Watermelon Sushi World: Amazon

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Wednesday, May 01, 2013

Spirits Aloha

Anna Malone

Aloha, Hip Hapa Homeez. What’s HAPA-ning?

One of the most mixed-race locales to reside in the U.S. is Hawai’i. It seems that a lot of folks here are a combo of ethnicities and even if they HAPA-en to be so-called monoracial, they still love to cross cultures. As strong as the East Asian presence is in Hawai’i though, it still remains well, Hawai’ian. Streets are named after indigenous Kanaka Maoli and, anyone who lives here for a length of time will soon learn to say "Kamehameha" with the utmost ease. Kanaka history is powerful, its culture colorful, and the melding locals truly reflect the Aloha Spirit originated by them.

This month, we feature two Hip Hapa Homeez both abundantly infused with the Aloha Spirit.

First, meet Anna Malone, a Japanese national who settled in Honolulu after attending school on the mainland. The mother of a blasian boy, Anna shares her story—the shorter version--here with you.

Q: Anna-san, where are you from, and how did you end up living in America?

A: I’m from Osaka City in Osaka Prefecture. I first came to the States when I was 19, graduated college, went back to Japan for 3 years, came back to the States, and married. It’s been about 20 years since I came to the U.S. for the first time!

feeling the Aloha Spirit...

Q: What are some of the differences between living in Japan and the U.S.?

A: In Japan, people tend to gather as group. So, they think of themselves as a group or unit. But in the U.S., people think of themselves as individuals.

In the U.S., I need to think about my race, but in Japan I don't need to. I’ve experienced racism on the mainland, but not in Hawai’i since the majority here is Asian.

Q: What have been the biggest cultural issues that you had to overcome living in America?

A: Racism. In the American town where I lived about 20 years ago, there was only one Chinese restaurant! Kids there met an Asian (me) in person for the first time. That’s how closed off that place was.

Another big cultural issue is learning English.

Q: What do you miss most about not living in Japan?

A: The food, but I’m lucky enough to get some ingredients to make Japanese meals in Hawai’i. So I’m not missing that much.

Mr. Sag

Q: What's it like for you to have a son, Sag (pronounced Saj), whose father is African American?

A: A long time ago I went to a black barbershop with my son, and I was accepted. But when I visited there by myself for the first time, they just looked at me like, "you came here for what?"

But mixed races are very common now, and I think it makes racial issues less important than a few decades ago. It’s making opening racial doors easier.

Q: Do you think it's better to raise Sag in the U.S. or Japan?

A: Definitely in the U.S. Japan is not as open-minded as it should be--only in major cities, I think.

Sag feeling the Spirit

Q: In your opinion, what's the future look like for mixed-race people like Sag?

A: I think more people will be mixed-raced in the future and it will be harder to find single-raced people, especially in the States. In Hawai’i, I have heard of people mixed with as many as 9 races, and 2 to 3 race mixes is very common here. My son is mixed with 4 races.

Mahalo nui loa, Anna-san.

Next up, Hip Hapa Homeez, please reacquaint yourself with Traion Le whom we featured here some time ago.

http://watermelonsushiworld.blogspot.com/search?q=traion+le

Below, Traion aka Traika tells her story in her own words:

Traion aka Traika

Aloha, Yayoi and readers!

It's your new Hawaiiana friend, Traika, from Honolulu on the island of Oahu, aka "The Gathering Place".

I'm a mixed-raced hapa lady (African-American, Irish, Native American) originally from the East Coast (Northern Virginia), and I'm a 9-year resident of Oahu. I love Hawai’i! I like the local people, and the ono grindz! I like being one with paradise. Feeling the island breeze. Cooling off in the Pacific Ocean. Smelling the sweet red, pink, yellow hibiscus flowers and, let's not forget, the pretty plumeria flowers. And the tradition of wearing flowers tucked behind your ears for the extra beautiful island flair! Tasting the island foods; Leonard's Malasada's, and all kine local cuisine. Favorites are the Japanese steakhouses, Tanaka's and Kobe's. Also, Northshore's Giovanni's shrimp and rice plate, and townside of Oahu's Pearl's Korean BBQ. Mmm, lish!

Hawai'ian hibiscus

As a 45 year-old mixed-race hapa lady, I've always loved Asian culture. I love all god's children, yes, however, there's a weakness for Asian men! Ha ha. Yep, that's right! I've dated and loved Asian guys since I was young. Watching my first Bruce Lee film, Fists of Fury, I was a goner; crushin' on Bruce. He did it for me! In addition, I was raised in the melting pot nation--the metropolitan area of Washington, D.C. "Chocolate City". I had friends of every foreign nationality imaginable. So enriching!

LMT'ing

My profession is Licensed Massage Therapist (LMT) for 13 years. I've also enjoyed modeling and acting gigs, but my greatest passion now is writing. Please check out my info below.

Living in Hawai’i inspired me to write and publish books. My latest book, Destiny, is an AMBW (Asian Man Black Woman) true story. I believe all of you interracial couples, AMBW or other mixed couples out there, will relate to what I bring to a 6x9 250-page documentary.

Hawai'ian style toenails...

Destiny by Traika Le (2013)

"A coming-of-age, true story. In 1975, a young Vietnamese refugee boy flees Saigon and the war. In 1985, he meets his unrequited forbidden love, a Southern, African American girl. His enemies and family warn him to keep his distance from her. He joins a crime organization for fast money, hoping to live the American Dream and win her heart."

Look for your copy of Destiny, a story of forbidden interracial love and redemption. Watch for it on Amazon.com July/August 2013!

local girl...

Thank you for reading! All the best and god bless!

Please frequent my sites:

www.youtube.com/traion

www.zazzle.com/traion/

AMBW:

http://www.zazzle.com/ambw_asian_man_black_woman_love_flyer-244511206660541745

http://www.zazzle.com/i_love_ambw_button_key_chain_template-146742502532108764

http://www.zazzle.com/blasian_black_asian_mouse_pad-144964646811406232

http://www.zazzle.com/ambw_love_morphing_mug-168618442090795316

http://www.zazzle.com/blasian_love_heart_sticker_customizable-217657891963921490

http://www.zazzle.com/love_blasian_style_bella_v_neck_shirt-235699516185644365

www.amazon.com (search Traika Le)-Book, Faith Your Fears

big Aloha kiss from Traika...

Mahalo! Thank you!

Traika

Thank you, Traika. Hey, Hip Hapa Homeez, for a clarification of the word hapa, check out our Hip Hapa Homeez group page on Facebook. Send us a request for membership and you can join in discussions about being mixed-race, transracially adopted, interracially involved, or just crossing cultures. Remember, we have a Watermelon Sushi film and fan page, and our Hapa Teez t-shirts fund our projects.

Until we meet again, aloha nui loa from

Your Hip Hapa,

Yayoi

PS Lisa Giamo is conducting research on mixed Asian/Caucasian people as part of her dissertation at Simon Fraser University. Check it out:

https://cgi.sfu.ca/~sisclab/cgi-bin/v5/rws5.cgi?FORM=MultiracialExperience2

Wednesday, November 02, 2011

Novel Novelist: Outsider Or In?

Word up, Hip Hapa Homeez! We at Watermelon Sushi World are so HAPA to call you our homeez. Because of your dedication, we’re moving towards getting our Watermelon Sushi film completed. One of the ways we’ve been doing that is by offering Hapa*Teez t-shirts to the mixed roots community. With every t-shirt purchase, you get us closer to our goal. And, you earn a rear crawl credit--your name will roll at the end of the movie.

Cassie as hip HAPA homee

When you do buy a t-shirt, please email us at hapateez@me.com with your correctly-spelled name. And, if you send us a digi photo of you wearing your t-shirt, we’ll showcase you on our Watermelon Sushi and Hapa*Teez fan pages on Facebook (like Cassie, here).

Hey, here’s a shout-out to Arana, The Topaz Club founder, for her recent purchase. Join The Topaz Club group page on Facebook where mixed-race women of African descent share their stories.

Speaking of stories, this week’s featured hip hapa homee is Dmitri Ragano who just completed his novel, Employee of the Year. Your Hip Hapa first met Dmitri after stumbling upon his interview with Japan enka star Jero. After corresponding for a while, we met in person--along with Dmitri’s beautiful wife and daughter. Below, Dmitri discusses his life and how he came to write a book about a multiracial character.

Q: Tell us about your parents.

A: I am a typical garden-variety white guy so I might be something of an anomaly in the Watermelon Sushi World. My mother came from an Irish German family and my father from an Italian family. They grew up blue-collar Catholic in Pittsburgh, then broke away from the church during the Vietnam War era. They gave me an exotic name that they liked from Russian literature.

Dmitri at AFI Fest

Q: How did the way you grow up affect your life?

A: I grew up in Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania, a town on the edge of Pittsburgh that was predominantly African American. I had exposure to different cultures at a young age. I was often the only white guy in my elementary school class so there was exposure to art and popular culture that was different than my own. I remember very vividly when the early rap songs like "The Message" came out. That style of using rhythm and poetry to deal with real-world situations was a big influence on my fiction writing. Another influence was August Wilson, who broke onto the national scene when I was a teenager with plays about the African American experience in Pittsburgh.

During college in San Francisco, I went to Japan to study the language. For a while, I lived in a remote part of the country where I was the only foreigner in the town. The process of learning to communicate in a new language in a foreign country is slow, painful and humiliating. But once you get to the other side, the rewards are amazing. It unlocks certain parts of your brain and heart you didn't know existed. Charlemagne said, "To possess a second language is to possess a second soul."

So, the combination of these experiences created an openness and curiosity about other people's cultures. On the flip side, for better or for worse, it instilled this sense that I was an outsider and that it was sort of my destiny to go out and search to find my place in the world. Again, this is a theme with many characters in my book: they don't have a map for how to live their lives so they take scraps of maps they find along the way and try to piece them together.

Q: Were you accepted in every country where you’ve lived?

A: I have traveled to around 25 countries, but Japan is the only country outside the U.S. where I've lived. I lived in Japan several times for a total stay of about five years. It was a great experience, but you need to qualify the word "acceptance" when you talk about living in Japan as a foreigner. Japan is a very homogeneous and insular culture, and it's been that way for thousands of years. There's been no significant immigration in the whole recorded history. When you live in Japan, you live as a guest and you are treated with incredible kindness and hospitality. But like a guest in a hotel, you never really feel completely at home, you never expect to be completely accepted. You always feel like at some point you will overstay your welcome and have to leave. This is not everyone's experience, but I think it is a typical experience of most foreigners who live and work in Japan. The kanji characters for the word "gaijin" literally mean "outside person".

Q: Tell us about your interracial marriage and biracial child.

A: My wife and I met in San Francisco at a party held by these Japanese monks who lived by Haight and Fillmore. They would cook all this Buddhist vegetarian food and play reggae concerts in the basement. She was trying to learn English and I was trying to learn Japanese. We were friends for many years before we became romantically involved and decided to marry.

Being from different cultures is challenging. You come at things from a different frame of reference. My wife's experiences being raised in Osaka are so dramatically different than what I knew growing up. The stories you tell yourself about who you are and how you should live are completely different. The good news is we love each other very deeply and share the same core values. But we've spent the early part of our lives learning to express the love and values in different ways. So it takes a long time to work this out.

For our daughter, I think this has pros and cons. She's exposed to a wide range of ideas and experiences and she knows we care about her more than anything. But I am sure sometimes it's got to be confusing for her compared to, say, having two parents who grew up in the same country with the same language, same culture and same socioeconomic background.

Q: What motivated you to write Employee of the Year, about a mixed roots character in a multicultural workplace?

A: I think there are more young people growing up like my daughter, who are mixed roots and exposed to many different customs, values, languages and ways of life. Yet, I believe there is still a lack of stories in our popular culture that reflect this. So I felt there was an opportunity to write about characters that grow up straddling different racial and cultural experiences and how they negotiate their own identity. There's no tribal blueprint for the type of person they should try to become. It's a riddle they have to solve on their own.

On top of that, my story is set in a big financial company in Los Angeles. In this city, on top of mixed roots experiences, you have mixed class experiences, interactions between people from different educational and economic backgrounds. These are all things we have so much trouble talking about in America. A company is a good setting for a story about this. In Los Angeles, the 1 percent and the 99 percent only set foot in the same zip code during working hours.

Dmitri channels Temo

Q: Is the main character, Cuauhtemoc McCarthy, based on your own personality and experiences?

A: In many ways, Temo is based on who I've tried to be. I've tried to be someone who retains a certain honesty and purity while being pragmatic about what it takes to survive and thrive in the modern world. Temo's job as a collections agent is to chase people down and convince them to pay their credit card debt. If he can't do this successfully, he loses the only way he knows how to support his wife and family. He feels ambivalent about this, just as most working people have mixed feelings about how they make a living.

Q: I first learned about you as a journalist from your interview with Jero. How does writing fiction differ from reporting?

A: The interview about Jero is a funny story about how lives and cultures intersect. My father worked for 30 years as a schoolteacher in inner-city neighborhoods around Pittsburgh. When my wife and I got engaged in 1998, we went back to Pittsburgh and visited my father's school. There was a woman from Peru who was teaching Japanese so we visited her class to talk about Japan. I remember there was a kid in the class who knew a little Japanese from his grandmother. For the next ten years, I had no contact with him, never thought about the visit to the school, et cetera. Then suddenly, in 2008, I was on a business trip in Peru and I saw something on the cable news about Jero, a guy from Pittsburgh who went to Japan and became a singing sensation. It turns out it was that same kid I'd visited at my father's high school! He remembered my father as one of his teachers. So, after leaving South America I had to go to Asia for business. My wife and I were in Japan and I decided to do an interview with Jero for the local Pittsburgh newspaper.

I think this is the best illustration of the difference between fiction and journalism. With fiction, you're taking the essence of the people and experiences from life and molding them into a narrative. With reporting, you end up discovering these real life connections and events that are so random and serendipitous that you couldn't make them up because no one would ever believe it. I mean, look at Obama. You couldn't write a fictional story about someone with his background becoming President of the United States. No one would find it plausible.