I went to Kip Fulbeck’s show “part asian, 100% hapa” at the Japanese American National Museum in Little Tokyo.
“Hapa” was originally a derogatory term derived from the Hawaiian word for “half.” The word has been reclaimed as a term of pride by those whose mixed-race heritage includes Asian or Pacific Rim ancestry. The show comprises hundreds of framed photographs with every imaginable mix of races — and always a bit of Asian-ness thrown in.
Handwritten statements accompanying the pictures are often funny and ridiculous, with sometimes a touch of sadness or angst. “I am millions of particles fused together making up a far less-than-perfect masterpiece. I am the big bang,” writes a Japanese, French, Cherokee, Irish American woman.
“CHINESIAN! Kimchi enthusiast, serial napper, and assassin extraordinaire. Sorority girl by day, hazard by night. Potty-mouth, ass-kicker, and over-analyzer. See also: awesome,” another Chinese-Russian hapa writes.
When I first visited the JA Museum six years ago, I was in my ethnic self-discovery phase. In the museum’s resource center, I looked up the record of my great-grandparents’ immigration to Los Angeles in the very late nineteenth century. A group of nisei guided me through. Most of them have probably passed now. I had dinners in the Little Tokyo plaza and stayed overnight at The Nisei Inn, in Gardena — a former Japanese American enclave. I visited the Buddhist temple three generations of my family attended, and I drove around my grandmother’s old high school — the one she walked to barefoot during the Depression, or somedays skipped because she had no shoes. I thought I was finding out who I was.
But suddenly, over the past six years, everyone has recognized that most of the Japanese Americans who were coming of age or who had long ago come of age were/are hapa. I was an anomaly of my generation: Both of my parents were of Japanese ancestry. Old hat — I grew up in a rare community where everyone around me was Japanese on both sides. I was presented a skewed view of our community.
In the 1970s, my parents’ generation, students at Berkeley, UCLA and S.F. State, were alarmed at the record-breaking percentage of outmarriage in the community. Some did activist work to teach and preach self-love, to resist assimilation, to piece back together a community shattered by internment, resettlement programs and urban renewal. One of the old activists told me finding another Japanese American to marry would be like finding a needle in a haystack, but it’s doable. She mentioned Hawai‘i.
Nowadays, I think it’s insulting to reduce mixed-race people to a phenomena of self-hatred, violations of civil rights, internalized racism and assimilation. It’s particularly ignorant to think that way when most of our community is mixed-race.
Still, there was a time not long ago when I clung to narrow, nationalist views of myself and my experiences. And I wrote out a series of identity-politics poems, thinking I was building my identity, within myself, and collectively, as if identity was a piece of paper you could fold into a crane.
Kip Fulbeck’s show expands our usual ideas about who we are as Asian Americans. “I’m a mestiza. I joke that my mother is Japanese, my father is Anglo and I’m Mexican. That’s how the world has identified me since I came to California from Pakistan,” writes a Japanese, Scottish, Welsh, Italian, Native American (Klamath) hapa woman.