Hapa Issues Move Into the Spotlight

Children of partial Asian descent express common concerns




Clockwise from top right: Mika Tanner, who spoke at a L.A. conference on Hapa issues provided photos of her mother, Mariko; her father Robert; herself as a child; and herself with her parents.

BY STACY LAVILLA

About five years ago, a UC Berkeley graduate student's comments on mixed marriages enraged some students in a Japanese American history class--and spawned a movement.

In discussing their anger, the students realized the need for a forum to address issues facing Asian Americans of mixed race. Their informal, small weekly gatherings evolved into today's Hapa Issues Forum, which currently has a mailing list of 500 individuals.

"We were collectively offended by what [the graduate student] was saying, because the bottom line was that interracial marriages were bad ... they were sweeping generalizations ... that interracial marriages were between all Asian women and white men," recalled Greg Mayeda, a founding member and the group's board president.

"A bunch of us got to thinking, and we concluded that that line of thinking was ignorance," Mayeda said. "There was no voice for children of mixed-race marriages to counter assumptions that were being made. And so the birth of Hapa Issues Forum was to provide a voice for mixed race people and mixed-race issues."

The group, which takes its name from the Hawaiian term hapa, which means half, has evolved considerably. While the core group of members were originally half Japanese and half white, the now nonprofit organization, like the term hapa itself, includes a diversity of members with partial Asian or Pacific Islander ancestry--those part Korean and part Filipino, for example, those and African American and Chinese American heritage.

The organization has also caught on elsewhere, with a new chapter in Southern California and budding chapters at Stanford University, Berkeley High School, University of Washington, and UC Irvine.

In a sense, the growth of such organizations reflects what is happening in the Asian American community at large. With out-marriage rates escalating among Asian Americans, a burgeoning population of mixed-race individuals of Asian descent is beginning to emerge.

About a quarter of Asian Americans born in this country marry outside their race. Among the 136,405 marriages in 1990, 18.9 percent were to white spouses, and 6 percent were to spouses in other minority groups, according to Larry Hajime Shinagawa, a professor at Sonoma State University who based his calculations on 1990 U.S. Census data.

The next census is likely to provide greater detail into this trend and others affecting mixed-race Asian Americans. For the 2000 census, multiracial individuals will be able to check off numerous boxes when identifying racial identities. Previously, a mixed-race person was forced to limit their racial identities to a single box.

The Japanese American population, with one of the highest Asian American out-marriage rates, is at the forefront of examining the implications of interracial marriages and the growing mixed-race population on ethnic and cultural identity. The JACL in acknowledgment of mixed-race and hapa individuals gave Hapa Issues Forum a $3,000 grant that helped launch the Southern California chapter. JACL is also honoring the organization next month with its 1998 Vision Award.

For some hapas like Mika Tanner, who is half Japanese and half white, being of mixed race did lead to some feelings of exclusion. As a Japanese American living in Los Angeles, Tanner found that her identity did not match up with the more common identity of Japanese Americans who were interned during World War II.

"The sense I got from the community was that the definition that existed for Japanese Americans was very limited to having a history, family background in the camps, or just being a sansei, or [fourth-generation Japanese American]," said Tanner, a board member of the Southern California chapter of Hapa Issues Forum.

"On a day to day level, by this definition I'm not Japanese American because no one in my family has ever experienced the camp or worked in the plantations in Hawaii. I didn't see my experience as just as Japanese American as anyone else's and that's why I became interested in the Hapa Issues Forum."

"There was this sense that hapas ... that we represent this disintegration of the community, and that's just not true," said Tanner, who speaks fluent Japanese. "For me, there was this need to assert the fact that I was a Japanese American, and to inform the community of broadening the definition of Japanese Americans."

This spring, Tanner spoke on a panel addressing such issues at "The Ties That Bind" conference sponsored by the Japanese American Cultural Community Center in Los Angeles.

"There was a lot of discussion at the conference that with intermarriage, that the community was in a state of decline or that the organizations that maintained it were diminishing," said Chris Aihara, director of community programs at the center. "In the past we used generational words like 'issei,' 'nisei,' 'sansei' and the structure possibly worked, but it became clear that it wouldn't be appropriate for future generations.

"For several generations now, people have not felt that they fit into this paradigm. The community realized that we had to look at the future and be more inclusive in terms of who it considered belonging and not belonging," Aihara added.

By the end of the conference, Aihara said participants came away feeling a greater sense of inclusion, and that the culture and traditions of Japanese Americans would not be lost.

"A lot of people thought it was less fatalistic and they were less discouraged that the culture was going to go once they were gone, that the culture would dwindle as their numbers disappeared," Aihara said. "But the younger generations were very proactive about their culture and heritage, that they were not letting it go ... and by saying this is not an issue of you accepting us [hapas], we are here, we are your future, we are a part of this community."

Many argue that a common hapa identity is less rooted in physical appearance or the culture an individual most identifies with, and more rooted in experience, parental upbringing and where an individual grew up --all of which makes the mixed-race population much more diverse and complex.

"With many Asian Americans, many of the same questions are always asked, like 'Am I more American or more Asian?' said Theresa Williams, a professor of Asian American studies at California State University Northridge.

"People always want to do this. They want to pose the question every time, are you one or the other, do you identify Asian or white?" Williams said.

"They want to use the way one looks as a marker and say, 'Oh if you look more Asian you date Asian, or if you look more white you date white. But people normally have a more intermediate look, where they fall somewhere in between."

With mixed-race individuals, including hapas, there is a greater sense of fluidity between racial identities instead of a sense of isolation and exclusion.

"In some ways we belong to many communities, some that have physical boundaries and some that don't," Williams said. "For some of us, our identities are multiracial, but we can move in and out of these identities we claim as well."

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