Mixed Race Studies

An Interview with Poet Brian Komei Dempster

Hyphen: Asian America Unabridged
2015-02-02

Jeffrey Thomas Leong, San Francisco Bay Area poet; 2014 graduate of the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Writing program in poetry

I first met Brian Komei Dempster in Winter 2000 as a student in his Kearny Street Workshop writing class, held in his grandfather’s Buddhist church in San Francisco’s Japantown, and was immediately impressed by his warmth and patience. Brian has edited two books of personal stories by Japanese Americans who were incarcerated in WW II camps — From Our Side of the Fence and Making Home from War. His debut poetry book Topaz, which won the 15 Bytes 2014 Book Award in Poetry, was published in 2013 by Four Way Books.

What I admire most about Topaz is its skillful interweaving of the historical and the personal, which reflects the way that inherited family legacies are both a burden and a gift for one to sort through and integrate. Brian’s story — and the speaker’s quest in the book — is further complicated by his mixed race heritage and upbringing by a Japanese American mother and white father. As a Chinese American, I’ve experienced cultural bifurcation but, through Brian’s work, have discovered a new world of racial dualism. His fearless investigation of its nuances and conflicts is inspiring. He can write of a grandmother’s grief and then seamlessly present the sexual angst of adolescent males: his ordering and juxtaposition of poems reflects the multi-layered resonances of the speaker’s life.

Brian’s poetry is carefully crafted, with formal experimentation, yet remains accessible to a broad audience. It is personally expressive, though grounded within the context of family and community. His poems chart new territory and speak hard truths. Most importantly, for me as a writer, they feel authentic.

Brian’s poems have appeared in New England Review, North American Review, Ploughshares, and numerous other journals as well as various anthologies, including Language for a New Century and Asian American Poetry: the Next Generation. He is a professor of rhetoric and language and a faculty member in Asian Pacific American Studies at the University of San Francisco, where he also serves as Director of Administration for the Master of Arts in Asia Pacific Studies.

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Jeffrey Thomas Leong: Can you tell us about your name — Brian Komei Dempster — and where it comes from?

Brian Komei Dempster: My father’s name is Dempster, which has European roots, and my mother’s maiden name is Ishida, which is Japanese. The name Komei was given to me by my grandfather, Archbishop Nitten Ishida. I didn’t always use Komei, but as I got older and became a writer, I felt I had to use Komei; otherwise someone might not know who I was, not get the half Asian part of my identity. According to my grandfather, the name means “tall, high, clear –like a mountain. ” The fact that my grandfather — who’s a priest — gave me the name imbues it with gravitas…

Read the entire interview here.

Adopting The Asian in ‘Caucasian’: Korean Adoptees and White Privilege

Hyphen: Asian America Unabridged
2015-01-20

Nicky Sa-eun Schildkraut

My father remembers that when I first arrived, he’d wake up to me calling out “Abojee! Abojee!” in the middle of the night, the Korean word for father. As a little girl, those nights in my new home in America were filled with angst that if I fell asleep at night, I might wake up utterly alone. I fought against the tide of sleep until I was secure in the knowledge that one of my parents was still at my side. I remember my mother would often sing me to sleep with Christmas carols, after running out of lullabies.

I was around two years old when I was adopted. I say ‘around’ because my date of birth and name on my official adoption documents were most likely fabricated by social workers at the White Lily orphanage in Daegu, South Korea in 1979. On those papers, it says that I was “abandoned,” without explanation nor names of my biological parents; for many Korean adoptees, this is the norm. Many of us will never know our real stories because those early erasures of our original families were not only commonplace but were created to make us into social orphans, a profitable industry. Many of us were the children of unwed mothers who faced the stigma of raising us alone and unsupported by the state. Caught in precarious social and economic circumstances, their only option was to relinquish their children to wealthy, white and European parents who could provide “a better life” with the promise of a home, education, and cultural capital.

I feel compelled to return to this giant chimera of adoption because it continues to haunt me. Equivalent to the giant elephant in the room, the chimera represents everything that is unspeakable and messy and ambivalent. Like many Korean adoptees, I grew up in a liberal, white family, in a predominantly white town, and came of age during the years of neoliberal multiculturalism in the 1980s to 1990s. I didn’t realize it then, but my discomfort as a hypervisible minority in my family was the direct result of being raised in a climate of colorblind attitudes when international adoption was part of a continuing trend of the white American savior complex. I was taught to believe race wasn’t important, when the real reason was that nobody knew how to discuss racism and micro aggressions, especially the social workers at adoption agencies…

Read the entire article here.

Why Mixed with White isn’t White

Hyphen: Asian America Unabrided
2014-07-22

Sharon H. Chang

When I wrote my first post for Hyphen, “Talking Mixed-Race Identity with Young Children,” I was deliberately blunt about race. I wrote about how I don’t tell my multiracial son, who presents as a racial minority, that he’s white — but I do tell him he’s Asian. While the essay resonated with many people, others made comments like this:

“Your child is as white as he is Asian… Why embrace one label and not the other?”

“Why is he Asian but not white? He has white ancestors as much as Asian ones. So if it’s OK to call him Asian, it’s OK to call him white. Or, if it’s not OK to call him white (because he’s not completely white) then it’s not OK to call him Asian, because he’s not completely Asian either.”

“Your child is neither white nor Asian. I once heard this description: When you have a glass of milk and add chocolate to it, you no longer have just a glass of milk and you no longer just have chocolate because you have created something completely different. A bi-racial or multi-racial child is not either/or.”

In the 1990s, psychologist and mixed-race scholar Maria P.P. Root wrote the famous “Bill of Rights for People of Mixed Heritage,” stirred by her examination of mixed-race identity, interviews with hundreds of multiracial folk across the U.S., and the struggles multiracial people face in forming and claiming a positive sense of self. “I have the right not to justify my existence to the world,” it reads. “To identify myself differently than strangers expect me to identify. To create a vocabulary about being multiracial or multiethnic.”

Almost two decades later, these proclamations still ring so true. Some people are completely unwilling to honor my family’s choice to identify as mixed-race and Asian because it doesn’t align with their own ideas about how we should identify. The right of a mixed-race person to self-construct and self-define, even today, endures continual policing from people with their own agendas…

Read the entire article here.

Talking Mixed-Race Identity with Young Children

Hyphen—Asian Americans Unabridged
2014-05-06

Sharon H. Chang

“Mom, am I White?”

A few weeks ago, when I got this question from my four-year-old, I wasn’t sure what to say. Technically my son is “biracial” — but that label does him a severe representative injustice, because his bloodline is actually Japanese, Taiwanese, Slovakian, German, French Canadian, British, and Welsh. He also does not possess a parent of just one race and a parent of another race, as if often assumed when people hear the term “biracial”—because both my husband and I are mixed-race Asian/White too. For these reasons, I much prefer to describe us, and our son, as multiracial.

I write about and research race, families, and children, with an especial focus on multiraciality. I don’t believe in avoiding race talk with my child, though I do try to discuss it in age-appropriate ways. I’ve tried to stand by my conviction that it’s better he learn how to think and talk about these issues within the family first, rather than have normative ideals force-fed down his throat by everyone else when he walks out the door. That said, I wasn’t fully prepared when he turned to me and asked, “Mom, am I White?”…

Read the entire article here.