The Hapa'ning Un-Hapa

Welcome back, Hip Hapa Homeez! With the approaching holidays about to effect its annual distractions on us, don’t forget about presents for your hapa friends and supporters. If you’re still searching for a hip gift, check out http://www.cafepress.com/hapateez

This week’s featured Hip Hapa Homee has been making noise about mixed-race issues for a while. In fact, Your Hip Hapa first became aware of Wei Ming Dariotis through a 1999 Mavin magazine article. Since she’s been forever in the mix--if you will--you know the sistah’s legit. In November 2010, Wei Ming will co-present the Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference in Chicago.

http://las.depaul.edu/cmrs

Ironically, Wei Ming has been outspoken about discontinuing the use of the word hapa to describe mixed-race Asians. If you’ve been reading this blog since its inception, then you know Your Hip Hapa advocates that all blendies of any mix, and even transracial adoptees, use hapa as a symbol of unity. Originally, Native Hawai’ians referred to their half European offspring as hapa haole—hapa, a mispronunciation of the English word “half”; and, haole meaning “without ha, or the sacred breath” which is how they referred to foreigners who didn’t know their custom of expelling their last breath before their king. But as mixed-race Asians grew, they “borrowed” hapa to describe themselves. While Your Hip Hapa understands the pain of pillage Native Hawai’ians must feel, she also thinks that it’s too late to return the word to them. There are so few pure Native Hawai’ians anymore that we can better honor their culture by applying their word to everyone who is multiracial, and point to them as the best example of what being mixed is all about.

Be sure to read Wei Ming’s opinions about this issue in the links below. That’s her wearing her happy hapa smile above. And, a Q&A appears below:

Q: What’s a nice multiracial girl like you doing organizing a conference for mixies?

A: The Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference grew out of an idea I had for a two-week summer seminar for mixed race studies scholars. When Eric Hamako organized a weekend retreat for Mixed Race scholars and community activists in early Spring 2008, I met Laura Kina and Camilla Fojas, who became the co-organizers of what we decided to make an academic conference with a strong community component.

Q: What is your parents’ ethnic mix?

A: My mother is Chinese, and my father is Greek, Swedish, Scottish, English, German, and Pennsylvania Dutch.

Q: You had quite an upbringing—can you share your childhood adventures?

A: I was born in Australia. At two months, I traveled to Hong Kong and Bangkok to visit my Chinese grandmother and grandfather, respectively. At four months, I was living in India on an ashram in the Punjab with my parents. Eventually, we came back to the U.S. and settled, after a year with my grandmother near Seattle, in Northern California. When I was three, my mom and I divorced my dad and, after a brief incident in which my dad kidnapped me, my mom and I moved from Santa Cruz to San Francisco, so she could be around other Asians. She worked as a cocktail waitress, and we lived on welfare for about two years until she was able to pull us out of it. My father, meanwhile, refused to pay any child support. My mom is a first generation immigrant from Hong Kong, though her roots are Shanghainese. She'd come when she was 17, and at this point had been in the U.S. for about 10 years, so she still had trouble with English and had no support network. Eventually, she met a fourth-generation Chinese American, who became my stepfather. He was an architect and encouraged my mom to become a real estate agent, which she was so good at that she was, in the mid 1980s, one of the top commercial brokers in San Francisco. Meaning: I was able to go to the most expensive and exclusive private high school in the Bay Area; San Francisco University High School. It was a childhood with many contrasts.

Q: Tell us about your work.

A: I am an Assistant Professor of Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University. When I graduated from college at 21, I went immediately into a PhD program in English Lit, at University of California Santa Barbara, on a full scholarship. After grad school, I moved back to San Francisco and started working as a lecturer at various schools. Eventually, I was invited to apply for a position at San Francisco State University in Asian Americans of Mixed Heritage--a unique position that has not been duplicated in any other Asian American Studies program.

Q: You’re also a poet. Can you elaborate?

A: I've written poetry most of my life, in part because of the independent school I attended from 4th to 8th grade, Presidio Hill School, founded in 1919 on an anti-war curriculum by two sisters who were artists and poets. As a poet, however, I have often felt bound to confine my poems to specific foci--in other words, I wrote them like I write essays. After I was tenured, I felt I could open up and I began to play with language, with non-sense, and also with mixing different ideas together in one poem in a much looser way. As with my watercolor painting, I've begun to leave "white space" or "breathing room" in my poems.

The collection of poetry I am working on is a hybrid genre--poems with footnotes, bits of autobiographical narrative, and significant quotes from both my own writing and other authors are all included to make a kind of auto-poetical narrative, or what Fred Wah calls "bio-writing".

Here’s a link to a recording of me reading some of my poems:

http://www.dublit.com/node/2260

Q: What about your artwork?

A: I do large acrylic paintings as well as usually smaller watercolors. My work is focused on trees, self-portraits, and abstracts. I like to use purples, lavenders, and copper/gold/silver in my work. Lately, I've been painting green and blue-trunked trees against flaming skies. In this, I think I was influenced by several paintings by Chiura Obata in the permanent collection at the De Young Museum.

Q: Why does the following blurb appear in all of your emails?

“I am on a 10% FURLOUGH. This will affect the level of service you receive. FIGHT to support higher education in California!”

http://checkingeducation.com/petition

A: What is going on in California is that we need to roll back Prop 13 so we can fund education. It’s as simple as that.

Thank you, Wei Ming. Below are links to this hapa'ning Un-Hapa's many projects and thoughts.

http://www.mixedheritagecenter.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1259&Itemid=34

http://www.mixedheritagecenter.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=718&Itemid=29

http://www.sfsu.edu/~news/experts/085.htm

http://www.hyphenmagazine.com/content/view/94/1/

http://books.google.com/books?id=VkAanbOCzUIC&pg=PA37&lpg=PA37&dq=wei+ming+dariotis&source=bl&ots=cTpDwqOu6M&sig=087jKHYaZR3nthaLT-z0hOB2Nag&hl=en&ei=n4ERS7mUB4iMtAP567HmAQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CBAQ6AEwAzgK#v=onepage&q=wei%20ming%20dariotis&f=false

http://honoluluweekly.com/qanda/2009/04/critical-transformations/

Remember to join Hip Hapa Homeez on Facebook where you can read more news about multiracial issues. And, become a Watermelon Sushi Fan on Facebook to help support our film.

Finally, check out Cassie here looking haute in her Hip Hapa t-shirt. Don't hate. Get yours at: http://www.cafepress.com/hapateez

Until next week, here’s a wish for your holiday hapa-ness!

Your Hip Hapa,

Yayoi

Aloha No, Straightened Hair, And A Dedication To Sergio Goes

"You look younger," my neighbor told me tonight as I was taking out the trash.

"Really?" I replied, doubtful as I remembered sleeping only six hours the night before.

"It must have been my trip to Hawai'i," I told him. "I felt so relaxed--like I was home."

Even though my last week's Honolulu island hop ended on a bittersweet vibe, I enjoyed moving among people who looked like me. If you're of mixed races and it shows, being in Hawai'i is like being on a planet filled with all your multiracial brothers and sisters. Sure, there are lots of "pure-blooded" East Asians among other races living there, but there are also many folks that are racially unidentifiable--like yourself. And, that feels comfortable. When you're comfortable, you don't frown or wrinkle your face up in defense. So, you look younger!

Of course, I was also happy to be "home" because I got to spend time with my old buddy Scott Lee who greeted me with a fragrant traditional lei and lunch at our favorite King Street Chinese restaurant. Scott Lee and I go way back to 1994, and we love to "talk story" about local culture; of which Scott's an expert having lived on Oahu all his life.

I also hung out with my friend, Lucy, an NYC transplant and professional photographer. Besides munching on a vegan lunch in Kahala and a homemade dinner at her Kailua home on Windward side, we also indulged in a lot of girly stuff like trying on make-up at Ala Moana Mall. We also got our hair done by a young woman selling electronic hair straighteners at a booth.

That's right. After 20 years of wearing my own personal natural--long, thick, wavy, hair with frizzy ends--I allowed myself to get talked into having an electronic implement iron out the ripples of my tresses to give me straight hair. When Adee first approached me, I balked. After all, I am of the natural garden variety. Rarely do I wear make-up, other than lip and nail color, and I don't like fussy hairstyles. But as Adee smoothed out each strand, my thoughts went from skeptical to amused to impressed. I hadn't had straight locks since the mid-1980's when I would spend precious hours rolling my hair in curlers the size of soup cans then sitting under a scorching dryer with a magazine hoping against hope that it wouldn't rain in Seattle where I lived then. Just one drizzly day would undo my hours of hard labor. Later, when I became more of the artist that I am today, I chucked the rollers and hair dryer and went au natural.

When Adee was done, I just knew I had to have the straight look--at least for a while. Call me a sell-out, but I dig variety and my waves had become boring to me.

My friend Lucy saw it differently.

"But you just said at dinner the other night that one of the problems you had with Michelle Obama was her hair," she reminded me. "You didn't like that she relaxes it."

"Yes," I argued weakly, "but I'm half Japanese and I'm just trying to look more like my mother. Besides, my 'do is chemical free."

All I knew was that I wanted a different look, and looking different made me feel different. Somehow, I felt Native Hawai'ian with my new flowing hair. As I walked around Waikiki tossing my untangled mane, I felt that the locals thought I was Native Hawai'ian, too.

Still ain't buying it? Well, here's what hair author Teri LaFlesh told me when I admitted to using a straightening rod on my hair.

"Hey, I checked out your hair! Even straightened it has so much presence. Hair is a crown, and you wear yours with such flair."

If Teri, the hairx-pert, says it's okay, then ya'll back off.

On to a much sadder note. While in Hawai'i, I discovered that a friend had passed away there in July. Although I hadn't been in touch with Sergio Goes for awhile, I always remembered his warm graciousness. Co-founder of the Cinema Paradise Film Festival, Sergio issued me a press badge in 2003, then went out of his way to invite me and Lucy to all of their Red Carpet events and parties. A filmmaker himself, he also gave us copies of his documentary called Black Picket Fence. The story of two aspiring rappers in a NYC project is told with Sergio's deep sensitivity and humanity. Originally hailing from Brazil, Sergio had a keen ability to hone in on things American and his film shows that. Sergio was also known for his amazing photography which appeared in most of Honolulu's local publications. While it hurts to lose such a downright nice person, I feel fortunate that I knew him at all. This week's blog is dedicated to the memory of Sergio Goes. That's him with Lucy in 2003 in the picture above.

To see my straightened hair, watch for the extra blog following this one.

Mahalo nui loa and aloha no. Rest well, dear sweet Sergio.

Your Hip Hapa,

Yayoi

AmerAsians, Blendies And Hapas

Speaking with a good friend tonight, I was moved by her declaration that she won't allow herself to be called hapa. That's cool. It's just not a word that she wants to identify with, and I'm okay with that.

A blend of Okinawan and African American, Eriko prefers the term AmerAsian. Again, I have no quarrel with her, but, personally, I prefer hapa because it's truly a non-word. As I've explained before, Native Hawai'ians had no concept of half of anything, but Europeans who arrived in their nation taught them the word. The way Native Hawai'ians pronounced it with their particular phonetics, half came out sounding like hapa. In Hawai'ian, every word ends with a vowel--much like in the Japanese language.

The word hapa was originally applied to the offspring of Native Hawai'ians and Europeans. Because the first Europeans landing on the islands didn't know the custom of bowing to the king and expelling their last breath, or ha, Hawai'ians felt they must not have any--breath, that is. Thus, the word haole was born. Ole means nothing, so the word ha-ole meant "he without breath". Although modern-day natives of Hawai'i (not necessarily Native Hawai'ians) mispronounce the word as "howlie" and use it derogatorily to describe a white person, it's original intention was to simply differentiate between those familiar with sacred Hawai'ian rituals and those who were not. Hapa haole then became the name Hawai'ians used to describe half European children.

Anyway, I'm repeating myself because I still feel like there should be one word that designates us as a group of multi-racially identified folks. Since hapa is a bastardized word anyway, I don't think it should belong to any one particular blend of people--like the half Asian and half white folks who mostly use it to describe themselves. In fact, I recently read an article in the LA Times where a reporter said the word hapa was Hawai'ian for half Asian and half white. Now, why would Native Hawai'ians even have a word for that particular mix of children?

It's pretty scary what passes for reporting these days. Just last week, the New York Times ran an op-ed piece written by a Jewish woman married to a Japanese American man. Her subject? What it means to be hapa. And, her expertise in the subject? Her daughter, a toddler, whose experiences as a mixed-race child provided the writer with all the insight she needed. She was, after all, her only resource. Now, I know if I wrote an op-ed piece about what it means to be Jewish, the New York Times would not only flatly refuse my article, but they'd probably ridicule me, too. Yet this writer, with no direct connection to being hapa, arrogantly told us multi-racial folks what it means to be mixed, and the paper actually published her piece--rife with errors, too, I should add.

Of course, I had to respond to that article, although I'm not confident that a newspaper printing such an inaccurate piece would even publish my rebuttal. If I don't hear anything by next week, I promise to publish my response here on this blog. And, that's a threat, New York Times!

But back to name-calling. I have another good friend who's African American and years ago, Darlene used the word "blendies" to describe some biracial people she knew. I thought that was cute.

Truthfully, I don't know what the answer is. As much as we hear the phrase "safety in numbers", I don't think we realize the power in the size of our group. If all mixed-race people worldwide came together, we'd be a force to be reckoned with.

Here's a quick quiz. I was trying to make a list earlier today of all the famous hapas--all clearly biracial people who are household names. Can you add to it?

Jimi Hendrix (Native American mother, African American father)

Bob Marley (black Jamaican mother, white British father)

August Wilson (white German father, African American mother)

Mariah Carey (white American mother, African Venezuelan father)

I'm sure there's more, but I'm off to cop some z's. There's me, above, a hip hapa Hapawood star! Join me by wearing a Hapa*Teez t-shirt claiming your identity. Go here: http://ww.cafepress.com/hapateez

Your Hip Hapa,

Yayoi