My Child and His Beautiful Body

Why Can’t I Be White?

I like to tell the story about my father’s birth to my son, as ever since he developed awareness of a sense of self, he has become acutely aware of his own body. By becoming conscious of difference, he has now become uncomfortable in his own skin. There is tension. He feels discomfort realizing that he does not possess the fair skin or blue or brown eyes of his closest friends. He is physically different. His hair is raven black, eyes are slanted, and his skin color is olive. But what does this mean to him? And how do I feel as his mother, as I sense discomfort and yearning stirring underneath. When I sense his unease, I tell him about the story of his grandfather so that he can find a narrative that will help him feel more comfortable with his body.

Feeling Uncomfortable in One’s Own Skin

Your grandfather was born in the middle of winter just after the Korean war. His eyes are alert. He senses a story brewing. Yes, you are lucky to be alive and so am I. Your grandfather’s life is a miracle. On a cold winter’s morning, the sounds of a young baby’s cry could be heard from the garden. A questioning look. You are right, it was him. Your great grandmother, who was still delirious and weak from child birth, ran outside to discover that her “dead” first-born was in fact alive. Can you believe it? She left him outside overnight in winter when the ground was frozen and covered with a thick layer of snow. He shakes his head in disbelief. The previous night she had buried her mother, who had been hit by a bomb. Her heavily pregnant daughter dug a hole in the icy hard ground to bury her mother; the combined grief and the physical trauma of shock and exhaustion must have induced labor. Completely alone and fatigued to the point of delirium, she found herself giving birth to my father on the cold floor. Had she managed to get back into the house? I was told that your grandfather had come out quiet, without breath or sound, with half of his face covered by an ugly red mark. He must have looked frightful with his bloodied face that appeared as beaten up and as lifeless as she felt. Chilled to the bone and feeling numb, your great grandmother must have hastily wrapped him up in an old blanket and left his small body outside in the freezing cold winter’s night. Exhausted by labor, she had no strength to mourn. Eyes closed, sinking into black oblivion, sleeping as if she had died herself, completely unconscious and dead to the world. He has a puzzled look in his eyes. I know he is wondering what she was doing by herself. The country was newly divided after the war. Your great grandfather had gone to the North in hopes of retrieving his parents and fled back to the South wearing a North Korean military uniform. On his way down, he was caught and brutally tortured by the South Korean army; when he was finally released, he was a broken man who experienced crazy and irrational rages, who hoarded everything from food to the paper napkins and was extremely averse to spending money. His family blamed him for his wife’s early death and his children avoided him.

Your grandfather survived but was left with a strange birth mark covering half his face. How did he get it? Perhaps, it was caused by the trauma of his birth, the blood rushing to his mother’s tummy as she bore the impact of her mother’s death and burial. I wonder what he would look like without this birth mark. I know you cannot visualize it. Perhaps his face would have become less vivid without this deep and dark purple mark, bright red in some parts, flowing like melted lava and hardening lumpy and creviced. Would he have become lesser without these bright colors and fleshy surfaces? I know you don’t notice as you are too distracted by the warmth in his voice and the twinkle in his eye. His distinctiveness was also hidden to me until I saw a very small child point to his own face and say in a concerned voice, “hurt, hurt.” It was only then I noticed he was considered disfigured. The image reflected by others was that his face was stained with blood. They could not tell the story of his survival and how he struggled to live so that my son and I could be born.

To Be Anyone But You

You are my son, which is perhaps why you are so self-conscious of difference. You often ask me to take you to school instead of your father. Why, I ask. He sometimes speaks to my friends in Korean, you say. It is embarrassing. My friends can’t understand as they speak English. I listen to his words, but think, what does it matter what language is spoken when you can hear the kindness in his voice. But this sense of difference still causes you angst. Although I wish you felt otherwise, I can understand why you feel this way. As an Asian child growing up in a primary White neighborhood, I also knew what it meant to be visibly different. An outsider. This feeling of being different lingers even now, as I inhabit a predominantly Anglo-Saxon and male-dominated academy, whose bodies signify knowledge and power (Wilcox, 2009). My own ethnic body wields little authority as it has less currency in this Eurocentric world. Ellingson (2006) writes about how bodies act as political sites of knowledge production (p. 301), as she relates the privileges of her “white” body, conveying,

. . . my Whiteness eased my initial acceptance into a team of healthcare providers . . . incorporating person into the daily routine would have required more conscious accommodation. My unearned social privilege helped me to fit in . . . (p. 306)

She considers the reality of “. . . the [forgotten] ontology of the body” and the underlying “conditions under which bodies are acculturated, psychologized, given identity, historical location, and agency” (Grosz, 2005, p. 2).

Our physical appearances can also shape how we know and encounter the world. My ways of knowing also does not conform to the scientific, disembodied, Eurocentric, and masculine forms of knowledge represented by older White male bodies (Wilcox, 2009). It is more embodied, as my knowledge is derived from the senses. But such forms of knowing are discredited as academia prioritizes the intellect over the body and perceives the latter as being unruly, unpredictable, and unsophisticated (Freedman & Holmes, 2012). Positivist discourses devalue the body as being less concrete and reliable, inferior to the mind and “. . . [too] personal, immediate and messy” to be considered a site of “acceptable knowledge” (Tangenberg & Kemp, 2002, p. 11). Sharp (2009) highlights the social implications of dismissing the body, explaining how the separation between the mind and body reflects the colonial rationalist’s views that non-White races were more primitive, natural and instinct-driven, and inferior from their colonizers, who had superior mental capacities and a firmer control over their senses. By possessing a “non-typical” body-type in a Western academic setting, I had a heightened awareness of my body’s differences and spent my academic life trying to become “invisible” by adopting normalized academic practices.

Learning to “See” With the Body

I cannot strip myself of ingrained ways of perceiving the world via the body. This embodied lens took root when I was brought to a place where I was physically an “outsider.” The body was also foregrounded through increasing reliance. My father was at the peak of his dental career when he migrated to Australia with his two young children. Here his path to posterity became marred by poverty and hard physical labor, as his bodily knowing shifted from expertly wielding dental tools to using physical strength to manipulate large cardboard boxes as a wholesale businessman. To adapt to manual work, his soft and white hands transformed into dark and coarse instruments of labor, illustrating the ways that disadvantage can be “written on” and “read from” bodies (Yoo & Loch, 2016). My father’s rough hands revealed the story of his new immigrant existence of driving around under the hot Australian sun, buying whole sale and re-selling at the weekend markets, working long hours in front of a till, and opening box after box of items to sell.

Growing up, I became accustomed to physical work. Each evening after dinner I would walk to our garden shed to spin barrels full of honeycomb to harvest honey from our beehives. During these evenings I lost myself in pleasurable, repetitive, and mechanical movements that often left me in a trance-like state. Night after night my father would insert exposed trays of honey comb into a big metal barrel that I would rotate, alternating arms to avoid tiredness. I would secretly sneak in a taste by sucking on my wet honey-coated fingers, listening to the sound of the thick sticky liquid hitting the metal like rain falling onto a tin roof, mesmerized by the sight of one plastic jar after another becoming filled with thick gold liquid. The tastes, sights, and sounds were intoxicating. The spinning was hypnotic, and the sweet honey was divine. The body and mind were forgotten as it merged with the spinning barrel, working intuitively and basking in many sensations, such as the sweetness on my tongue, thick droplets hitting the tin surface and the heat emanating from the light. The sensory nature of these encounters created vivid memories that could be lived and relived, so much so, that I have come to encounter the world in these sensory ways. I have come to “know” through being animate, alive, and occupying the world, via the “moving body, the doing itself” (Farnell & Varela, 2008, p. 216), in which knowledge consists of the ability to affect and be affected (Deleuze, 1988).

The work of the body was pleasurable, but it also caused shame, as my coarse skin, protruding veins, and thickened knuckles did not fit with the refined hands of an envisioned academic self. I wanted to distance myself from my body and its signifiers of poverty. Callahan (2008), an academic who was once ashamed of her poor upbringing, also explains how poverty could be read from her body as her hands, with their “chapped skin; calloused palms; soft, brittle nails; and large, knotted knuckles,” reveal her poor upbringing. Her hands starkly contrast to the comforts of her middle-class academic existence. Immigrant life was similarly a far cry away from my father’s previous white-collar existence and separate from my current life in the academy, where I was desperate to hide how I derived “intelligence” through the body rather than the mind.

Disowning the body meant writing in disembodied ways, which meant adopting an objective and “academic” writing style that left me voiceless. After years of such half-hearted and empty attempts to write, I desired to find an academic language that brought me closer to myself (Yoo, 2017). Atay (2018) discloses his desire to come into his own and to find “. . . an academic home to belong to, to feel safe in, and to have a voice in” (p. 1). Callahan (2008) also depicts her own search for a home as a process of “com[ing] out” of the academic closet and letting go of the desire to “pass” as an academic from a privileged middle-class background (p. 353). She considers the ability to pass as being “privileged” to be a “passport” to “success, to knowledge, wisdom, confidence, and self-worth,” but realizes how this “passport” propels her into a “liminal” space rife with the “tension and fear” (p. 371). My journey toward feeling comfortable in my skin is motivated by such a desire to come out of the “academic closet,” as like Callahan (2008), I have realized that “Who I am has seemed solidly grounded in who I have been trying not to be” (p. 354). This means embracing the embodied ways of encountering the world and identifying myself with my hands through exploring Wilcox’s (2009) questions about bodily knowing, “When one takes the view from the trenches, what do embodied knowledges look like? How do we claim or even recognise bodily knowledges?” (p. 106).

Returning to the “Soil” of Knowing

Capturing childhood ways of knowing can initiate a return to our “original landscape” and the “soil” of knowing. This return has felt paradoxical as for most of my academic life had been spent on escaping my “childlike” reliance on the body. Such longings to capture the body’s presence in my academic work revealed that underneath all my theorizing, I was still the “child” who watched bodies to draw on the emotionally sensed knowledges (Grosz, 2005). Pelias (2016) asserts that the personal evokes embodied ways of knowing by disclosing the researcher’s connection to their body, stating, “Writing the personal, I speak from the body. . . a scholarship attuned to the visceral and somatic. . . I am my body speaking. I am a mind/body fully engaged” (p. 388).

As academics become reflexive about their bodies and bodily ways of learning, they accordingly engage in “embodied reflexivity.” Burns (2003) introduces the term “embodied reflexivity” as a tool for identifying and questioning how the body impacts the production of knowledge (p. 230) and explains how we assess the veracity of research accounts through how it resonates with our bodily sensations. Sharma, Reimer-Kirkham, and Cochrane (2009) defines this “epistemology of embodiment” through the following criteria:

(a) how researchers can be more aware of their emotions and bodily states, (b) what these states can reveal about the researcher and possibly his or her participants, (c) how nonverbal communication is intersubjective and contributes to a co-construction of knowledge, (d) how researchers’ identities are multiple and complex, and (e) how cultural difference can impact on the interactions between researchers and participants. (p. 1643)

By understanding the embodiment of our work, we can make visible how knowledge can be “constructed,” interpreted, and deconstructed (Merleu-Ponty, 1967) to perpetuate unjust systems of power and privilege. We can also draw on our self-reflexivity to acknowledge how our research accounts represent one “truth” among many possible “truths,” as they reflect our personal histories (Burns, 2003). As we understand the existence of alternative perspectives and multiple realities, we can recognize that the picture is never complete as “we see aspects and profiles but never totalities” (Greene, 1995, p. 73). Embodied researchers acknowledge that bringing the body to the foreground is a complex and “messy” process, but they understand how embodiment provides a significant entry point into multitudinous ways of imagining the world (Sharma et al., 2009, p. 1648). Alternatively, they can become more aware of the dangers of extracting the researcher’s body from the research process and the more contrived and one-dimensional perspectives that can result by “obscur[ing] the complexities of knowledge production and yield[ing] deceptively tidy accounts of research” (Ellingson, 2006, p. 299).

Breaking down traditional research and writing in embodied ways creates spaces for different approaches to knowledge making. Sense making becomes more equitable as spaces are generated for marginalized voices, “. . . [whose] embodied knowledges . . . not only render science more accessible to women and underprivileged communities, but also help cultivate citizenry for action and change” (Wilcox, 2009, p. 105). By writing about the body, we give permission for others to express their embodied ways of knowing. Writing about the personal therefore provides a voice for the marginalized; finding “voice” enables those standing in the periphery to speak about their experiences and to connect with others. Bhattacharya (2016), for example, asserts how our “fragmented, similar, intersected, entangled” narratives, which touch on “marginalization based on gender, race, nationality, sexuality, religious affiliation, scholarly agenda, methodological preferences,” helps us to form connections with others and allows us to re-discover ourselves (p. 310). This article highlights this emancipatory potential of research, arguing how personal voices are critical and reflexive as they lay claim to multiple forms of knowledge. Embodied writing and research therefore provides a space for academics like me to speak.

Developing “Ease” With the Body

Perhaps it is because of how I have occupied my body, always feeling slightly ill at ease, that I notice the body and the discomfort it generates. Years of feeling separate from my body has left me longing for a space where people can learn to occupy their bodies without self-consciousness, to retain a sense of wholeness. I desire to find that place that my son reveled in as a new born when he was unaware off where his body left off and mine began. He was in raptures over discovering his toes. His body was not separate. It was still undiscovered. Its power to dazzle was endless. Such precious times have passed, as greater competency implies a critical gaze that compares and attributes worth to external entities. He is no longer free to simply enjoy his body, without expectation, command, performance, and evaluation.

So now it hurts me to see that there is a certain dissatisfaction in his eye as he looks in the mirror. A small child, born of my flesh, brought into the world through bodily suffering. His small expressions reveal how much he wants to fit in, blend in, and go unnoticed. I understand as I have experienced this same discomfort, both as a child and as an adult. As an academic, I have attempted to disown my body by writing dispassionately. Fortunately, my own life time of discomfort is slowly starting to ease, as I have come to realize how my visible body helps me perceive, know, exist, and write in richly nuanced ways.

Perhaps my child will also one day perceive the beauty that I see in his body. The raven black hair, slanted eyes, and olive skin, that gives him a sense of otherness, may also be what cultivates the self-reflexivity to see, feel, and sense things beyond.