I am a mutt, and proud. As a Chinese-American woman whose father is lily white and whose mother was born in China, I am like a human bridge from one culture to the next.

After an early divorce, my Chinese mother raised me -- over Christmas and summer vacations -- to eat anything, respect my elders, be conscientious, waste nothing and save money for the big things.

On our trips to Taiwan, where she grew up, we stewed in the summer heat. Watching my mother, her sisters and my wypoh (grandmother) haggle with vendors in the open markets, then laugh and talk as they prepared meals in my grandparents' tiny, sweltering apartment, I learned the value of thrift and the meaning of food in family. In the divine coolness of early morning, I would follow my mother through humid city streets, warmed with the smell of fried breads and soybean milk, to the public park. There, we watched hundreds of the oldest of Chinese women move in unison, slowly and precisely, at morning tai chi sessions. "They are lost in their own worlds," she told me once in Chinese, "making movements that would normally be considered so immodest." In the misty park, Chinese humility was transcended by Chinese ritual.

Over the school year, I grew up with my Anglo father in communal housing and on the road in various vans. We lived with students and single mothers, professionals, hippies and hippie professionals. We camped and explored the vast and beautiful United States, befriending hitchhikers and housed by strangers who befriended us. We were a traveling tribe, with our dog Waggles, cat Cleo and my pet rat Digger piled in too. Traveling with my father, I discovered the wonders of nature, the kindness of strangers and the many paths to knowledge. As a graduate student in the late 1960s, my father taught me to question traditional structures, to be liberal-minded and tolerant, and to work for change.

Today, as an Eurasian woman with an Israeli boyfriend, I have no set cultural traditions. I mix and match: celebrating the Chinese moon festival with flaky moon cakes; celebrating Christmas with a bejeweled pine tree and presents; and now, celebrating Passover with my partner. Each celebration means something to me, teaches me something about human values, or is a recognition of the natural season. I am grateful to be able to choose, and to celebrate!

Because of the way I look, I am often mistaken as Filipino, Hawaiian, or Native American. But, above all, I am an American. I represent what America, to me, has always represented: the hope that the world's peoples can one day come to understand each other and live together in peace.

The United States is the great salad bowl of the world. It is we who are of two heritages who will eventually create the "melting pot." Since 1970, the number of American children born to one white and one non-white parent has increased by 253 percent. And in the last two decades, the birth rate of mixed- race babies has increased 26 times as fast as the births of babies born to uniethnic families. Simply put, the mutts are taking over.

Who are we? We are those who check "other" when asked to identify our ethnicity. We are not black, white, American Indian, Alaskan Native, Asian or Pacific Islander. We do not fit neatly into any of these categories.

We "others" are proud, colorful and beautiful people who tan easily and see both sides of the cultural divide. We were born beyond ethnic categorization, although many of us respect and practice the traditions of our parents. We have an unusual perspective on the race issues of our time that is forced by our birthright.

I am mixed. And I am a strong, intelligent, conscientious woman, happy to be alive, happy to contribute. To me, my mixed status only makes me more beautiful. To white supremacists, though, I am a mongrel. Naturally, I am appalled by their calls for racial purity. At the same time, I do not sit easily with ethnic minority groups' eerily similar demands for the retention of cultural "integrity." Because I am of two ethnicities, I have no cultural purity of my own and cannot contribute to anyone else's cultural purity. To my boyfriend's Jewish parents, who live in Israel, I am a threat to their "race" -- although, scientifically, there is no such thing as race. Nonetheless, I am diluting the cultural solution. I am like a terrible solvent.

While I can understand these feelings -- especially in light of the historical and terrible persecution and exclusion of Jews by other ethnic and religious groups -- the underlying belief is, to me, the same as that of white supremacists: that our ethnic or cultural identity is somehow more important than our common humanity. I believe that if we hold our common humanity aloft as our first and sacred goal, ethnic persecution would end.

In the Taoist Hua Hu Ching, it is written that those who wish to achieve harmony "will be obliged to abandon any mental bias born of cultural or religious belief." This, it continues, "is the beginning of liberation." In my mind, our rigid cultural and religious beliefs sow the seeds of division, hate and war. We half-breeds have something to teach racial purists: Look at us, we are proof that two humans make a human. And variety is the spice of life.

As a mixed-race person, to support cultural purity would be to deny my own birthright, and my own value. Mutts or mongrels, in the dog world, are often healthier, smarter, and live longer than their overly purebred counterparts. If I bear a child with my current partner, that child will have no pedigree. And yet she or he will be a child of four equally wonderful peoples: the Chinese, the Jewish, the Middle Eastern and the Anglo-Saxon. Won't that make this child even wiser, stronger and more tolerant?

Like my future child, inevitably, more and more of we who populate the planet will come to be mixed. Someday, if we do not destroy ourselves or the earth first, we will all be mongrels and mutts, hapas and half-breeds. We will form our own traditions, born out of ancient customs, and re-formed to have relevance in the modern day. We will all be children of color. To me, that is cause for celebration.

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