Blog
Tiger Mom’s Hapa Cubs
Are persons with one Asian parent and one non-Asian parent Asian or not Asian? Schools don’t seem to know where to place them, leaving them on their own to determine their identities. In the article, “Some Asians’ college strategy: Don’t check ‘Asian,’” some young Hapa reveal the ambivalence and flexibility surrounding their identities. Parents wondering if they should regard their kids as Asian might take a lesson from Tiger Mom Amy Chua, who raised two Hapa children. Amy describes her two girls, Sophia and Lulu, as...
read moreHidden Hapa
“Hey, what are you doing over there with the Hapa?” Kathy and I looked over and there were three of our Japanese American friends at another table smiling at us, one with a mischievous grin. Sandy had jokingly pointed out that I was a mixed blood amidst a group of full bloods. Kathy and I smiled back at them and returned to our conversation. But Kathy suddenly surprised me by saying, “Actually, I’m kind of mixed too; my mother is from Okinawa; like an interracial marriage to Japanese.” I looked over at my friends and remembered that...
read more“You’re Irish?” Celebrating Hidden Identities
“You’re Irish?” I introduced myself to the Irishman by my father’s family name Murphy and watched as he stared at me in seeming disbelief and confusion before uttering, “Well, it’s a good name anyway.” I recalled this incident recently as I celebrated St. Patrick’s Day with a bunch of other Irishmen. The Boston Globe carried an interesting story that day—St. Patrick’s Day Holds Mixed Emotions For Some—that introduced some other Irish who celebrated their heritage with complex feelings. There was Ryan McCollum, whom...
read moreWe are not our bodies
I was shocked when I found out that Julia was only 43 years old. She was in the mid- stages of ALS when we met and was losing voluntary control of her body. The first time I sat by her bedside and talked to her I was aware of an intense feeling of fear inside myself. I wondered what it was like for her, living inside that crippled body. I kept imagining how beautiful she must have been and how tragic it was that her body was now being ravaged by such a debilitating disease. Despite her deterioration, Julia always smiled when we were together....
read moreMy Transnational, Hapa Identity in Question
I like to say that I have a transnational, multicultural, multiethnic identity. I am hapa, haafu, I am both/and, Japanese AND American. But I know that many others still see the world in dichotomies, as either/or, Japanese OR American. I know what I look like. I’ve seen my face in the mirror before. But I forget that others might see me differently than I see myself. And I know who I am. But I am aware that others usually do not know me. I was reminded of this while riding in a taxi with my 108 year-old grandmother in Matsuyama, a city on...
read moreTiger Mom with a Heart Workshop
I will offer a workshop on raising children in multicultural environments: Tiger Mom with a Heart: Empowering Ourselves to Raise Healthy Children in a Multicultural Environment. Here is an explanation of the workshop: We all want our children to be successful and happy. But what do we mean by “success” and “happiness” and how do we achieve this? This training is designed to help mental health professionals meet the needs of their multicultural patient populations by addressing some of the problems encountered in working with patients...
read moreAre Hapa White Asian Americans?
Some people seem to think hapa means white Asian American, even though it originally refers to Hawaiian mixtures and is not confined to hapa haole. I never had that impression myself, as one of my first hapa friends was Margo Okazawa-Rey and she called herself, Afro Asian or black Japanese. One of my earliest colleagues was Velina Hasu Houston, who more than anyone publicly acknowledged the blackness while asserting her Japanese identity. But the reality is that black Asians may still feel like they do not fully belong in hapa circles. In her...
read moreWho Was the Last Samurai?
“Why is the last samurai a white guy?” my son Sho asked me. His younger brother Gen added, “Yeah, it’s weird.” We had just seen the film in which a captured American soldier lives among samurai, learns their ways, and joins them in battle. Tom Cruise’s character was a little uncomfortable when he first tried on Japanese clothes, but after a while he felt fine. At the beginning, I thought he looked a little weird too, but by the end of the film, he looked cool in the red samurai armor. But something seemed wrong to my kids. “You...
read moreBalancing the Tiger Mom and Dragon Mom Within
In an achingly beautiful essay in The New York Times, “Notes from a Dragon Mom,” Emily Rapp describes dragon parents: “fierce and loyal and loving as hell. Our experiences have taught us how to parent for the here and now, for the sake of parenting, for the humanity implicit in the act itself, though this runs counter to traditional wisdom and advice.” She says that Amy Chua’s Tiger Mom in “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother” is “animated by the idea that good, careful investments in your children will pay off in the form of happy...
read moreWas My Japanese Mother a “Tiger Mom?”
Like so many other people, I was incited by the “Tiger Mom” sensation that Amy Chua created with her provocative book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, and inflammatory article in the Wall Street Journal, “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior.” I was outraged by the ferocious control she relentlessly imposed on her poor children and felt relieved that I had not been raised by such a monster parent who was sure to ruin her children. How lucky I was, I told myself, that my Japanese mother was nothing like Amy, not at all a stereotypical...
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