Mixed Race Studies

Part Asian, Not Hapa

Open Salon
Thoughts from a Third Culture: on being mixed in America
2010-07-27

Mia Nakaji Monnier

My mother is Japanese from Osaka; my father, American from a small town in Western Oregon. There’s a word for people like me, used especially on the West Coast and popularized in recent years, maybe most notably by artist Kip Fulbeck:

Hapa.

From the Hawaiian phrase “hapa haole” (“half white”), the word “hapa” has come to be a label that many multiracial people with some Asian heritage incorporate into their identities, whether they wear it with pride or with ambivalence.

I don’t wear it at all.

It’s not that I think “hapa” is an offensive word, though my parents took issue with it as my brothers and I were growing up, their reason being that it means, literally, “half.” “Haafu,” the Japanese equivalent has the same literal meaning and I’ve even heard people skip over both these words entirely, going straight to “half.” As in, “You look a little Japanese. Are you half?” or “Why do you work at the Japanese American National Museum? OH, are you half?!”…

Read the entire essay here.

Alien Land

Northeastern University Press
2006 (Originally published in 1949 by E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc.)
336 pages
1 illus. 5 1/2 x 8″
ISBN-13: 978-1-55553-657-2
ISBN-10: 1-55553-657-3

Willard Savoy (1916-1976)

Introduction by:
Robert Burns Stepto, Professor of African American Studies, English and American Studies
Yale University

Alien Land is the passionate and haunting story of a light-skinned black man who can pass as white in mid-twentieth-century America. As a spiritually tormented child and young adult caught between two worlds in a segregated society, Kern Roberts puzzles over racism and agonizes over “why he’s a nigger.” As a teenager studying at the exclusive Evans Academy in Vermont, Kern “passes” until a classmate maliciously exposes him. Anguished and resentful, he throws himself into working for the Freedom League in Washington, D.C., the civil rights organization of which his father, a prominent black attorney, is national president. In 1934 Kern starts college in an “alien land,” the Jim Crow South. Exposed to horrifying racially motivated crimes, prejudice, and contempt, Kern necessarily plays the submissive “nigger” until, terrorized, he renounces his race and his father, returning to Vermont to live as a white man with his white grandmother. Ultimately he comes to terms with his biracial identity, finds peace in his marriage to a white woman, and reconciles with his father.

Robert Burns Stepto’s keen introduction firmly situates Alien Land in the line of African American novels that treat the issue of identity through the motif of passing. Originally published in cloth in 1949 to national acclaim, the full text of this remarkable novel is finally available in paperback.