I just read this staff blog entry from
Faith in Vermont from the 10/2/12 edition of the Addison Independent (a local weekly newspaper not too far from us). It was fabulous and very well put. I'm sharing it here in its entirety. Thanks for putting what I think into words!
Uncomfortable by Faith Gong
My last name is Gong, but I’m not Asian.
I think this probably confuses people the first time they meet me;
nurses scanning the waiting room for “Mrs. Gong” tend to overlook me,
and many people repeat “GONG?” upon learning my last name, as if they must have misunderstood.
That doesn’t bother me one bit, honestly, because I spent the first two
decades of my life saddled with the maiden name “Cinquegrana,” courtesy
of my Italian father. I can’t claim to have married my husband for his
last name, but its lone syllable was a definite selling point.
My last name is Gong, of course, because I married a Chinese-American
man. We were married in Manhattan, which is 48% White. We had three
half-Chinese children, all born in Oakland, California, which is 35%
White. Then we moved to Middlebury, Vermont, which is 86% White – and
that figure, from the 2010 census, includes the Middlebury College
student body. According to the same census, the state of Vermont is 96%
White. That makes Vermont the whitest state in the nation.
I’m not usually aware that our little family is adding racial diversity to the whitest state (although I will occasionally
realize that my husband is the only Asian in a room, or that my
daughters are in a small minority of brunettes at their preschool).
That’s due in part to the fact that I’m the whitest member of our
family, so I’m arguably the most comfortable in this setting. It’s
probably also because we live in Middlebury, where the aforementioned
college attracts a great diversity of students and faculty -- enough to
make it 10% more diverse than the rest of the state.
But I think it’s more than that; I think the fact that our multi-racial
family is so comfortable here says something special about Vermont.
It’s funny, but those awkward moments when nurses look over my head as
they call “Mrs. Gong?” and people squint at me quizzically when I say my
last name – those moments all happened in Manhattan and the Bay Area.
Here, our family has been warmly welcomed by fellow Vermont transplants
and fourth generation Vermonters alike. I can only describe the
experience of my family, of course, but never once has anybody in
Vermont commented on our name or our race.
How is that possible, in such a remarkably UN-diverse place? It could
be that there are so few Chinese people in Vermont, nobody expects “Gong” to be attached to an Asian – it’s just not in their frame of reference.
But I give Vermonters more credit than that. My own theory is that
Vermonters pass so little racial judgment because most Vermonters live
in small towns. Living in a small town, you learn a lot about diversity.
Not racial diversity, per se, but PEOPLE diversity. Simply put:
Everybody is a little weird. Your neighbors may be Chinese, or they may
have ten rusted-out pickup trucks in their yard, or they may cover their
walls with antlers, or they may breed llamas. (Actually, after 18
months in Vermont, I no longer find any of those things weird). My point
is, everybody’s got something. And it’s a lot harder to hide your something in a small town, where you see the same people every day.
This is where I believe the legendary Vermont reticence – some would
call it “chilliness” – comes in. I’ve found most Vermonters to be quite
friendly, but they do set boundaries. I wouldn’t label this “chilliness”
so much as “respect.” If you plan to live for decades within the same
small community, you’d best learn to respect people, to allow space for
their weirdness.
Last month, my husband and I had the enormous pleasure of attending Mike Sommers’s one-man show, Vermont Boy in West Oakland,
at the Town Hall Theater. Sommers, who grew up in Middlebury, performed
a hilarious and moving monologue about his experience moving from
Vermont to a primarily black neighborhood in West Oakland, California –
not far from where we used to live.
At one point, Sommers’s Oakland neighbor asked him if he was
uncomfortable being the only “white boy” on the block. Sommers replied
something along the lines of: “I’m a Vermont boy; I’m uncomfortable
around everybody. I look at white people, and all I see are city folk.”
In other words, to live in Vermont is to be weird, plain and simple.
Vermonters live in the least diverse, most rural state in the union.
Perhaps it’s this deep-seated knowledge of their own weirdness that
makes Vermonters so tolerant of difference, diversity….weirdness, in others. Everybody’s got something.
Faith Gong has worked as an elementary school teacher, a freelance
photographer, and a nonprofit manager. Since moving to Addison County in
2011, her work has involved caring for a house in the woods, three
young daughters, one soon-to-be-puppy (coming next week!) — and writing
for her blog, The Pickle Patch.
