Identity Crisis: Stories about what makes us who we are

This week we present two stories about people struggling with their identity.

Part 1: When science journalist Katherine Wu interviews a scientist about a new facial recognition algorithm, the conversation turns more personal than she expected.

Katherine J. Wu is a Boston-based science journalist and storyteller whose writing has appeared in Smithsonian magazine, Scientific American, NOVA Next, and more. She's also a senior producer for The Story Collider. In 2018, she earned a Ph.D. in microbiology and immunobiology from Harvard University, where she studied how bacteria deal with stress so she could one day learn to do the same. She can spell "tacocat" backwards.

Part 2: Hurricane Katrina gives Mary Annaise Heglar a new perspective on both her grandfather and home state.

Mary Annaise Heglar is a climate justice essayist and communications professional based in New York City. Her writing has been published in Vox, Dame Magazine, Zora, and Inverse. She writes regularly on Medium and rants almost daily on Twitter.

Episode Transcript

Part 1: Katherine Wu

So even as a kindergartner I had some pretty lofty aspirations. The day our teacher asked us to draw ourselves in our future careers, I proudly declared to the entire room that I was going to grow up to be a lion.

That didn’t go over so well. My teacher had to remind me that I was in fact human and I should probably pick a job that people did. Fine. If I couldn’t grow up to be a lion, maybe I could still grow up to write about them.

So I drew myself all grown up as a writer. In my drawing, I gave myself a pen, I gave myself a desk, I gave myself a big stack of paper, and then I gave myself blue eyes and blonde hair.

So it was kind of a weird thing to grow up as an Asian-American kid in the 1990s. Pretty much no matter how many TV channels I flip through from doctors to shop owners to playwrights, there are almost no faces that resembled mine. So while a lot of the kids around me could see their future selves donning scrubs or leading board meetings or inventing robots, I didn’t have the same kinds of cultural touchstones. And more often than not, when I looked into my own future, I just saw a whole lot of nothing.

Katherine Wu shares her story with the Story Collider audience at Oberon Theater in Boston, MA in July 2019. Photo by Kate Flock.

And when I turned that drawing in to my teacher, she took me aside. “Honey,” she said, “what you did here, it doesn’t make sense.” And she paused and she had the strangest look on her face, this mixture of sadness and guilt and amusement. Then she said, “Your last name is Wu.”

So let’s be clear. It didn’t take me that long to figure out I wasn’t going to grow up to be white. But for the longest time, I couldn’t shake the feeling of just being a little uncomfortable in my own skin.

In middle school my friends started referring to me as a banana, someone who’s yellow on the outside but white on the inside. In some ways I guess it made sense. Like I'd always preferred bread to rice and I really hated bubble tea and I sucked at playing the piano. When my parents asked me what career I would choose out of the options that they gave me: doctor, lawyer, engineer or failure, you can probably guess which one I ended up choosing.

But I don't know. I guess in retrospect it maybe wasn’t that surprising that that day in kindergarten my first instinct was to envision my future self as another species. Because, I mean, like the way I thought about being called a banana it wasn’t technically incorrect if you thought about how people were thinking about it but, at the same time, I just hated the term so much because it made me feel like this incomplete version of two different people.

Being called a banana just told me that all people saw when they looked at me was someone who didn’t meet their expectations for how to think or how to behave. I couldn’t possibly be yellow all the way through and still be me, an Asian-American girl who was sometimes kind of outspoken and who wasn’t that bad at driving and who in fact did not just want to read the Amy Tan monologue her teacher handed her on the first day of drama class.

And so, yeah, I thought of myself as a different species because, I guess, it sometimes felt like by simple virtue of not being white, I just wasn’t always allowed to occupy the full space of human potential.

All the same, I eventually did find my own way to writing. Last summer, I took a break from grad school to do a Science Writing Fellowship in DC. One of the first stories I reported involved this facial recognition algorithm, pretty similar to the ones that Facebook uses to automatically tag your photos only this one researchers were using to try and distinguish between really similar looking breeds of dogs.

So I’m a lapsed microbiologist and so I know pretty much nothing about algorithms or computer science or like faces, really, so I called an expert who did. I was actually really excited to talk to this person because not only was she an expert in this field I was interested in learning about but, like me, she was a woman scientist.

But as soon as we started talking about the topic on hand, things kind of went off the rails. The best way to explain facial recognition algorithm, she told me, was to use the concept of race.

“I saw your last name,” she said. “You're from China, aren’t you?”

“I’m Taiwanese, actually,” I told her, “but I was actually born here in the United States. My parents were immigrants.”

“Great. Same thing,” she said. “So we should look at this as Chinese faces and white faces being at opposite ends of a spectrum and that’s what this facial recognition algorithm is going to help us map. So you know how Chinese people have like really, really flat faces and really small noses?”

I didn’t respond so she kind of just barreled on.

“So, as a Chinese person, how would you describe a really extreme caricature of a white person?”

I don't remember exactly what I said in response to that but it was something like, “That’s not something I think about very often.”

So she answered for me. “Well, when I talk to most people who are born in China, they'll say white people have like such big noses and such big eyes. And that’s pretty much what the algorithm would tell us too.”

The conversation eventually moved on from that point but, to tell you the truth, I barely remember the rest of it. I mean there were countless other examples of faces she could have used. I don't know, jungle cats, emojis, breed of dogs - the actual example in the paper - but instead she zeroed in on these superficial differences that I guess she assumed existed between us.

And even though I thought that as a fellow woman scientist she might have known what it felt like to be marginalized, it felt more like she’d taken that camaraderie and just kind of thrown it in my face. I'd never felt more one-dimensional. And for someone with a face as flat as mine, that’s really saying something.

And there was a part of me that thought maybe this wouldn’t have happened if my last name just weren’t quite so incriminating.

Here’s the thing, though. Names are actually malleable. Last summer, I actually got a pretty organic opportunity to change mine. I got married. And in the months leading up to my wedding, the question I kept getting over and over was if I was excited to be the new Mrs. Kevin Wilson.

I pretty much always answered that question in exactly the same way. “Not really, but I’m about to get my PhD so I’m excited to be Dr. Katherine Wu.”

So I'd actually decided long before I met my partner that I probably wasn’t going to change my last name when I got married. But as that summer drew on, I found this part of me, probably the banana in me, was kind of tempted. I mean Wilson was pretty much the most bland, boring, unambiguously not ethnic-sounding last name in existence. It was also as if the universe was giving me this weird opportunity to match a little bit of my external identity to my internal one, to peel the banana, so to speak. I wouldn’t even have to change my initials.

The way I thought about it, I mean, the name ‘Katherine Wilson’ just might raise fewer eyebrows. It might even decrease the chance that people reading my name at the top of my article or in their email inbox would discount me and my work right off the bat. Because I wish I could tell you that my encounter with the facial recognition expert, or racial recognition expert as I've come to refer to her since, was an anomaly during my fellowship, but it wasn’t. As that summer dragged on, my race was brought up time and time again, including one particularly memorable week when this cavalry of Twitter trolls decided it was appropriate to spend multiple days in a row messaging me and tweeting at me telling me to stop writing fake news about science and just go back to the chopsuey kitchen.

By the end of my summer, I was starting to get sick of seeing my own name at the tops of the articles I wrote. But the day I turned in my last piece, one of my supervisors took me aside and I sat down not really knowing what to expect: lecture, praise, stern advice. But she just looked at me and she said, “You're remarkable. I really hope that someday you'll be one of the fellows that we can brag about alongside all those guys who’ve gone on to work at NPR and the Washington Post.”

She paused. And she had the strangest look on her face, this mixture of sadness and guilt and amusement. And then she said, “Thank you for not being a white man.”

She was kidding, obviously, but at the same time she wasn’t. For the first time in a really long time, maybe ever, I actually felt proud. Proud to be not just a journalist but a female Asian-American journalist, one who might even be brave enough to put her name at the tops of articles she wrote and, in doing so, maybe make someone else out there feel less alone. Or at least a little less like a different species. Thank you.

Part 2: Mary Annaise Heglar

People usually think that I’m taller than I am, which is great for me because I have a brother who’s over six feet, a sister who’s over six feet, and a father who’s over six feet, which means I have a very intense Napoleon Complex.

But the reason people think that I’m so much taller is because of my granddaddy, my mom’s father. He was not very tall either. He stood at about five-foot-eight, so it’s like average height, but he stood really tall with his chest puffed out like a robin and his shoulders slicked back, like he dared the sun and the moon and the whole damn sky to even try to knock him down. And when I was really little, I would imitate him when he wasn’t looking. I got really good at it.

My grandfather was stubborn. He was proud and respect meant everything to him. So I remember when I was little and my mom used to tell me all these stories about this dog they had when she was a kid and all these fantastical stories that were just so outlandish I didn’t believe them.

I went to my grandfather to get confirmation from a serious person and my grandfather didn’t answer my question. He just threw his head up in the sky and was like, “That dog respected me.” Everybody did.

My grandfather taught me how to play pinochle which, if you don’t know, is a very complicated, sophisticated card game. So complicated that you don’t even use the same deck of cards that you do for every other card game. And he taught me really good so I can sit down at any card game card table now and just dominate it. Nobody ever sees it coming.

I love telling stories about my grandfather largely because he was such a good storyteller and that’s probably why or at least part of why I got into storytelling and into writing. And I remember when I was in the fifth grade, I wrote this short story and I really belabored it and wrote it all out by hand in pen and I went over it over and over again to make sure that there are no typos in it. I drew this whole cover page for it and bound it up and sent it to him in the mail.

He was living in DC at the time and I was living in Mississippi and I waited everyday for him to write a letter back to tell me what he thought of it. When I finally got the letter in the mail, his feedback was fucking brutal. He critiqued this shit like I was a grown woman. And I wanted to write back to him and be like, “Dude, I’m eleven.”

Mary Annaise Heglar shares her story with the Story Collider audience at The Tank Theater in New York City in December 2019. Photo by Zhen Qin.

But I don't talk back to my grandfather, so I didn’t do that, but a lesser 11-year-old might have stopped writing. But I was my granddaddy’s granddaughter so that meant I’m stubborn too. So I kept writing. I just didn’t show it to him anymore.

So I liked having things in common with my grandfather and one of the biggest things we had in common was our hometown. We were both from Birmingham, Alabama which is where the big base of my family is from, and we are both so proud to be from there. But when I was nine years old, my mom moved me and my brother from Birmingham to Mississippi which, you know, I think this is lost on a lot a lot of people in the north, but the way that people in the north think of the south, that is the way that people in the south think of Mississippi.

So when we moved to Mississippi it was like kind of a thing in our family of like, “Are you serious? Do you really want to do this? Are you okay?”

And one of the main people who thought that was my grandfather. My grandfather always looked down on Mississippi and though it was beneath him. So when he would come to visit he would always like have a lot of shit to talk. So imagine the injury when he was forced to move to Mississippi when he was well into his eighties and already succumbing to dementia. That was when he had to come live with my mother by which point I’m already out of the house.

And I held onto that sort of stigma about Mississippi too, even though I grew up there from the time I was nine years old. I sort of still looked down on it with my Alabama nose and felt like I live here and I kind of grew up here but I’m not from here. I’m different. I’m special. I’m like granddaddy.

But that all changed for me when Hurricane Katrina came rumbling through the state on the 50th anniversary of Emmett Till’s murder. In fact, one of my favorite stories to tell about my grandfather happened on the day that Hurricane Katrina came to town.

So we all knew it was this big, historic storm as evidenced by the fact that it was even coming to where we live. We did not live on the coast. We lived 200 miles from the coastline. So everybody is taking it very, very seriously. Imagine my surprise when in the middle of the storm, or close to the middle, like the eye is almost about to pass over where we are, here comes my granddaddy in his raincoat, in his little hat walking to the backdoor.

My first thought was maybe he just got overdressed to go to the kitchen. Maybe he's just going for a snack. I don't know what’s happening here because, again, he's already started to give in to dementia and I didn’t want to add insult to injury by, as his granddaughter, bossing him around and telling him what to do. I didn’t want to intrude on his autonomy.

But then I heard the backdoor slam and I was like, okay. I got to get involved. So I got up and went to the back door. I’m not proud of this but I yelled at him and told him to come back in the house. He muttered something about going to feed his hummingbirds because the hummingbird feeder had been knocked down because it’s a hurricane, you know.

I was like, “Granddaddy,” I was like, all right. Just calm down. “Granddaddy, it’s a hurricane. The birds aren’t out right now.”

And he didn’t even turn around all the way. He just like sort of shoots over his shoulder and goes, “You don’t know. You're not a bird.”

Fact, I am not a bird. So I was just like frozen by that. Like you got me and touché. And I couldn’t physically get him back in the house. Like I couldn’t even get to him before he was like completely off the porch and then in full view of the winds.

He took one more step and then Katrina was like, “Oh, no, you don’t,” and knocked him clean off balance. And that little proud strut he had going out there turned into this embarrassed little shuffle and he comes back in the house.

This is before things got really bad. This is before we lost power. This is before we lost water for three days, which felt like an eternity. We lost power for about a week. Me and my mom can’t agree whether it’s five days or a full week. And we lost phones for three or four days. I say all that because I think when we think about Hurricane Katrina, the disaster in New Orleans, which was absolutely devastating but also very much manmade, the natural disaster in Mississippi gets completely eclipsed. And both of them broke my heart.

And it wasn’t until the power came back on and I got to see what Mississippi looked like beyond my own street that I realized that I wasn’t exactly like my grandfather. As much as I admired him, seeing Mississippi broken and on her back like that made me realize that I was just as much a Mississippian as I was an Alabamian.

I saw how all of these things I used to look down on, like I used to look down on the fact that the water sometimes would come out of the pipe as thick as mud and the electricity grid would sometimes just give out with or without a storm. And I used to think that those things were so I don't know. I guess I was just bougie about it. Then you see how a disaster like that is completely neglected and wiped out even as it’s happening. You understand how that sort of trauma can last for a really long time, how wounds that never heal turns into water that doesn’t run and electricity that doesn’t work.

And I realize that I am just as much of this place and from this place as I am in this place and I love this place. But then at the same time I kind of realize I am still very much my granddaddy’s granddaughter because when the grocery started running low and my mama’s car was in the shop, I decided I’m going to walk to the grocery store. I’m not going to ask anybody for help.

And that is quite a spectacle in our town. Our town is very small. And even though it’s very walkable, people don’t walk there. It’s not a thing that people do. It’s a spectacle. So when I was walking home with all these groceries, my neighbor pulled over and quite angrily demanded that I get in the car and that I ask for a ride the next time I need a ride. And I looked in his face and realized I had actually insulted him by not taking up his generosity and not calling upon his kindness.

I didn’t know how to explain to him, “Yeah, but I’m my granddaddy’s granddaughter and I’m stubborn.” But I did learn from that and I did ask for a ride when I needed one to the airport to go back to college.

My granddaddy died in 2012. He was 93 years old. He would have been a hundred this year. We still keep the hummingbird feeders on the back porch for him. And my favorite thing to do when I go home is to sit back there and remember him and remember the first and only time I ever yelled at him. Thank you.