There’s a myriad of intricacies other than racial or ethnic identity that govern us and the lot multiplies as the world shrinks at an ever-accelerating pace. Factor in age, retirement, media access and exposure, sports, and shopping, for example. Was it then truly non-kosher or just too pretentious for Tiger Woods to identify his own intricacy as ‘multi-cultural’? Or, is it just human nature that less complex tagging should command broader acceptance—‘black or white’, ‘red or blue’, ‘with us or against us’?
My mother was a fan of Tiger Woods. In late retirement, my parents (now deceased) preferred to stick to just one TV network. Discerning those tiny buttons on the clicker was too complex for their glaucoma-stricken sights. That may have precipitated their increased exposure to Tiger’s winning matches. Even so, Mom may have opted to shut the power or join my dad in his usual afternoon nap. I find it fascinating then that she would have been so besotted by Mr. Woods.
True, Tiger has Asian heritage and she may have identified with him. Still, in her frail eighties, and with no sports background (gardening was her chosen form of exercise in her heydays), my mom was apparently captured. She watched Tiger’s matches whenever they were broadcasted on that channel. She even asked my dad to scavenge for a putter in one of their estate sale shopping adventures. (I have not been told whether she did in fact initiate any attempt to land a hole or two in their tiny living room.)
What part of me is Asian, and what part, American? This complexity ranks as high in the level of my dilemma of understanding what part of my genome is borne from my dad and what comes from my mom. I concur with Tiger when he finagled his way out of such verbose but less appealing propositions: “The bottom line is that I am an American and proud of it."