LB and I decided to both do a genetics test with 23 and Me. Today, I finally got my results after months of impatient curiosity, which mostly confirmed what I already knew about myself, but there were a few surprises and a few disappointments too that I think comes with the territory of learning about your genetic history.
1. The first thing I learned is that I'm 31.2% Asian, which comes as pleasant surprise. That's basically a 1/3 of my genetic identity, not 25%, as I'd originally assumed. Considering I'm nisei, hapa, and nikkeijin, this is kind of a big deal to me
2. Miraculously, I'm 1.3% Mongolian and 2.5%-3.4% Korean, which both came as a slight shock to me, until I started studying the migration patterns of my maternal haplogoup D to Zhongyuan, with origins in ethnic Han people. Also, several Japanese history scholars I've talked to have told me that Japanese and Korean people have always shared DNA despite ethnocentric claims to the contrary on both sides
3. I'm definitely English/Irish (37.6%)
4. I'm slightly less French/German than I thought (somewhere between 14.3% and 24.6%)
5. I'm basically 6% Scandinavian, which is news to me. Once, while a student at Interlochen Arts Academy, I hung a Swedish flag on my wall simply because my great Aunt, Patricia, used to work for the American-Scandinavian Foundation, which was my way of passing, even though no school would have been more accepting of my mixed-race identity as IAA.
6. Mostly importantly, I'm a 100% hapa (mixed-race Asian), but I already knew that!
I feel a personal essay brewing here. More on that later.