It doesn't matter what my IC says ...

This 'Anglo-Chinese' does not want to be defined by race

Some 30 years ago, a fortune teller gazed at my palm and said, among other things, that I was closer to my mother than to my father.

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This puzzled me because by all accounts I was (well, I still am), in appearance, temperament and outlook, much more like my English-Welsh father than my Straits Chinese mother.

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A few weeks ago, when I saw the results of my mtDNA test and read the explanatory notes, I immediately thought of that fortune teller.

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The mtDNA analysis shows me to be a member of haplogroup F. This, in the elegant language of the report, is the "final destination of a genetic journey that began some 150,000 years ago with an ancient mtDNA haplogroup called L3".

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Haplogroup F, the National Geographic report added, is primarily an Asian group, with the lineage found in Eastern China, South-west Asia and Japan.

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So, I asked myself: Is that what the fortune teller meant when he said I was closer to my mother than my father?

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To Mr Bennett Greenspan, president of Family Tree DNA, a partner of the Genographic Project, I put these questions: So, what's happened to my Caucasian blood? Why has it not shown up in the test results?

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It's quite simple really — mtDNA is genetic material that mothers pass on to their children. Their daughters will, in turn, deliver it to their children, but their sons do not pass on mtDNA to their offspring.

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So, my mtDNA test correctly shows my maternal lineage to be Asian — but there is, of course, no trace of my paternal origins. Paternal lineage is traced through the Y chromosome that men pass on to their sons.

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So while in person and in personality, I may be more like my father, it's my mother's ancestry I carry evidence of in my mtDNA.

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This triggers another memory. Sometime in the 1980s, I decided to act upon a matter that had annoyed me for a long time — the "Race" field that we have on our Singapore identity cards.

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My IC said my race was "English" and I felt that if the state insisted on identifying us by our racial origins, then it should at least do so accurately.

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So, I called the appropriate department and spoke to the person in-charge. After registering my objection to having "Race" on our ICs, I launched into my spiel about giving due respect to my mother's lineage and so on.

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The civil servant listened patiently and when I was done with my haranguing, he said: "So what would you like us to put as your race?"

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"Ah," said I in some surprise, not having expected such acquiescence, then added, "Anglo-Chinese would be the most accurate, I suppose."

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"Let me check," said he, and I heard sounds of a drawer being opened and pages of a file being flipped.

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"Yes, that's okay," he pronounced.

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And so, my IC these days says that my race is "Anglo-Chinese", which is a lot better than "English".

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But does it really matter what my IC says? It is my Singaporean nationality that I identify with most. It is my mother's Peranakan sub-culture — the cuisine, the patois, the folklore — that I am most familiar with. I cannot and do not wish to define myself by race.

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All the more so when, looking at my mtDNA test results, I learn that my maternal lineage, while ostensibly Chinese, traces all the way back to "Mitochondrial Eve" — the common ancestor of all human beings, who was born some 150,000 years ago in Africa. And if I had a brother, his paternal lineage would trace back to Adam — the male common ancestor, who was born in Africa some 60,000 years ago.

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Perhaps, I should see if I can get that "Race" field in my IC card changed to "Afro-Anglo-Chinese".