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“I’m not half, I’m whole!”
“I hate the word ‘half,’ which is used to designate people like me. I always wanted to be someone who is ‘whole.’” The young man raised his eyes to the evening sky and gazed upon the rising moon. It suddenly struck me that Byron and I were like the moon. As we are called “half,” the moon we were looking at is called a “half moon.” But like the moon, “half” is an illusion; there is much more to the moon than what meets the eye and there is much more to us than what people see. Like the moon, we are not half, we are whole. The metaphor of the moon continues to captivate me as I study identity development in persons of mixed ancestries like Byron...
Read MoreFollowing You, Together in Cancer
My friend Soh died in autumn 2008 in St. Luke’s Hospital in Tokyo, the hospital where I was born. Strangely, I wasn’t so sad because I felt that he wanted to die. His wife Chio, his partner of 44 years, had died the previous spring in the same hospital. And Soh had stomach cancer and was waiting to die himself. But in the midst of his great sorrow, he discovered Chio’s journal and was uplifted from a feeling of complete exhaustion, receiving comfort, consolation, and encouragement, as if he could hear her voice, alive, reading her words. He also had kept a journal and the idea came to him to put them together. He found that it filled each day with a small purpose...
Read More“Wait . . . they had a white baby?!?!”
My niece recently had a baby, a beautiful boy. The proud grandmother showed the photo of the newborn to family members and everyone oohed and aahed. One of his cousins looked at the picture and said, “Oh he’s so cute!” But suddenly a puzzled look came over him and he blurted out, “Wait . . . they had a white baby?!?! When I heard this story I thought, Oh, it’s already started. People see colors and label according to what they see. The little cousin saw white and labeled the baby white. But mom is Japanese as well as Irish and Scottish. Dad is Irish as well as African American and American Indian. The baby is therefore all of these. But he is...
Read MoreCaring for Transnational Grandparents
When I walk in the park near my house in Palo Alto, California some of the elderly Chinese and Indians smile at me and my dogs while others are indifferent or scared. Like many immigrants who come here later in their lives to join children and grandchildren they are spending their last years far from their “home” countries. Their transnational families bring them here hoping that it is the best place for aging and dying. When we realized that she could no longer live alone in Japan, we brought Obaachan to the U.S. to die. No one actually said that but we all knew it was true. After all, grandma was 99 and how many more years could she possibly live? Better to die...
Read MoreTiger 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 having “brown hair, brown eyes, and Asianesque features.” They both speak Chinese and Sophia eats “all kind of organs and...
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 one of them had told me his father was Chinese. Hey, that makes three of us and only two of them! I recalled this incident when I...
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