Mixed Race Studies

Visible and Invisible Hapa Exhibit at Japanese American Museum San Jose

Hapa Mama: Asian Fusion Family and Food
2016-05-20

Grace Hwang Lynch

Bay Area people… there’s an exhibit about the history of hapa Japanese Americans at the Japanese American Museum in San Jose.

Titled Visible and Invisible, it’s similar to the exhibit of the same name at LA’s Japanese American National Museum, but this collection is unique and has many ties to the local area.

Curated by historical sociologist Cindy Nakashima and art professor Fred Liang, the small but significant collection shows the history of mixed-race Japanese Americans from the 1860s to the current day, when the majority of Japanese Americans are projected to be mixed-race by 2020. “The first Nisei was a hapa, for heaven’s sake!” says Nakashima, who also curated the 2013 Los Angeles exhibit with Lily Anne Yumi Welty and Duncan Ryuken Williams.

Read the entire article here.

“Race absolutely still matters and racism persists in every sector of society. We can easily see evidence of these realities every day in the news, on social media, in film, television, publishing, academia, the workplace, medicine, government, politics, law, etc. Proclaiming “race doesn’t matter anymore” is willfully ignorant, colorblind, avoidant, and worse – in being complicit – perpetuates racism itself through inaction. To make the point how powerfully shaping racial reality is: The finely-tuned concept of race alone (i.e. belief that human beings can be organized into a handful of hierarchically organized groups based on the way they look) has not changed in centuries. Elite white male thinkers fully congealed value-laden racial categories by the late 1700s which are still the very same categories we use today. This way of thinking has been infused into the fiber of society; the words we use; the way we interact with each other; even our Constitution. Every time we check a race box on a form, every time we read a report where people are filed into races (e.g. Pew Research), every time we watch a news anchor talk about Black Lives Matter protestors – we are living the reality of the racist foundation this country was built on. Nobody is immune or escapes that history that continues to shape us all today.” —Sharon H. Chang

Grace Hwang Lynch “Interview With Sharon H. Chang on Raising Mixed Race,” Hapa Mama: Asian Fusion Family and Food, December 7, 2015. http://hapamama.com/2015/12/07/qa-on-raising-mixed-race-with-sharon-h-chang/.

Interview With Sharon H. Chang on Raising Mixed Race

Hapa Mama: Asian Fusion Family and Food
2015-12-07

Grace Hwang Lynch (HapaMama)

I’ve been reading a new book by Sharon H. Chang called Raising Mixed Race. You might remember Sharon, a Seattle-based writer and scholar, from her guest post A Multiracial Asian Mom Wonders How Her Son Will See Himself (Routledge 2015). With chapter titles that are analogies to home construction (Foundation, Framing, Wiring, etc.), the book aims to get to the historical ideas behind the way we talk about race, including the concept of mixed race identity. I was especially interested because the research focuses specifically on Asian multiracials. Recently, I had a chance to interview Sharon about her work. Read on…

HapaMama: First of all, tell us a little bit about yourself, how the idea for Raising Mixed Race: Multiracial Asian Children in a Post-Racial World came about and the process of researching and writing it.

Sharon H. Chang: I’ve worked with families and children for over a decade in various capacities: as a teacher, parent educator, administrator, school owner, etc. I hold a Master’s degree in Human Development with an Early Childhood Specialization and Raising Mixed Race actually grew out of my Master’s thesis. At the time I had just had my son and was struggling to find resources that would support our mixed race family. Frustrated beyond belief (particularly since I thought things would have changed by now) I finally decided to head into the field and conduct research myself. I interviewed 68 parents of 75 young multiracial Asian children around questions of race, racism and identity. I then compiled and analyzed those interviews, about 800 pages of transcripts, while simultaneously researching critical mixed race studies. Several years later I am at last thrilled to debut the book we are about to see today…

Read the entire interview here.

My Face is a Face of Asian America

Hapa Mama: Asian Fusion Family and Food
2015-11-14

Candace Kita

“Blending in” has never been my strong suit. As a generally shy and rather bookish individual, I have always wished that I could more naturally fit seamlessly into my surroundings. However, my inability to blend into established categories–particularly in regards to race–unexpectedly led me to become the Asian American community activist that I am today.

As a hapa Japanese American growing up in the flat plains of suburban Chicago, I knew that I stood out from a very young age. I looked different from the rest of my family, and especially from my mom, who was my primary caretaker. A second-generation Swedish American, my mother embodies the Scandinavian archetype: tall, lean, blonde, and blue-eyed. I, on the other hand, was a racially ambiguous, chubby, Asian-ish child with a chocolate brown mushroom cut. Although my mother and I sometimes sported matching Hanna Andersson sweater sets (not that I had much say at age two, mind you), clothing was not enough to prevent the attention and astonishment that came from our largely mono-ethnic community. Once, on a family shopping trip to the neighborhood grocery store, a stranger oohed over my almond-shaped eyes, pointed to me and asked my mother, “Where did you get her from?” Due to my “look,” my mother’s womb was clearly not his first assumption. I was a foreigner two blocks away from my childhood home…

Read the entire article here.

What the Heck Are You? The Racial Guessing Game I Don’t Want to Play

Hapa Mama: Asian Fusion Family and Food
2015-04-13

Melinda Frank, Guest Blogger
Growing Up Ethnic

“I thought you were Dutch–you’re Indonesian?”

“I thought you were Irish–you’re Dutch?”

“Wait, you’re white and Asian?”

“What are you anyways?”

I hate answering the question “What are you,” because in my experience, that question always overshadows the more meaningful question of “Who are you?”…

Read the entire article here.

INTERVIEW: Jason Fung, Author of ‘Beyond Eurasian and Hapa’

Hapa Mama: Asian Fusion Family and Food
2015-02-02

Grace Hwang Lynch

I recently had a chance to interview Jason Fung, author of the upcoming book Beyond Eurasian and Hapa. Fung is a 34-year-old mixed-race (Chinese and Caucasian) person who went to high school and college in the U.S. is currently living in Hong Kong. His book draws upon his own family experiences, as well as history, to examine the different terms we use to describe multiracial Asians.

HM: What are your thoughts about the terms “Eurasian” and “Hapa”? How are they good descriptors and how do they fall short?

JF: These terms are really broad, and mean different things to different people.

For example, Macau has Eurasians; India has Eurasians (aka Anglo-Indians); Hong Kong and Sri Lanka and Burma have Eurasians. There are other definitions for the term, but as far as I define it “Eurasian” means one thing: a bloodline traceable to original European colonials. Macau Eurasians, for example, see themselves as utterly distinctive. Even if you are Portuguese-Chinese mixed they still won’t accept you as “Eurasian” by their standards if you were not from the accepted colonial bloodlines.There are plenty of fascinating “Eurasian” stories, surrounded by a rich material culture but “Eurasian” is too singular and closed…

“Hapa” is a term I really want to like. I really do…

Read the entire interview here.

‘Everything I Never Told You’ by Celeste Ng: Unspoken Thoughts About Being Mixed-Race

Hapa Mama: Asian Fusion Family and Food
2014-12-28

Grace Hwang Lynch

Celeste Ng’s debut novel Everything I Never Told You: A Novel has been at the top of many best books of 2014 lists — and for good reason. It’s a quick read, without feeling cheap. It’s a mystery, without falling into genre. It’s a critique of race in the United States, without sounding shrill or academic.

The small Ohio college town in 1977 in which the Lee family lives will feel familiar to any Asian child who grew up in the Midwest. The story opens with the stark sentence “Lydia is dead. But they don’t know this yet.” Starting from a description of a very ordinary family breakfast, Ng gives us glimpses into the world created by the marriage of Marilyn and James Lee.

The couple meets at Harvard, where Chinese American James is a Ph.D. student and Marilyn, who is white, is his student. Their whirlwind romance leads to a shotgun wedding in 1958, in a sly nod to Loving v. Virginia. When Marilyn’s mother, a Southern white single-mother, meets James on the wedding day, she pulls her daughter aside.

It would have been easier if her mother had used a slur. It would have been easier if she had insulted James outright, if she had said he was too short or too poor or not accomplished enough. But all her mother said, over and over, was, “It’s not right, Marilyn. It’s not right.” Leaving it unnamed, hanging in the air between them.

These doubts about the suitability of an interracial marriage and the inability of society to grasp mixed-race identity pop up over and over throughout the novel. In the 1970s Midwestern town Ng conjures up, there are only white and not white. There are so many aspects of this novel I can’t stop thinking about, from the threads of Betty Crocker homemaker versus 1970s feminism to the deft way Ng has crafted the details to unfold in sort of a spiral fashion. But I am most interested in the undercurrent of interracial marriage, assimilation and mixed-race identity…

Read the entire review here.