Today is an interesting holiday. Most holidays have themes — things you're supposed to do, or things you're supposed to think about. On Martin Luther King Day, you're supposed to think about race. Or better yet, you're supposed to think about not thinking about race. Ah, I love a conundrum.

As many of you know, my mother is white and my father is Chinese. This makes me what people now like to call "mixed race". Not long ago it might have been "biracial", though that term seems to be out of fashion (perhaps because it excluded those of more than two races?).

Some time in the early 1990s, or maybe late 1980s, I happened to be strolling about the campus at U.C. Berkeley. A fellow half-Asian bearing a clipboard sought me out and approached me to ask if I'd sign his petition. I don't recall the details, but it was something to do with mixed-race folk like us. I think there was some administrative classification where one was required to indicate one's race. This classification did not have an option for mixed race, forcing poor half-breeds like us to deny one or the other of our heritages. After giving me this alarming news, clipboard guy went on to sympathize with me about how painful it is to be neither one race nor the other and how nobody out there understands us. The whites and the Asians each have their identity groups, but we half-and-halfs are denied ours.

I didn't sign his petition. It wasn't so much that I disagreed with him as I was completely baffled by the very concept. It had never occurred to me to think of "mixed race" as a racial identity, far less to feel like I was part of an oppressed group.

I don't know what became of his specific petition, but his larger cause has been successful. Nowadays just about any survey offers and option for mixed race, and if I'm answering such a survey I usually take it. In the old days, when I had to pick white or yellow, I figured I could choose whichever one I liked, but in fact I almost always chose white.

Some time in my youth (early teens, I think), I had heard a saying that "being white means not having to think about what race you are". I thought that was pretty profound and was actually a very good definition of white identity. And since, both then and now, I almost never give any thought to what race I am, I figure that means I must be white.

President-Elect Obama has a standard story he likes to tell when he is queried about his choice to identify himself as black, rather than mixed race or white. It varies slightly in the telling, but I'm quoting Obama in his interview with Charlie Rose very early in the primary campaign. "If I'm outside your building trying to catch a cab," Obama said, "they're not saying, 'Oh, there's a mixed race guy'."

Racial identity is not how we see ourselves. It's how others see us.

As far as I know, strangers never refer to me as "that mixed race guy". I'm rarely called Asian either. From time to time I'll get a polite inquiry: Someone will come up and ask, "What is your racial heritage?" Or, surprisingly often, they'll be hopelessly awkward and say, "Um, what are you? Uh, I mean...."

And in fact, I do know what they mean, so I tell them that my mother is white and my father is Chinese. This makes them so happy. They get a glow of triumphant satisfaction their face and say, "Aha, I knew you were something!" which I understand to mean they could tell I had some sort of non-white ethnicity in me, but couldn't tell if it's Asian or Hispanic or Native American.

I think that makes me white.

It wasn't until many years later that I realized that as often as not, casual inquiries about ethnicity are, like inquiries about horoscope, a mild pickup line — which perhaps explains why they were so often so awkward. Since I spent most of my 20s and 30s in and around the classical music community in the San Francisco Bay area, and since in my youth I gave out an ambiguous vibe, I would get these from both men and women. I was completely oblivious to this, even when (as I now recall) it was sometimes followed up with an observation like "I think when whites and Asians mix the result is always very attractive". With only one exception, I always took this at face value and answered blandly, "Oh, that's nice". Looking back, I assume my interrogators must have read that (correctly) as a complete lack of interest and moved on to the next mixed-race guy.

The one felicitous exception was after a summer concert at Holy Names College in the Oakland Hills. I had sung a short solo (not very well, according to the recording...) and was meeting friends and acquaintances in the lobby, including one mixed-race-loving admirer whom I had crossed paths with before but barely knew. I don't remember what I said differently that time. All I remember is that I was mesmerized by the delightful shape of her flimsy sun dress, and the conversation led to a brief but lovely proto-romance with by far the whitest and blondest girl I ever dated.

Alas, I was a fool and I bungled it before it turned into anything bigger.

Years later, when new vistas of self-awareness led me to see what self-destructive habits I had developed to protect myself from possible intimacy, I came to regret it very much and for a very long time. It occurred to me then that it might give her some belated satisfaction to hear me say so, since at the time I had been a complete oaf and I hurt her badly. Unfortunately, she has a fairly common name and proved ungooglable.

If you're out there, D.A., all those platitudes your girlfriends must have offered while you were crying over ice cream were actually true: You really were a great catch, and I really was an idiot to let you get away.

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