is well supplied with food, the tension disappears completely as everyone tucks in contentedly, chopsticks clicking against the dishes. I grin as the delicate flavors of tender pork, and onions make my tongue tingle happily and the fluffy bun dissolves in my mouth. But then comes that inevitable point in time when everyone is almost full and for me there’s this huge question lingering in the air:
“Now what?”
As the lazy susan slides the plate of chicken feet past me, with one last limp foot on it, my aunt urges me,
“Becca! Try the chicken feet.”
“No thanks.”
I was already so satiated that I didn’t want to look at food any more.
“They’re good Becca!”
“It’s okay. I’m really full,” I say firmly.
My aunt’s face falls, worried that this morsel might go to waste. Wasting food is an abomination on my Chinese side of the family. My concentration slips and I start staring at a lone noodle on my plate. Hana throws me a significant look and mouths,
“I’m so bored.” at me. I nod slightly, raise my eyebrows and sigh.
My Chinese side of the family rarely engages in gossip, or discusses politics and random topics, preferring small talk, and conventional more businesslike conversations. There is a strong sense of obligation to family and it’s a duty to attend family gatherings.
When we all converge at one of our houses the whole event is centered around the making of several dishes, as we wait impatiently for the rice to plump up in the cooker, for the prawns to simmer, or the bac-choi to cook. Since my sister and I cannot do stir-fry or comprehend the complexities of preparing Chinese cuisine we’re always left out of this ritual and communal effort.
It all leads up to the moment when it’s ready and set on the table where everyone is crowded hungrily around the food, and we descend upon it in silent concentration. After eating the scene is very anti-climatic, as we sit in our chairs, a little dazed, and extremely stuffed because it’s harder to stop eating when the food is so delicious and the high point of the evening.
My Chinese family is a lot more down to earth than my Jewish side of the family, which is nice because it’s so laid back. They have this unpretentious manner that just isn’t there to the same degree with a lot of my Jewish relatives. When I’m with my Chinese relatives I’m not always on my toes, trying to be witty like everyone else. But without a doubt, one of the best things about Chinese culture is the food, and I’ve definitely learned to appreciate the passion and care that goes into its creation.
When you’re multi-ethnic, you’re not really supposed to choose one of your ethnicities to connect to more than the others. My parents were very neutral on the subject of my ethnicities and never tried to push me one way or another. They hardly followed any strict Jewish or Chinese traditions besides very non-traditional Hanukahs and Chinese New Years. I did try, though, to choose one of my ethnicities. I wanted to be more like my Jewish family, who seemed just so sophisticated, fancy, witty and fun to me from a very young age. I was also sent to The Jewish Community Center (JCC) for preschool, which encouraged a stronger connection to my Jewish side, something I enjoyed a lot when it came to remembering all the Hanukah songs, getting presents for eight days, eating Challah and latkes, coloring, making things out of dry macaroni, finger-painting, and making my first Jewish friends.
I always felt more out of place when we visited with my mom’s side of the family than when we’d visit my dad’s side of the family. Not only am I suddenly one of the tallest people in the room for once, but also sitting in a crowd of my Chinese relatives makes me more aware of my whiter features, whiter features that made me see myself as more white than Chinese. Another thing that made really aware of my whiter features was going to Chinese summer camp at age six with my sister.
My parents had wanted us to have a balanced experience of both of our ethnic backgrounds, though they’d never followed the traditions of their ethnic backgrounds. I hadn’t been around a lot of Chinese peers from a very young age and suddenly I was surrounded by them. I’d never felt so white and out of place before Hip-Wah summer camp, or felt so aware of how brown my hair was in a sea of black. My sister and I couldn’t relate to any of the kids there and as a result never bothered to make friends there.
There were plenty of Jews and a lot less Asians around me as I went through the preschool, elementary, and junior high. My bias for Jewish and White culture caused me to seek out people I thought would be more like my dad’s side of the family so by the time I got to high school I couldn’t really relate to Asians or anyone Chinese.
Another awareness about my bias towards my Jewish side has emerged quite recently too, and it is a very uncomfortable one. Not only does my bias it stem from wanting to emulate my Jewish family, but to emulate their slightly wealthier lifestyle and a prejudice I have against Chinese culture even though I am half Chinese.
It isn’t easy to talk about class or prejudice as factors in my bias towards the Jewish, whiter side of me, and these are awarenesses I have felt a lot guilt about for holding. But the main point is how, from a very young age, I always wanted to be more like my Jewish side of the family in terms of personal qualities. More recently however I have realized that some deeper underlying reasons for my preference have a lot to do with class and cultural preference.
With my preference to be around a more Jewish culture, I felt pretty confident of my strong connection to anything Jewish. I was proud of that part of myself and the contributions Jews had made to society, as well as indignant at the past wrongs done to them.
July 2007. I was visiting Washington D.C. with the National Young Leaders Conference and that day we were free to explore the Smithsonian museum complex. After visiting the Museum of the American Indian my very Jewish friend Shana and I trudged about 3/4 of a mile to the opposite end of the complex to the Holocaust Memorial Museum through the humid, soggy, rainy weather. All our clothes were sticking to us as we entered a large, somber-looking building that was supposed to be reminiscent of a prison. Once we got past security and collected our passes, we took the elevator up with tourists of varying backgrounds and ethnicities to the start of the permanent exhibition.
The miniature identification card I picked up at the entrance of the exhibit read, “For the dead and the living we must bear witness.” Mine related the story of Dora Eiger, born in Radom, Poland, who had first noticed anti-Jewish placards and hate messages when she visited her uncle near the German border around 1939. After that she had to wear an identifying badge on her clothing and work in a weapons factory, which coincidentally saved her when Nazis were destroying the ghettos between 1942 and 1943. In July 1944, Dora was deported to Auschwitz where she nearly died from starvation and brutal forced labor. She was liberated at the Bergen-Belsen camp by British troops in April 1945 and immigrated to America in 1950. There were hundreds of copies of different identification cards telling the stories of Holocaust survivors at the entrance to the exhibit.
On the way up, Shana asked me tentatively, if my family or anyone else I knew had been affected by the Holocaust. I’m only 1/4 Jewish and my grandfather’s family emigrated to the United States before the twentieth century, so I don’t have a very direct connection to the genocide. Shana, who is full Jewish, didn’t know of anyone that had been affected either. As the doors opened and I saw the displays of the grayish blue uniforms the prisoners used to wear covered the walls, I noticed a definite tension spreading across Shana’s face. We fell silent, watching several screens depicting the spread of Nazi ideology with fuzzy black and white clips of mass book burning, the light from the screens reflected in her eyes.
We didn’t have much time left to get back to the buses so we had to hurry through the exhibition, passing photos of Jewish storefronts that had been closed or ransacked, and models of gas chambers holding thousands of naked corpses. One of the most eerie parts was walking through one side and out the other of an old train car. It had transported Jews to Auschwitz. The wooden walls, the dark inside the cabin, and the presence of hundreds of the absent dead seemed to press in on me from all sides. As exhibits steadily became grimmer and my stomach seemed to clench slightly at each on as I read each little placard describing in horrible detail, the suffering of the Jews in Europe. There really wasn’t much to say, except “God, that’s really fucked up.” Shana seemed to be becoming more and more disturbed as the exhibition progressed, her arms folded tightly to her, concentrating intensely on each part of the exhibition, her face set.
By this time I was beginning to realize that these exhibits were probably affecting her more severely than me. But still, I was reasonably confident in the strength of my connection to this part of my heritage. I did feel a heavy sort of dread in my stomach, because as the exhibition took us through the Holocaust’s progression I already knew how it would end, with six million murdered. I was only a little worried about the emotions I was supposed to be feeling because I’d expected some kind of pain from the extent of the tragedy to grip me agonizingly and cause a strong reaction to the information. But I already knew the outcome of the genocide and a lot of the information wasn’t new to me. I was feeling the shock, outrage and sadness of the tragedy, but these feelings were numbed somehow; they were these faint lurches of emotion that seemed to fade away fast no matter how hard I tried to hold onto them.
Then there were the shoes.
The exhibition led to a white walkway with railings on both sides, where spread across the floor on either side of the path were thousands of old forlorn shoes. There were ones that must have been fine once, with flimsy straps and slight heels, ones of black and brown leather, a dainty, dirty white slipper with a broken heel, children’s shoes scattered here and there, a loafer, and hundreds of boots. An engraving on the wall read, "We are the shoes, we are the last witnesses. We are shoes from grandchildren and grandfathers from Prague, Paris, and Amsterdam. And because we are only made of fabric and leather, and not of blood and flesh, each one of us avoided the Hellfire."
These were the shoes of thousands of the dead from the Nazi prison Majdanek in Poland, that had made my usually stoic grandpa start bawling. My stomach seemed to turn over sickeningly and my throat tightened as I heard a quiet sniff beside me. Shana was crying hard, streaks of tears shining on her cheeks. I put my arm around her.
“Oh....Shana.”
She wiped her eyes, her voice breaking,
“God, I just...look how many...there are so many kids shoes down there...and...and...oh...”
There really wasn’t much to say. I kept patting her on the back, as my eyes remained stubbornly dry. Usually streaming during sappy movies, they were completely unresponsive. I thought I could feel a slight burning behind them and a slight grief take hold of me, but nothing could force a single tear out and I felt a little heartless standing next to Shana who was still sobbing quietly and wiping her eyes. Not one tear. How could I feel so little at one of the biggest tragedies in history?
I was frustrated at how such atrocities could have happened, but also at how I couldn’t seem to feel as sad as I wanted to. I did feel sad, but I wanted to feel that kind of grief that always felt better after you cried, not this empty, frustrated feeling.
I thought I always felt that I most strongly connected to the quarter Jewish part of me between the 1/2 Chinese, 1/8 Scottish and 1/8 Hungarian fractions of my ethnicity. After all, I had gone to Jewish Community Center (JCC) and Kehila, celebrated Hanukkah and ate latkes. My best friend is part Jewish too, and I’ve always been quite proud of that quarter of myself. Now, I felt a little lost. What did this say about me, if I couldn’t fully identify with and feel this one tragedy that connected all Jews?
The tour ended in a large circular room with rows and rows of short flickering candles on black marble plinths curving around the walls. Not all were lit; the unlit ones were meant to be lit in memory of the Holocaust. I lit several, hoping to somehow redeem my lack of appropriate emotion for those six million. I’d never wanted to feel connected to one culture so badly.
In bed that night, I kept thinking about my bias toward the Jewish part of me. I’ve always liked being multi-ethnic, because you can’t be easily boxed into expected cultural behaviors, you can connect to a lot of different people, and it makes you a little more interesting. I thought I favored my Jewish part of ethnicity more, but somehow it turned out that I couldn’t feel my connection to it to the degree I should have felt it.
I think I realized I couldn’t just be a Jew because I’ve always had such a strong reaction to my Chinese side of the family in terms of gravitating away from it. That reaction also translates into an awareness of my connection to Chinese culture, and probably makes it impossible to suppress that culture that is a part of me no matter how little I seem to relate to it. That awareness probably also dilutes the influence of my other ethnic backgrounds, so that I have to acknowledge that I can’t ever be just of one background. That day, as I walked back out into the humid air with Shana, I was able to see that I can’t be part of just one culture. The quarter Jewish part of me must have sensed the Chinese and Scottish parts’ intrusion into this grief and felt a little out of place at that key moment, knowing that I couldn’t suppress any part of my identity.