Asian Americans as a group share identity issues being stuck between cultures -- not quite accepted by the country of our heritage, and not quite always accepted as "American" either. We're still finding our place in society. Each culture can have a specific spin that colors our identity. Japanese Americans carry baggage from internment and Japan's bombing of Pearl Harbor....
Erica Johnson is a woman on a mission. Earlier this year, she launched a blog called Hapa Voice where she posts submissions from hapas -- mixed-race Asians -- with photos and short autobiographies that explain a little about themselves. The titles of each post are a simple rundown of the submitter's ethnic mix.
This elegant, straightforward approach to stating one's own identity is both powerful and moving, especially for hapas because their identities have been a central focus all their lives, even more so than other people of color. Being mixed adds a layer of richness for themselves, and too often a lare of confusion for others. So it's really cool to read entry after entry on "Hapa Voices" and see so many people who are finding their voice... and their identity.
Johnson has been inspired by the work of hapa writer, filmmaker, artist, activist, standup comic and lifeguard (really) Kip Fulbeck.
His "Hapa Project" and books such as "Part Asian, 100% Hapa" are clear antecedents for "Hapa Voice." In the book, Fulbeck traveled the country shooting portraits of mixed-race Asians accompanied by statements of identity by the people posing. He recently published a new book of adorable portraits of little hapa kids, "Mixed."
But as an ongoing website project, "Hapa Voice" takes Fulbeck's inspiration and breathes it more life. Johnson explains the origins of the "Hapa Voice" blog on its "About" page:
I've written before about Japanese anime, or animation, as well as the genre's characters and their large eyes, and wondered if they symbolize a desire to look more Caucasian.
But this brief guest post by Julian Abagond on the blog Sociological Images titled Why Do the Japanese Draw Themselves As White? that offers very interesting food for thought.
Abagond makes the case that Americans (white people) think Japanese draw anime and manga characters to look Caucasian, but that's a Western construct, and that "Americans" (he conflates nationality with ethnicity, a common slip in race/culture conversations, even by well-intentioned people and often by Asians) see everything in terms of white unless there are stereotypical symbols that identify a character as another ethnicity.
With Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month about to end, I thought I'd write a bit about the terms we choose to describe our identity. Like other ethnic groups, the labels we use for ourselves seems to be always evolving. Hispanic evolves into Latino; Negro to Black to African American; Native American to American Indian. Asian Americans are sometimes called Asian Pacific Americans, sometimes Asian Pacific islander American, and sometimes Asian American Pacific islander. These labels lead to a crazy bowl of alphabet soup acronyms: AA, APA, APIA, AAPI.
I choose to say (and write) "Asian American" most of the time, but say "Asian American Pacific Islander" and use the acronym AAPI for formal references. Although organizations such as APIA Vote and APAs for Progress helped get Asian Americans involved in the political process, President Obama and the White House prefers AAPI, as in "Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month." (Note that the poster shown here, from East Tennessee State University, calls it "Asian Pacific American Heritage Month.")
Earlier this month at an AAPI Heritage Month event sponsored by the Colorado Asian Roundtable, our friend emcee Kim Nguyen stumbled on "Asian American Pacific Islander" and I had to snicker. It's a mouthful, all right, especially when you say it over and over into a microphone. And even just saying "AAPI" repeatedly gets to feeling odd, as if the letters lose all meaning upon repetition.
As it happens, we may be on the cusp of a change in how we identify ourselves anyway.
The Sacramento Bee the other day ran an interesting story that proposes that "Asian American" is fading off like the term "Oriental" before it.
"As Sacramento's growing Asian immigrant communities celebrated Sunday's Pacific Rim Street Fest, a growing number note that Asian American isn't a race and said they choose to identify by their ethnicity," the article stated. The excellent (required reading) group blog 8Asians picked up on the SacBee's story and expanded upon its theme of ethnic Balkanization.
Asian Americans are increasingly identifying more by their specific culture and ethnicity, and not so much as a larger, racially-linked group.
Like a lot of social change, this may be a generational swing.
Every once in a while, people ask me about the name of my blog, because they only hear the word "Nikkei" when it's used for the Japanese stock exchange. "Nikkei" is also so the word used to describe people of Japanese ancestry outside of Japan. I'm a Nikkei-jin, or Nikkei person. When my blog first started out in the 1990s as a column in Denver's weekly Japanese community newspaper, the Rocky Mountain Jiho, its publishers, Eiichi and Yoriko Imada, suggested I call the column "Nikkei View" since it reflected my perspective on pop culture and politics.
The name stuck. In the years since, I've come across "Nikkei" a few times as a term for who I am -- mostly on research projects such as the International Nikkei Research Project, a three-year collaborative project involving more than 100 scholars from 10 countries and 14 participating institutions including the Japanese American National Museum (JANM) in LA. There are organizations that use the term, such as the Oregon Nikkei Legacy Center, and the blog "Nikkei Ancestry."
Now there's another "Nikkei" site, which is republishing some of my babbling from this blog. In 2005, JANM launched Discover Nikkei, which is a gathering place for stories about Nikkei-jin from all over the globe, not just Japanese Americans but also Japanese Peruvians and Japanese Brazilians (two countries that have very large Nikkei populations), and every other country, as well as mixed-race people of Japanese ancestry.
The first single from Dawen's debut album, "American Me,"which was released back in September, wastes no time stating his passion for Asian American identity. "Flip through the paper, turn on the telly, go to a movie," he croons in his supple, silky soprano. Then he slips into the first verse:
Just because you saw the movie Crouching Tiger Doesn’t mean that I know kung-fu And just because Mr. Yan has an accent Doesn’t mean that I’ve got one too People tell me I “speak good English†Or that I’m “too thin to be Bruce Lee†Where do they get their preconceptions Of what I’m supposed to be?That's his first single, but the first track on the album, is more blunt in addressing the inequities of many immigrants of color to the U.S.:
Welcome to the USA Freedom is your right Land of opportunity Only if you’re white Welcome to the USA Sea to shining sea I give my money, give my life Still they stare at me Welcome, Welcome, hey…On the third track, "Ku Li," Dawen weaves in the lyrics from the folk song, "I've been working on the railroad," into a stunning statement about how Chinese immigrants were treated as slave labor during the taming of the American West.
What's amazing, despite such in-your-face lyrics, is that Dawen wraps his message in an incredible wealth of warm musicality, starting with his soulful R&B vocals to his must-be-classically-and-jazz-trained keyboards and his guitar work, and his hooky instincts for get-in-your-head melodies and late-night funk bedrock rhythms.
The album is a mellow, low-key wonder that can play in the background or zoom into the foreground with the sharply-observed social activism of the first eight tracks.
