I played the violin and piano while I was growing up.  As all musicians know, music for the piano is written using the treble and bass clefs.  Normally, the bass clef is for the left hand and the treble clef is for the right hand.  Of course, there is some migration going on—notes on the bass clef can be designated for the right hand and notes on the treble clef can be designated for the left hand.  But these are special instances, not permanent, more like tourism than immigration.

That’s why I’ve always been fascinated by the middle C.  On the piano keyboard, it sits in the middle (as its name suggests), not the exact center, but close enough.  On sheet music, the middle C occupies the no-man’s-land between the bass and treble clefs.  To me, there is so much beauty in the middle C whole note, sitting by itself, unattached to either clef, just floating on its own ledger line, untethered to anything.  That is true independence, courage even, to make its home in the void, the limbo of undefined space.

But the potential of the middle C really lies in its flexibility, its ability to make a home anywhere.  Attach a stem to the middle C, point that stem upwards, and it becomes an accepted, unquestioned inhabitant of the treble clef.  Point that stem downwards, and it belongs to the bass clef as if it had lived there for generations.  Regardless of which direction the stem points in, the middle C becomes an integral note in any musical passage.  It is not just a temporary visitor but as essential to both clefs as home base is to a baseball diamond.

I think often of middle C when I consider my immigrant experience.  I was born in South Korea a month before JFK was assassinated in the US.  My father came to the US in 1967, then brought my mother, me, and my sisters over a year later.   At that time, South Korea was weakly but desperately (if those two adverbs are not contradictory) trying to recover from years of devastation caused by Japanese occupation, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War.

There weren’t many Asians, let alone Koreans, living in the US back then.  My parents had a very small group of Korean expatriate friends that they socialized with.  Basically, my parents’ generation had the task of representing “Asian-ness” to Americans.  What do you mean Koreans, Chinese, and Japanese aren’t all the same?  Why is kimchi so spicy?  How do you pronounce your name?

I, on the other hand, occupy that landscape particular to 1.5s, the people who were born in a different country but basically grew up here in the US.  I am immersed in two cultures but really am native to neither.   And it is often difficult to know which culture is more comfortable to me. Sometimes I identify with the Korean culture and sometimes with the American.  Yes, it can lead to multiple personalities at times, but on the whole I really enjoy it.  I enjoy having an unstable identity, or maybe I should say I really like having a rotating identity.  The hyphen in Asian-American, to me, doesn’t stay rigidly linear, but spins, swivels, rocks, sometimes leaning more heavily toward the Asian and other times leaning more heavily toward the American.

My children are a whole other story.  They are truly a mish-mosh.  They are half-Korean from me; from their father, they are part Norwegian, Italian, English, Scottish, and Welsh.  Their generation has no problem being not only bi-racial but also multi-racial.  For them, Rudyard Kipling’s famous line, “East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,” is patently false.  The “twain” between East and West has already met and merged, as have the “twains” between north and south, light and dark, believer and non-believer.  In fact, for my children, the world is not organized around “twains”.  They’d rather not choose between a and b; they’d rather have four choices and then choose “e,” all of the above.  In a world where everyone is different, the definitions and norms of what it means to be different have to be recalibrated.

And that brings me back to the beauty of middle c.  My parents’ generation is like the middle c whole note, in unchartered, unclaimed territory, staking out a space for itself.  My generation is like the middle c that can flip back and forth between the treble and bass clefs.  My children’s generation?  The most powerful generation of all because they are like the c clef, also known as the “moveable clef.”  As you can guess from the name of the clef, the c clef moves, able to sit anywhere on the musical staff and wherever its middle points to becomes middle c.  The c clef re-defines what is the middle, the center, the norm, and we all have to adjust the way we sing our song.