Being Hapa

I've been outside my "racial environment" for 99.99% of my life. In any country I've ever lived in or visited, I stick out like a sore thumb. Most non-Asians in American assume I'm full Asian, then do a little double-take once they look at me closely. Sometimes they decide to do the obnoxious Asian country guessing game thing. In Asian countries, it's obvious what I am. Oddly enough, African-Americans (but only native Georgians) sometimes assume I'm Hispanic. I chalk it down to the fact that Hispanics and now Brazilians are relative newcomers to our state.

I can think of a few other hapas I've known. The first was a girl in Florida who was in my circle of college friends. Her father was in the military and her mother met him stationed in Japan. We got along but never clicked as friends. She eventually moved to California, and I moved to New York and then Atlanta. The second was a guy I met in a concert line in New York. His father was Chinese and his mother was white. I would never have known he wasn't white if he hadn’t told me. He had sandy hair, and his features were almost completely white. The third is a guy in Atlanta who's married to a close friend of my husband's. Like me, he's half-Japanese, looks much more Asian than white and speaks Spanish he learned in Mexico. He's interesting but has extremely weird conversational habits; his life, very unlike mine, totally revolves around skateboarding and Honda tuning.

There are only two places I'm aware of with people that look like me. There's a large group (Uighurs and some related) in the far northwest of China. Then there's a medium-sized group in Hawaii. I went on a weeklong visit to Hawaii about five years ago. At times I was surrounded by people who looked like me. It was amazing but terrifying. It was almost like a voice in my head going "Welcome home. This isn't home. Welcome home. This isn't home". Coming from a Florida background, I know how unfriendly tourist economies can be. That's the kind of treatment I was expecting. But from the body language other Hawaiians showed towards me, it was clear they didn't think of me as a tourist. I can't exactly explain it in physical terms. They didn't throw their arms around me, or even take much notice of me. Maybe it was in the way that they didn't take notice of me. I wasn't anyone special at all. Of course, this only lasted until I opened my mouth and they heard my very un-Hawaiian accent.

My visit to Hawaii was very disconcerting because it made me realize how much I was used to "sticking out": people assuming I'm a foreigner, asking me "where are you from" and refusing to take "Florida" for an answer, asking to touch my hair, at the most extreme even taking trophy photographs of me. Part of this is in my blood. Both my parents have a very high tolerance for being noticed, stared at or pointed out. My father spent a lot of his professional life in Africa. He and my mother have both traveled all over the world. They're used to being foreigners, and I was raised to believe that being foreign was nothing out of the ordinary. Still, both of them have hometown origins where the people looked more or less like them. I would have liked to have had that at some point. It's too late now; I really have no strong desire to move to Hawaii, although I'd love another visit.

I learned early on a great way to feel comfortable: just find a group that has a lots of different kinds of people. In any crowd that's all white or all Asian or all black I start to feel a bit nervous. When the crowd mixes up more, I relax. The same goes for foreign countries. I once had a fantastic summer living in Mexico City where I socialized with Mexicans from really diverse backgrounds as well as foreign students from Russia, Japan and Colombia. I've been very lucky to live a cosmopolitan life. I've had a lot of privileges that people coming from homogenous rural or isolated areas don't have.

I only learned I was "hapa" a few years ago. It's a Hawaiian word that's turning into a word for all mixed Asians. I love the word as much I hated the only other word I knew to describe me, "Eurasian". It sounds too much like "hey… yer Asian!" and it privileges "European" as if that were the standard to be deviated from. The only thing "hapa" sounds like to me is "happy". I've told my husband that I'm now a hapa, but haven’t told anyone else I know in real life. It just doesn't come up in normal conversation. "Haven’t seen you in a while, what's up? By the way, I've got a new name for my racial identity."

Maybe I should send them hapa cards!