This is a full transcript of an interview with Other Colors Host Barbara Rodgers.

Q: Tell me about your family and the family secret that you discovered.

A: I grew up with my mama and daddy in Pasco, Washington, a little farm town in eastern Washington near Idaho. As I was growing up I would get ridiculed a lot by other children, and the term that they always used a lot was, you're a half-breed. I didn't know what that meant, so I would think about it a lot and I thought, oh, it must mean that I'm stupid. And so it was very important to me as I was growing up, and both my mom and dad always emphasized education. I thought, well, I'm not going to be stupid. I'm going to be very well-educated. And when I was ten years old I got into some fight over who knows what with some neighbor kids, and what came out of this one boy's mouth. He said, Rose ain't even your mama. Your mama's white! And something about it just hit me so hard, at age ten, I knew it must be true.

Q: How did you know? I mean cause kids say all kinds of cruel...

A: Right.

Q: ...things and strange things. What was it that made you think that this must be true?

A: Well, once a year my other daddy would come visit me from Seattle, so I had another dad, but in African-American culture you have lots of uncles and daddies and aunts and things. You know, this is Daddy Bill, and this is Daddy Joe, so it didn't mean much to me. It's that I had this dad, this father that would come and visit once a year. And I would overhear things. Just little things. The way my grandmother would whisper sometimes to my father, who was her son, but it didn't really have much bearing for me until this kid said, your mama's white, and I went to my mama and I said, mama, is you my mama, or is mama white? And she, her response was, I knew this day would come. That was her response. And what she did was, she showed me some pictures of my mother and told me my mother lived in California. And I loved how she emphasized, she said -- you are my baby because I've had you ever since you were born, and I will always be your mama, always. And she said -- But this is your mother. This is who brought you into the world, but I'm the one who's always cared for you. I'm the one that changed your diapers. And I realized that my grandmother had more than a grandmother ownership of me. She had a mother's ownership of me in her heart. And so for me, even though my biological mother is Caucasian, my black grandmother is my mother. Because she and I were just... she's the woman that I slept in the same bed with until I was 12 years old.

Q: So what was your feeling then? Was that like just a crushing blow to you to find out that this woman that you were so close to, you cared so much about, wasn't really your mother?

A: I don't remember being crushed by it. It's almost like a feeling like things, certain things, got explained. Oh, so that's what half-breed means. It means you're white, you've got some white in you. Also in terms of growing up in the late fifties and early sixties, there was always this conflict, we lived on eastside Pasco, which is where the blacks lived, and there were one or two white families, but they were poor white trash, that's how they were considered. And white people, even if blacks didn't like white people, white people were always uplifted as they got something. They got something we want. And I know my mind wasn't directly thinking this way, but I think I have to be honest and say that there was a part of me that was excited because I thought I'm going to get something now. I'm going to get something that... if my mama's white, I'm going to get some of those white things.

Q: Now at that point you had thought of yourself as what?

A: Black.

Q: Did your sense of that change at that moment?

A: It didn't at that moment. Interestingly enough, my grandmother said after I found out that information, she said sometimes when she and I would go shopping together that she would notice that I'd sort of move away from her and sort of stand next to a white woman and kind of look up at her, kind of longingly, and she said that it just broke her heart that I would kind of slowly sidle up to these white women and just look at them. When I was older it started to make a difference cause it was during the... When I became 13 you know, James Brown had out "Say It Loud, I'm Black and Proud" and you would hear on the news -- even though we didn't have Black Panthers in Washington State -- you would hear on the news about the Black Panthers and the Black Nationalist Movement. And so some of that fever of I'm black and I'm proud... that was the first time I ever felt conflicted. I thought, oh well, can I be black and proud and have a white mom? So that kind of conflict started to grow in me. You know, can I like the Beach Boys and the Temptations, too?

Cause sometimes I'd sing Beach Boys songs, and then I'd feel kind of strange, like okay, no, it's not cool for me to like the Beach Boys. But then I'd say, but my mom's white so maybe that's why I like it cause I can't help it. [LAUGHTER] It became that kind of situation for me. And when I was 13, I wrote to my mother, cause my grandmother knew where she was living in Berkeley, and I wrote to her and said that I'd really like to come visit and meet her and... that's what happened.

Q: As you wrote that letter did you have an expectation of what that mother would be like?

A: Oh yeah. I had some incredible fantasy that I was going to meet my mother, and she was going to break down and just -- you're my daughter and I wish -- very dramatic, teenaged fantasy. That I should have never given you away, I should have always had you near me, and I think that's what I really longed for. That my mother would say, you're so beautiful and I just love you so much, and it would just be -- you're my daughter, you're my -- you know, it would be this same, cause I was very, I hate to use the word spoiled, but for lack for a better word, I was very spoiled by my grandmother. My grandmother adored me. No one could have been... everyone should be loved that much. My grandmother and my grandfather, they... cause my grandmother, sometimes she would just grab me and say, I love you so hard. You know, it's a hard love that I feel for you. She was an incredible woman and she did not want me to go visit my mother, because she was so afraid that I would go live with her, which is what I did. And yet at the same time she said, mother's blood is very strong and you got to know your mother, you got to know her.

Q: So what was the reality like when you got to know her? Tell me about that meeting.

A: Oh! It was a lot of firsts. It was the first time traveling alone as a teenager. The first time on an airplane. The first time ever coming to California and then the first time meeting my mother. And I was just so filled with anticipation. It was 1969, and I landed here and there was all this excitement going on because the Native Americans had taken over Alcatraz. I didn't even know what Alcatraz was but it was like -- the Indians had taken over Alcatraz and I was like, wow! And there was Telegraph Avenue, and my mother was a hippie. So that was a total shock to me.

I mean my mother was a Berkeley hippie and working at UC Berkeley, and I'd never been exposed to anything. I mean I grew up in a sanctified, religious... you know, you'd be lucky if I wore, I had to beg my grandmother if I could wear a pair of panty hose at age 13. She goes -- you're not grown, you're not a woman, and here...

Q: I know what that's like. [LAUGHTER]

A: It was that... and then all of a sudden here I am in Berkeley with a white mother and people aren't wearing bras and I grew up in the kind of house where you didn't leave a house without a slip on, so you had a bra on, a slip. It was just like you were armored.

Q: Uh-huh.

A: You know, at age 13 my grandmother said, maybe you should have a little girdle on. It felt like you were armored for the world.

Q: I think some of that's Southern, cause I grew up in the South.

A: It's very Southern. Yes, cause she was from Mississippi.

Q: Um-huh, the same way. And at that same time...

A: Yes.

Q: I remember my, my dad saying when I came home once and had, the see-through blouses that were really in...

A: Oh.

Q: And he was like -- you're not going out of the house in that, are you?

A: Right.

Q: You know, I can see your bra through that.

A: Right.

Q: I said, that's the way it's supposed to be, you're supposed to see the bra. My mother said -- not in this house. [LAUGHTER]

A: Yeah. That's right.

Q: You're not supposed to see the bra.

A: That's right. That's exactly...

Q: But so you had this hippie mother. You were expecting Donna Reed and you got something totally different.

A: Hippie mother... and I was very confused. Well, what should I call you? Should I call you mother? Cause I didn't feel right calling her mama, cause I had a mama. And something in me knew that, no, she's not your mama. Maybe you're going to call her mother. And then my mom totally shocked me when she said just call me Nancy. We're going to be good friends. Well, I never heard anything like that.

You know, if I had said to my grandmother, are we friends. She'd say, I'm going to friend you upside you're head, I'm not your friend.

I'm your mama. You didn't have that kind of relationship.

Q: That's right. That's right.

A: To say that it was dizzying is the only way... I mean I felt culturally uprooted, and yet Berkeley was the most exciting place, after coming from a little farm town, I just thought, this is it. And I did see other people that I felt looked like me, more mixed, and there were so many cultures, and so I wanted to come live here. So I went back to Pasco and finished up my last year in junior high school and came here to live with my mother to be in high school. It was exciting, but also emotionally very chaotic because I'd grown up in a exclusively black culture, and she lived in Kensington. So all of a sudden I'm around nothing but white people and I was very uncomfortable. Everything was foreign to me. We ate greens and corn bread with our hands... fingers. You know, it's not like we're going to do a place setting. It was just like -- food come out on the table, you'd come to the table, everyone's yakking and grabbing and passing. And even though my mother was a hippie, my mother also grew up in a, by my standards, rigid household of like -- the table is set and there's the napkins and, napkin? What napkin? There's no napkins. [LAUGHTER]

Q: [LAUGHTER]

A: In our house... And so my mother actually uprooted me when she was hippie. She goes -- I'm just appalled, you don't even know how to eat with a knife and fork. For her not being a mother, I don't think she had any kind of sense of how that really just made me go... oh, I want to fit in, and I want to fit in with my mom and all these new people and just how white can I get. And that became...

Q: Is that what you thought to yourself, that you wanted to be white?

A: Oh, yeah. And then I thought okay, I got to, cause I, like you said, grew up with someone from Mississippi. So I'd say, oh, can you carry me to the store? You know, I'm fixing to go to the library could I get a ride from you, can you carry me down there? And my mother and her friends thought that was so funny. Carry? What do you mean, carry? On my back? Ha-ha-ha-ha. You know, there was like this amusing thing and it was very hurtful to me.

Q: You were a novelty.

A: Yeah. And it was very hurtful to me, at that delicate place of being a teenager, but yet inside I felt like a little girl again. I just wanted to be my mother's baby all over again and I don't think until I was in my thirties that I finally had a good cry and said, I couldn't have been a baby to her, you know, I was 14, I couldn't be a baby, you know, no matter how much I wanted to be a baby and have that experience, it's...

Q: Did you consider going back, to your grandmother's?

A: Several times. Several times. And I'd go back and visit twice a year and I would always go back and visit every year, no matter what. And I would talk to her on the phone all the time and sometimes I would just cry and she goes, why don't you come home and...

Q: Why didn't you?

A: Cause... the cultural life. There were movies and I realize now, I think I just would have gone to hell to stay, any kind of emotional hell, to stay in this cultural life. Museums and film and music and oh! It was all so breathtaking to me. And books! Just books I'd never heard of. Ideas. And that's what kept me here. That's what kept me here. I just fell in love with everything from Fellini. I remember the first Fellini film I saw at the Telegraph Rep, and I was like, wow! I mean, I couldn't believe it. I just couldn't believe that this was the world.

Q: Now during this time, what about daddy? Had you thought about your biological father? Where was he?

A: Because he was in Seattle, he would come visit once a year. And my father -- I think if I had been a boy, the relationship -- I think once I reached a certain age, he would have come and gotten me. But he was very much hands off, you're a girl, what do I know about girls, kind of father. And I would go visit him in Seattle, and he lived in a different rarified world... he, his house. When I would tell my grandma, I'd go -- I don't like to go visit my dad. I said, he's too weird. Cause he didn't have stuff for kids. He didn't watch television. He listened to weird stuff, too. You know, Ornette Coleman...

Q: [LAUGHTER]

A: And this was very alien to my little child's ears. And I remember something, he collected African art in the sixties and early seventies and I remember as a child sometimes, not really having an adult around. I'd be playing with his African fertility goddess things, like making them do all this stuff, cause I didn't know what those were and they were weird and they had big booties and big breasts and it was like, oh. And so, he loved abstract art and he was interested in being an art teacher and he was a very intellectual man. So he was not someone who was going to play with me and be emotive that way because what was there to say to a child.

So he was, and he still is, very much that way. He's an intellectual. He was the kind of person that -- as I got older and needed a father more, sometimes I'd cry to him and I said, Dad, I don't want to talk about Albert Camus with you. I said, I just want you to take me out for a hamburger and buy me a dress. That's it!

Q: [LAUGHTER]

A: And I'd be so mad at him. I'd get this book from him for my birthday... incredible, which I respect. He sent me, one year, a book called Gyn-Ecology: Radical Eco-Feminism.

Q: [LAUGHTER]

A: Which was great.

Q: How old were you?

A: But not from my dad, you know. It's just like, send me a dress or something like that.

Q: How old were you when you...?

A: Like 30.

Q: Oh, okay, this wasn't as a kid.

A: No, not as a kid. But he was very much, you know, as a kid that we didn't... He listened to his music and I'd just sit around the, his, apartment.

Q: How had your mother and father come together?

A: They met in college and I don't know the truth of all this. I made up... I realized that as an adult, I have to now have the courage to just say, I don't know. I know they met in college and there's been different stories. My father says my mother pursued him and it made him very uncomfortable. And I know that once my mother said that she thought my father was the most beautiful man she'd ever seen. He was an athlete at the University of Washington and she was an English major and by all accounts it's not like they really dated, but obviously something went on cause she got pregnant.

Q: [LAUGHTER]

A: And she was sent to a home for girls when she got pregnant and brought her pregnancy to term in a home. And then my father left school and my mother was actually told that it wasn't a good idea for her to come back to school at the University of Washington, and that's how she ended up at Berkeley. They said Berkeley's a more liberal school and they also counseled her not to keep me, as a baby, because they said she would be ostracized by her own race if she kept a black child. And so my father's parents agreed to take me when I was born. And they never married, to this day never married. And I think that when I -- the little bit I know about my father's life -- I've never seen my father date a black woman. Even growing up as a little girl, he would have white women friends and...

Q: He never got married?

A: He never got married and a few years ago was living with a white woman, and I don't know what happened. My father's very much of a generation where a lot of conflict... on one hand being very angry at white people and talking about racism and yet, as my grandmother would always say, then why don't you get a colored woman? Just leave the white people alone! [LAUGHTER]

Q: [LAUGHTER]

A: And she would say, I want to see you with a nice colored woman and you could be happy. And it's one of those kind of things where I just go... the human psyche's mysterious. It's not like someone can sit down and... it's not like I, the daughter, could sit down and say, okay, Dad, what's going on? What's really going on here?

Q: When you look in the mirror do you see your father or your mother's face?

A: Mostly I see my father, as I've gotten older. When I look at baby pictures of myself I see my mother. My hair was much lighter and I see my mother. But when I look at pictures of myself with the McLaughlin, the Irish-German side of the family, in here, sometimes the way I hold my head, I'm like oh, there's where that's from. Cause there was a picture I saw once where we're all looking in the same direction and my head was pointing and I said, wow, all our chins are uplifted the same way and it was really interesting to me. And I see things in my mother's side of the family that's so strangely similar. I had a very synchronistic thing happen when I was in my early twenties. I started a spoon collection. I don't know why, just started collecting old spoons. And I told my Grandma McLaughlin about it, and she said your Aunt Marcia, who you never knew and who died when she was 14, collected spoons, passionately. And she sent me my aunt's spoon collection, from this aunt that I never knew. It was really a very profound experience of just... I was like yeah, we're family even though we're so far apart, we're still family. We're still family. And one of the most wonderful things that happened -- oh, gee, I think I'm going to start crying -- is my white grandmother, after her husband died and my grandfather, black grandfather, died, she called me up and said, Do you think that your Grandmother Rose would mind if I called her? Now these are two women who hadn't spoken in 35 years. I think the only time they ever had spoken was at the hospital to say here's the baby. And they became friends.

Q: Your black grandmother and...

A: And my white grandmother.

Q: Your white grandmother.

A: And it was such a moment for me when I said, are you kidding? I said, of course, call. And they started talking and my grandmother... they visited each other a couple of times and I just thought that was so wonderful, because I thought -- oh, it's true that if the effort is made, even within a family where there's been racial tension, things can change in time. If enough time is allowed to go by and I guess if somebody, which I felt is me, is right in there saying -- well, you got to try. Cause there'd be things even on the white side of my family that were... my mother's brother was still unresolved about me and I was the family secret on that side of the family.

Q: When did you stop being the secret?

A: When I came to live with my mother. My mother's family obviously never really communicated very deeply, cause my mother wrote her sister and said, guess what? Ellen is coming to visit me. And her younger sister was like -- who's Ellen? Who's that? And I remember talking to my Aunt Ann and Ann said I was so sweaty in the palms and nervous cause I knew it was something big, but I couldn't... And I said, well, what did you think it was? I said, did you think she was a lesbian? What'd you think it was?

Q: [LAUGHTER]

A: And she said, I didn't know. And I didn't say, well what else could it have been except a child? She said, I knew that on some level, but I couldn't say it. And then she went home and rather than confronting my grandmother, her mother, she went to Auntie Reese and she said, Reese, Aunt Reese, who's Ellen? And Aunt Reese... I just got the same letter from Nancy and I don't know who she is either but I'm going to find out. And then my Aunt Ann said that Aunt Reese called her and said, well, I found out who she is. She's your... she's Nancy's illegitimate black daughter!

Q: Oooh!

A: And my Aunt Ann said she rushed in to confront her mother and she said, mother, why didn't you ever tell me that Ellen existed. And she said my grandmother broke down and said, because I thought it would never come up again.

Q: They thought they could hide it.

A: Yeah. And I thought, oh...

Q: And you... essentially hide you.

A: And that was such a telling statement for me of how people think that okay, if I got a skeleton in the closet, if I build a separate closet outside of the house and put it far away that the door's never going to crack open, in the box. And it's just made me feel -- yeah, it's true, at some point who knows why those things come out. And there was a lot of discomfort in... when I first met my white grandparents. They were very kind, but also polite, but also uncomfortable. We'd walk through the streets of their town which is... to this day no blacks live there, in Port Angeles, Washington. And the first time I visited they didn't introduce me to any of their friends.

Q: That must have been hurtful.

A: And it was very hurtful. And now, of course, I come there and it's very open arms and I know all their friends and they're like -- oh, don't you direct theater, well, you should come up and direct the Port Angeles Community Theater. And I'm like -- okay, if you pay me enough money I'll come up. You know, and... but.

Q: What do you think made that change? Is it just that society has changed so much?

A: I think it's that more and more of those skeletons start to fall out of the closet. Cause I think we look at our history, and we know this has been going on before, before there's legal marriages. And it's been going on for thousands of years and hundreds of years that people have been mixing, and in the United States it's been going on. And I think people just get caught up into these personal rigid protocols and politics. Just the way my grandmother explained it to me, my white grandma, she said, oh, we just knew that if... we weren't against them getting married, your mother and father, it's just that we just knew it wouldn't work out. It would be too hard. It would be... and what about the children? And look at you. Look at how unhappy you are so much of the time.

Q: Were you?

A: Yeah, well... I was unhappy when I was with my family because I wanted something different from them. I would have these fantasies as an adult. I'd think, oh, someday I'd get married and there'll be a wedding and that will bring everybody together. Of course none of that happened, and then by the time it did happen my grandmother had passed away and both my grandfathers had passed away. And by then it's just like you go -- oh, now everybody's old and how do you even... and people are like -- I'm too old to fly, I'm too old to walk, you know, it's just...

Q: So then, I'm thinking two things as you were saying that.

A: Yes.

Q: One side of my brain is saying, so then maybe race didn't matter so much after all because, as you said, now it's all over. But then on the other side, I'm thinking race became so much of an importance that it allowed people's lives to be changed in a way that they didn't get the joy out of the relationship that they could have with you.

A: Oh yeah, it was so sad to me after my grandmother died, to me as an adult. She was in her kitchen and said, oh, I wish I'd known you as a baby. And I said, well, I wish you had, too. And when my mama passed away, even now it just... oh, I just couldn't... When she was diagnosed with cancer it was almost a selfish feeling. I said, now if she passes away there'll be nobody that knew me as a baby.

Q: Mmmnn.

A: My mother didn't know me as a baby. My father didn't know me as a baby. And now that I've had my own daughter... oh, do I feel the importance about that. It really is... it's not about visiting once a month or knowing someone when they're a teenager. It's my grandmother. Whenever I'd say, mama, do you love me? She'd go... love you? She says, I wiped your ass everyday. She says, what are you talking about? She says, I cleaned the snot off you. She says, don't you ever ask me that question. She says, I love you so hard. And well, that's true. She was so... she and I were so bonded and I just think that what made me cry so much as a teenager, and even into my adult life, was that I always felt like... was it because I was illegitimate or was it because I was black? What was it that kept the love withheld for so long? And that made me feel sad and made me struggle so much with what.... Especially when I did live with my mom, sometimes there'd be this conflict when people say, oh, I didn't know you were adopted. And I would say, no, it's my mother. I'm not adopted. It's my mother, I came out of her body. I experience that sensitivity now with my daughter because my daughter's hair is very light colored. It will turn dark, but right now her hair is very light, and she's a shade lighter than me and she has very Asian eyes and I'll hear people say, oh, is that your daughter? So I try not to get defensive and I go -- yeah, it is.

Q: But you do get defensive.

A: Yeah, I do cause I just like go...

Q: And angry.

A: Oh! So angry! I was in a situation -- my husband and I were at a framers getting a picture framed and here I am with my husband and we've got the baby and our friend introduced us. She said, this is the Chang's blah-blah-blah. And the woman looks right at me and she goes -- did you adopt your baby from China? And I'm like -- wait, the Korean man, hello, right next to me. It's my husband. And I just think, that's where people aren't checking their racism. And I go -- it's deep. It's deep on a level that the mind can't look. Cause I think, yeah, if you look at baby pictures of me and you look at baby pictures of my daughter, there's no doubt she's my daughter. There's no doubt. And yet, I think it must have been hard for my mother, cause I remember once... and these things you never forget. These are the kind of things... I can laugh at them now but they hurt. I was in the restaurant with my mom and I ran into someone, an acquaintance, and I said, oh, I want you to meet my mother. And she started up... she was, oh, you're joking. And I stopped and I said... And she goes, oh, you're not joking. And she goes, oh, I'm sorry, this is your mother? And it's just the kind of thing where I'm just like... oh. And I know there's young people now who, of a generation, who see more mixed parents and stuff, and so it's not so much the questioning. And I think that's fantastic. I think that's really, really fantastic.

Q: You talked before about your grandmother loving you so hard and loving you so much, did you feel after you went to live with your mother that she loved you?

A: Not like that. Cause the love, my mother's love was not, and my father's love is not, intimate love. I mean I think that, yeah, I know that they love me, but it's not that kind of intimate love where you put your feet up on each other because you're so close. You know, my grandmother would put her feet up on me, or I would put my feet, or I didn't have any problem. Like when my mother and I hug now it always feels... stiff. And I think that there was never that kind of childhood intimacy, and then when I was living with her, I think that because of the time of it being the early seventies and like I said she was kind of a hippie then, I think there was more a thing of this philosophy that she had and some of her friends... Oh, you want to be friends with your children, be free and you don't want to be restrictive on them, so there wasn't that kind of... I keep using the word intimacy, intimacy where it's almost protective, because she was never protective of me. I mean, she never scrutinized if some guy came over. My grandmother would be like -- who is that!? Well, I don't like the way his hair looks.

Q: [LAUGHTER]

A: Whereas she would... where she was invested in me.

Q: But yet you wanted to be with your mom.

A: Yeah. And it was the kind of the thing where it's almost like there was a fierceness in me. I was like I got to get her to love me. I just got to get her to love me the way I think she should love me. That's the only way I can describe it. And now we have a very good relationship, and my husband and I went to visit her cause she moved back to Washington state, and we took our daughter up there and it was great for me to see my daughter with her. Cause my daughter loves animals and my mother has horses and dogs and Canadian geese out on this land, and it was really great to see my mother gravitate towards her granddaughter through animals. And so I looked and I thought well, this is good. And she says, oh please come up next year and bring SunIm and so we were like -- yeah. And when I look, I go -- wow here's SunIm, who's now got Korean blood in her and it's really gone on to a whole other level of [LAUGHTER] complexity.

Q: Is that a good thing?

A: Yeah, yeah. I think it is. Cause I think that when I look around at a lot of the young, very ethnically diverse young people that I've worked with, who are in high school and stuff, man, some of them are just so fierce. And I like their attitudes. I like their attitude of... There's a young girl that I worked with and she said, oh, you know, when people talk about white people, I can say, well, I'm white, so I know what that feels like. Or she says, then on another day I might say I'm black, or to me Tiger Woods is a great example, him saying, I'm Asian. He said, it's obvious that I'm black and so I say that I'm Asian to honor my mother.

Q: Although he had another name...

A: Yeah.

Q: I can't remember what... he had a name that added all of the parts.

A: All of the elements, yeah, and then he created that and I forget what that is, too.

Q: Yeah, I can't think...

A: I think oh, there's a real leap in consciousness that's happened over the generations about people recognizing and I think it's been very interesting, the amount of books that have come out. The book -- what is it? -- Like Water or something like that about the African-American man writing about his white mother and the color line of the young man who grew up thinking he was white only to find out that his father was actually black. And so there's more and more people of my generation who are saying we've got to stop this. We have to be able to look at each other and be able to say, oh, we're family. We're family. And your skin's this color and I can still love you. I don't have to convince myself that I'm... like I always say to people, why don't you want to see color? I see color. We see color, we should see color. We should see... oh, you have brown skin -- and the issue becomes to me, can I love you and your color? Can I really love you and see you as a full human being and not put on blinders and say, oh. And try to look for the ways that you... As I've said to some of my friends, oh, you're always telling me like -- oh, I feel so comfortable with you now. I've got to go out there... And I said, oh, it's cause you see the whiteness in me. That's why you feel comfortable. Because if I was to get really, really black on you then you'd feel like -- oh, well now, Ellen, now I don't feel so comfortable with her. And I said, so it's like, you know, cause sometimes when my husband's on the phone with his family and he's speaking Korean and stuff, he's like -- he is, he's a different person, than when his whole nature, in terms of -- by nature I don't mean his internal nature, but his physical make-up almost changes. His face looks different because of the way he's forming words. I mean, even SunIm will walk over to her dad and she'll look at him and he's on the phone and he speaks twice as loud in the Korean, and it's very fast and it's very... you do shift around and...

Q: Why do you think that is?

A: Well, I mean that's just the beauty of being human. It's like every culture has its nuances. Its nuances and its subtleties. And its movement, and I think that's just beautiful. And it's very complicated and it's also hard for people to feel left out. There's groups that I've worked with that are bilingual groups that speak Spanish. I don't speak Spanish and if they shift into speaking Spanish about something, I have to just sit there and go -- oh, well, so I'm left out now.

Q: Let's talk about your identity. You've mentioned some things about it, but specifically, how do you identify yourself? You talked about what Tiger said about himself. How do you identify when somebody says to you that question that a lot of people get asked -- what are you? What do you say?

A: Mostly I say I'm a mixture of Irish, German, African-American and a little bit of Choctaw. But if I'm just really identifying, usually I just identify as black, cause then I think that might be generational. I think a lot of it is generational. There's a part of me that it's hard to... and also physically I look and it's not like someone looks at me like -- I think she might be mixed. Or what's more fun for me now is -- that since I took my husband's name and I'm Chang now -- when I get phone calls from the Chinese Cultural Center. Or my favorite story that I recently heard is -- a friend of mine said she was at a theater conference and people said, who's this Ellen Chang's name I keep seeing. They said, this is so exciting to have a new Asian director directing plays. And my friend is Filipina and she was laughing and she said... Because this other woman came up to her and said, I say Ellen Chang, she doesn't really look Asian. Is she Filipino?

Q: [LAUGHTER]

A: And obviously Filipino is just a code word for... they're the mongrel group. They could just, anybody could be Filipino, which I thought was funny. And so for me, I must admit, I'm delighted. I can have a sense of humor now. And at the bank, they'll see a check and they'll go -- can I see your ID? Or if I'm writing a check at the store... So I always have to show ID a lot more when they see Chang.

Q: You said you can have a sense of humor about it now. Was there a time when you did not have a sense of humor about it?

A: Um, yeah I think in my twenties sometimes I was sensitive. In my early thirties I think I was a lot more sensitive about family issues and angry about why can't people just accept that my mother's white and I've got white blood in me and that's a part of who I am and I was. And now that I have my own daughter and stuff, I feel like I can talk about it with a lot more compassion and graciousness and just be direct, rather than be angry. If the woman in the frame store says, is your baby adopted from China, and I go yeah, my husband, I adopted him from the Korean culture, and then she can blush and it can be about her blushing and realizing, oh, yeah that is kind of silly, huh?

Q: How important is it do you think to have an identity? To be able to say, I'm white, I'm African-American, I'm Filipino or whatever you call you. How important is that, and why is it so important in this culture these days?

A: Oh, that is such a deep question. Cause I think we've made it... I think that's millenniums of history, human history. If we look back, I mean, you look at any... Oedipus, not knowing who his father was and who is... it's obviously thousands and thousands of years of a struggle of why it's so important to have an identity and, I think that's definitely a philosopher's book. I don't think it's something that I would even imagine that I could take on to answer. I just know that it's important for us to know our history. I also think in America it's important for us to know it and then bat it away, cause I think we like to just feel that we can move freely in the world, because we're Americans, we can go anywhere. So I think America, of all places, is a really amazing country that way, and I'm not putting a judgment on whether it's good or bad, but it is an amazing country. Because when I've traveled to Europe, people don't go, oh, you're black. They go, oh, you're American. There's something about us where I think we really... and people coming here, people know that you can keep strong identities of your culture, but your main job is to become an American and move through the world with this big identity. And I think America is kind of creating a global consciousness in a certain way. Sometimes it's a McDonald's consciousness, unfortunately, but, I think we are...

Q: Tell me about your husband.

A: He's of what's called the 1.5 generation. Born in Korea, live there for seven years, then moved to Guam with his family from 7 to 17 and then came to America. So he's of that 1.5 generation of like -- if he went back to Korea, even though he speaks Korean, his Korean would be seen as not quite right. He had an experience where he was speaking on the phone with an uncle of his and there was a lot of yelling and I said, what's going on? And he says, oh, my uncle was saying I can barely understand your Korean, what's with your Korean? What's up, you know, with your Korean? What are you saying, you know? And so it's really interesting to me. I said, oh. So in a way my husband and I identify a lot emotionally alike -- as I said, being in this kind of floating world where he's very much Korean but yet, no... and for me I go, oh, I'm black, but... no, not quite. No, I'm definitely not white but yeah, I'm real attached to my white family and my white friends and yeah, yeah. And I definitely have heart feelings there. And yet where do you... so you have to find your ground. You have to make your ground in a different way, cause my husband has a wide circle of friends in terms of ethnicity, Chinese, Jewish, Vietnamese. He's got a lot of different friends, you know.

Q: When you started dating and you decided you were looking for a mate, was there any conscious thing in your mind about what kind of person you would look for in terms of race, or...? How did it come to this?

A: I kind of went through this circle. I said, oh, I don't want to be with... I had dated white men before and I was like oh, I don't want to be with, you know... The last white man I had dated it was just like -- it was one of those kind of things where I was like, okay, I'm through. I'm through. Because it was the kind of thing he said, oh, but if we had children... He goes, they wouldn't look like me. And I was like, oh, you mean they wouldn't be white enough? I said, they'd look like you and then I said, forget it, forget it. I don't want to ever have to deal with this kind of doubt. And yet, I know there's plenty of Caucasian men. I know some Caucasian men who are married to black women and have kids and they don't have those kind of issues. So I just didn't know. I just said, I want someone who has what I call, just a world view, and someone who's culturally flexible. That's the only thing I can think of -- who's like culturally adventuresome and flexible. I'd never dated an Asian man. It's not like I was thinking, hum, Asian men. You know... Korean. Cause it was very funny. I mean when I think about it, I think, oh, Korean... There's so much since the L.A. uprising and stuff. I think that the tension between Koreans and African- Americans is so volatile at this time in history. There's so much stuff, and so that I would meet a Korean man and fall in love with a Korean man... He and I were just laughing and I remember once we said, after I was seeing him, we said, SunIm can be the Rodney King poster child.

Q: [LAUGHTER]

A: We just put a little black leather jacket with a little Colt .45 in her hand and she'd just be like... see, we can all get along, you know. [LAUGHTER] We were just being silly cause we just said, who knows. Again, it's like who knows why my father and mother hooked up. Who knows. And that's why I think it's... There's sometimes a mystery to why people can't stay together and there's also a little bit of a mystery to why people get attracted. And soon after we dated for a couple of months, he just felt like family to me. He felt like the way my mama felt to me.

Q: Hmm.

A: And that's what I say there's a lot of ways... cause he cooked, and one night he made me some fried pork chops and I was like, okay! Cause it was like reminding me... and he made some corn bread. I was like, oh, yeah. Look at this. And we made some greens and I was like... and you know we would make this joke. And he's like, oh, yeah, I love the pig. He said the pig is the Korean man's friend. I was like, yeah. We'd just laugh about food and, and then he would fuss at me like my grandmother would fuss at me. You can be better. Why are you accepting the job like that? You're better than that, and you're asking too little. And I'd say, God, you're just so hard on me. All of a sudden, from the way I'd get angry at him, that's the way I used to get angry at my grandmother. I'd say, mama, you're just too hard on me. And she'd say, well, I'm supposed to be hard on you cause I want you to be the best. And I thought, oh, I'm kind of falling in love with him cause there's elements of him that are like my mama. He loves me the way my mama loves me. He's like my greatest ally and my harshest critic.

Q: So at that moment then, the cultural and racial difference sort of fell away.

A: Yeah, I mean there are certain things where, he says, in certain ways I'm a traditional Korean man. He goes, I want my family to have dinner together. And then I come back that night and think, but isn't that what most families say they want anyway, to have dinner together? And there's certain things where he says, I know that I grew up around Korean men who don't like their wives to hang out with their buddies. So do I hang out with him and his friends? No. In America you can see couples... so there's certain things that are like -- oh, is that cultural tradition, is that real Asian? I don't know. And part of me, you know, I love him so much I go, ah, I got my own set of friends, and I don't need to hang out with him and his men friends. And he feels like that's a real Asian thing -- like we're the men, we've got to hang out. And I just go...

Q: So has that been the biggest challenge of having an interracial marriage?

A: Well, I know we get some looks sometimes. My husband also can look real different at times. He's been places where people think he's Latino from the way he wears his hair. And if he'll wear a plaid shirt I say, look at you, you got your cholo look going or something. And we both, I don't know... And I think that we're so into making our home -- it's not like we've isolated ourselves because we go out, we socialize. It's that we've been real focused on... since we both work so hard and I work so hard in a public profession of theater and stuff, we come home and go, this is our house. We don't bring in all that outside stuff. And we're both old enough now that we choose to be together, and we know that there might be funny stuff, that people might... Like he'll call this one Korean restaurant he knows that gets special food made for us. He goes, my wife's going to come pick this up, and he's speaking Korean and then I'll show up, you know...

Q: [LAUGHTER]

A: But now people know me and they're fine. Because I know that there is tension sometimes. He's a really strong individual. He's like -- this is what I want and I don't care what other people think.

Q: And you, too?

A: I'm more that way cause... sometimes I'll be like -- maybe I should learn some more Korean and then it's like -- no matter how much Korean I learn, it's not like the people at Koryo Village are going to say, ah, you've come home! [LAUGHTER]

Q: [LAUGHTER]

A: So sometimes there's part of me that's like, I want to be like that. I want everyone to say, okay, Ellen, you're Asian, yeah, you're part Asian now, too. But you know, less