(Note: this essay is written entirely by my wife and drift partner.)
For most of my life, the closest thing I had to biracial representation was a cartoon wolfdog.
Nineties kids may remember the animated film Balto (1995), which was very loosely based on the true story of the 1925 diphtheria serum run to Nome, Alaska. It’s an odd movie. It’s probably not a “great” movie. But it was a favorite of mine as a kid, not just because the dogs are cute and they talk, but because subconsciously I related to Balto as a biracial kid. Balto is a wolfdog, which in this film is treated as something unusual and potentially dangerous by not only the other dogs, but also the human characters. His story is about accepting both parts of his heritage and recognizing his unique strengths and weaknesses as a wolfdog. As one character says to him, “A dog cannot make this journey alone…but maybe a wolf can.” It’s about as subtle as a brick to the face, and falls into a tired trope of making biracial characters “special” due to their heritage. But…up until high school, this was literally the only story featuring a biracial character that I had. I can “pass” for white, but there were subtle but constant reminders that I was different from my friends and classmates: my grandparents were Gung-Gung and PoPo, not Grandpa and Grandma, my dad was the only Asian dad at Parent’s Day, and we celebrated Chinese New Year when no one else I knew did. It wasn’t the only reason I felt “different,” but it was a significant one.
As I grew older, I embraced my heritage and began actively seeking out media featuring biracial characters. I found a few examples in high school and college and clung to them. Notably, the TV show Nikita stars Maggie Q as a half-Vietnamese woman, the first biracial Asian protagonist I’d ever seen. But the pool of stories about biracial Chinese characters was frustratingly small. Enter Agents of SHIELD in September 2013.
I tuned into SHIELD’s pilot partially out of an interest in the Whedon brand (2013 was a different time) and partially because this was the heyday of Marvel content and I wanted to experience it all. I thought it was pretty fun and I felt an instant connection to Skye, the snarky hacker/audience surrogate. At the time, many of my Tumblr friends also watched at least the first few episodes and were posting about them. I vividly remember the moment that I found out Chloe Bennet is biracial Chinese — one friend posted something about how the show had “two WOC” on it, and I googled Chloe and literally started screaming. From that moment onward, Skye/Daisy has been my girl.
Full story here.