Mixed Race Studies

Mixed Race Experience in Celeste Ng’s EVERYTHING I NEVER TOLD YOU

GrubStreet
2015-12-01

Sonya Larson

Not many characters in literature look like me. Half Chinese and half white, I’m used to reading about people who could occupy one half of my family tree, but rarely about the person who emerges where their branches join. I’m speaking about the mixed race experience: complex, elusive, and with a racial identity wholly separate from either person who birthed and raised you.

So I felt grateful and enriched to read Celeste Ng’s masterfully constructed Everything I Never Told You. Many have praised the novel’s confident drive, deft omniscience, and intricate storytelling, but I want to discuss its exploration of race around—and inside—of one mixed American family.

The novel concerns the Lees—a family of five struggling to make sense of the mysterious drowning death of Lydia, their middle child. James Lee, a Chinese-American, has married Marilyn, who is white, at a time when interracial marriage was illegal in much of the United States. From the beginning many see their coupledom as problematic, especially Marilyn’s mother. “Where will you live?” she says. “You won’t fit in anywhere. Think about the children. It’s not right, Marilyn. It’s not right.”…

Read the entire article here.

Multiracial in America: Who gets to be “white”?

Hopes&Fears
2015-12-15

Jeremy Gordon

The author with his parents, Mary and Dennis Gordon.

Jeremy Gordon on growing up multiracial, assimilation and “whiteness” in post-Obama America.

Every Christmas, when the dishes have been cleaned, when the presents are exchanged and the photos snapped, my cousins and I book it out of my aunt’s house in the suburbs for the comfort of the city, where we spend the rest of the night in each other’s company—playing video games, getting drunker, eating a second meal to close the holiday. Last year, we drove to a dim sum restaurant in Chicago’s Argyle neighborhood, which my Chinese family has patronized for my entire life.

Times had changed, though. We assumed we’d be seated right away, but the restaurant was full. As far as I could remember, it was the first time we’d ever had to wait for a table—and this time, we noticed that most of the diners were white. As we waited for our names to be called, my cousin couldn’t help but gripe. “I can’t believe we’re stuck behind all these white people!” she said. “Can’t they go somewhere else?”

My cousin is not a facetious woman, so the comment didn’t register as a joke. Nevertheless, her brother and I managed a laugh. It was true—the restaurant was filled with white people, whose grannies had never used Mandarin to order from the sullen teenagers pushing the dim sum carts around. But the complaint was a little awkward because of an incontrovertible fact: My cousins and I are half-white, each of us the offspring of a Chinese woman and a Jewish man…

We look about half-and-half—not quite white, not quite yellow, definitely a little something. White people might see us as Chinese—or, failing their ability to pinpoint our race, an ever-ambiguous “person of color”—but there are plenty of Chinese who might insist we were white. Joking about “white people” when that might be us—it’s an easy laugh, but ultimately disingenuous. Wondering what to identify as—white, Chinese, or something else—is something I, my cousins, and many multiracial people have struggled with for our whole lives, to no definite conclusion…

…Multiraciality is a young identity, one that didn’t formally come into existence until the 1980s. G. Reginald Daniel is a sociology professor who’s taught a class on multiracial identity at the University of California, Santa Barbara for nearly three decades, and even he can’t identify its first usage. He points to television shows like Oprah and Sally Jessy Raphael, where panels on multiracial experiences featuring multiracial people were hastily conceived. “The first time I heard the word multiracial used was on The Phil Donahue Show in 1988,” he tells me. “I was pretty shocked because I’d never heard that word before. Prior to that, nobody was talking about this, surely not in public.”..

Read the entire article here.

The Juggler’s Children: A Journey into Family, Legend and the Genes that Bind Us

Random House Canada
2013-03-26
400 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 9780679314592
eBook ISBN: 9780307372154

Carolyn Abraham

Carolyn Abraham explores the stunning power and ethical pitfalls of using genetic tests to answer questions of genealogy—by cracking the genome of her own family.

Recently, tens of thousands of people have been drawn to mail-order DNA tests to learn about their family roots. Abraham investigates whether this burgeoning new science can help solve 2 mysteries that have haunted her multi-racial family for more than a century. Both hinge on her enigmatic great-grandfathers—a hero who died young and a scoundrel who disappeared. Can the DNA they left behind reveal their stories from beyond the grave?

Armed with DNA kits, Abraham criss-crosses the globe, taking cells from relatives and strangers, a genetic journey that turns up far more than she bargained for—ugly truths and moral quandaries. With lively writing and a compelling personal narrative, The Juggler’s Children tackles profound questions around the genetics of identity, race and humanity, and tells a big story about our small world, with vivid proof that genes bind us all to the branches of one family tree.

Finding Samuel Lowe: China, Jamaica, Harlem

HarperCollins
2015-04-14
288 pages
Trimsize: 6 in (w) x 9 in (h) x 1.004 in (d)
Hardcover ISBN: 9780062331632; ISBN 10: 0062331639
eBook ISBN: 9780062331656; ISBN 10: 0062331655

Paula Williams Madison

Spanning four generations and moving between New York, Jamaica, and China, a powerful memoir that is a universal story of one woman’s search for her maternal grandfather and the key to her self-identity.

Thanks to her spiteful, jealous Jamaican mother, Nell Vera Lowe was cut off from her Chinese father, Samuel, when she was just a baby, after he announced he was taking a Chinese bride. By the time Nell was old enough to travel to her father’s shop in St. Anne’s Bay, he’d taken his family back to China, never learning what became of his eldest daughter. Bereft, Nell left Jamaica for New York to start a new life. But her Asian features set her apart from her Harlem neighbors and even her own children—a difference that contributed to her feeling of loneliness and loss which she instilled in her only daughter, Paula.

Years later, with a successful corporate career behind her and the arrival of her only grandchild raising questions about family and legacy, Paula decided to search for Samuel Lowe’s descendants in China. With the support of her brothers and the help of encouraging strangers, Paula eventually pieced together the full story of her grandfather’s life, following his story from China to Jamaica and back, and connecting with 300 surprised relatives who were overjoyed to meet her.

Finding Samuel Lowe is a remarkable journey about one woman’s path to self-discovery. It is a story about love and devotion that transcends time and race, and a beautiful reflection of the power of family and the interconnectedness of our world.

Finding Samuel Lowe includes a 16-page black-and-white photo insert and photos in the text.

Racial Ambiguity in Asian American Culture

Rutgers University Press
2015-05-12
256 pages
6 x 9
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8135-7070-9
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8135-7069-3
Web PDF ISBN: 978-0-8135-7071-6
epub ISBN: 978-0-8135-7537-7

Jennifer Ann Ho, Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

The sheer diversity of the Asian American populace makes them an ambiguous racial category. Indeed, the 2010 U.S. Census lists twenty-four Asian-ethnic groups, lumping together under one heading people with dramatically different historical backgrounds and cultures. In Racial Ambiguity in Asian American Culture, Jennifer Ann Ho shines a light on the hybrid and indeterminate aspects of race, revealing ambiguity to be paramount to a more nuanced understanding both of race and of what it means to be Asian American.

Exploring a variety of subjects and cultural artifacts, Ho reveals how Asian American subjects evince a deep racial ambiguity that unmoors the concept of race from any fixed or finite understanding. For example, the book examines the racial ambiguity of Japanese American Nisei Yoshiko Nakamura deLeon, who during World War II underwent an abrupt transition from being an enemy alien to an assimilating American, via the Mixed Marriage Policy of 1942. It looks at the blogs of Korean, Taiwanese, and Vietnamese Americans who were adopted as children by white American families and have conflicted feelings about their “honorary white” status. And it discusses Tiger Woods, the most famous mixed-race Asian American, whose description of himself as “Cablinasian”—reflecting his background as Black, Asian, Caucasian, and Native American—perfectly captures the ambiguity of racial classifications.

Race is an abstraction that we treat as concrete, a construct that reflects only our desires, fears, and anxieties. Jennifer Ho demonstrates in Racial Ambiguity in Asian American Culture that seeing race as ambiguous puts us one step closer to a potential antidote to racism.

Table Of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Ambiguous Americans: Race and the State of Asian America
• 1. From Enemy Alien to Assimilating American: Yoshiko deLeon and the Mixed-Marriage Policy of the Japanese American Incarceration
• 2. Anti-Sentimental Loss: Stories of Transracial/Transnational Asian American Adult Adoptees in the Blogosphere
• 3. Cablinasian Dreams, Amerasian Realities: Transcending Race in the Twenty-first Century and Other Myths Broken by Tiger Woods
• 4. Ambiguous Movements and Mobile Subjectivity: Passing in between Autobiography and Fiction with Paisley Rekdal and Ruth Ozeki
• 5. Transgressive Texts and Ambiguous Authors: Racial Ambiguity in Asian American Literature
• Coda: Ending with Origins: My Own Racial Ambiguity
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Being Japanese American: A JA Sourcebook for Nikkei, Hapa . . . & Their Friends

Stone Bridge Press
2015-06-09
176 pages
7.50 x 9.25 inches
Trade Paper ISBN13: 9781611720228; ISBN10: 1611720222
Ebook ISBN13: 9781611725292; ISBN10: 1611725291

Gil Asakawa

A celebration of JA culture: facts, recipes, songs, words, and memories that every JA will want to share.

This entertaining compendium is a celebration of Japanese American history and heritage. While detailing favorite foods, customs, words, games, and holidays, it explores the painful history of immigration and WWII internment, with suggestions for connecting to your Japanese American community and passing on traditions across generations and into intermarried families. This revised edition has fresh interviews with Japanese Americans about their life experiences and explores contemporary Japanese pop culture like anime and J-pop, with information on traveling to visit your Japanese roots and lists of resources on the Web and social media.

New York Times Just Boarded the Post-Racial Express: A critical response to “Choose Your Own Identity”

Multiracial Asian Families
2015-12-16

Sharon H. Chang

screen shot from NY Times Magazine

This Monday, The New York Times Magazine published a very unfortunate essay about multiracial Asian children: Choose Your Own Identity, by author and mother Bonnie Tsui. In it, Tsui (who is not multiracial herself) puzzles over her children’s mixed-race identities, what they may or may not choose to be one day, while taking a brief foray back/forward in time to consider the sociohistorical context of mixed-race and America’s impending multiracial future. After mulling on the subject for about ten paragraphs, she concludes with a seeming liberatory message on behalf of her children: “…the truth is, I can’t tell my sons what to feel…I can only tell them what I think about my own identity and listen hard to what they have to tell me in turn.”

Sounds innocent enough, yes?

No…

Read the entire article here.

Bombay To Brooklyn: New York’s Indian Jews Strive To Preserve Heritage

News India Times
New York, New York
2015-12-14

Ela Dutt, Managing Editor

Siona Benjamin. Photo by Sami studio

Siona Benjamin, a greater New York City artist, hangs her “very typical” Indian Jewish Mezuzah, a prayer scroll in an engraved casing, on her door to remind her of her cultural roots. “Every time I walk through my main door, it reminds me of my Indian Jewish background,” especially so during Hanukkah, the Jewish Festival of Lights that began Dec. 6 and stretches over 8 days.

Originally from Bombay, Benjamin’s art is a blend of her background growing up in a Hindu and Muslim society, educated in Catholic and Zoroastrian schools, raised Jewish and now living in America. She is among the barely 100 or so Bene Israelis left in the Tri-state area, and the 350 or so around the U.S. according to Rabbi Romiel Daniel, rabbi and president of the Rego Park Jewish Center who since 1995, has tried to keep his flock together and raise awareness among the second and third generation Bene Israeli youth.

Some of the history of this small and unique community is captured in the exhibit “Baghdadis & the Bene Israel in Bollywood & Beyond” that opened in early November at the Center for Jewish History in New York City and will be on till April 1. Presented by the American Sephardi Federation, most of the items at the exhibit come from the Joyce and Kenneth Robbins collection, and highlight how Indian Jews, women in particular, were leaders in Bollywood and beyond at a time when custom and tradition kept many other Indian women out of Bollywood.

In exploring the largely forgotten history of the Bene Israel of India, the exhibition showcases the careers of Pramila (Esther Victoria Abraham), (Florence Ezekiel) Nadira, Sulochana (Ruby Myers), Abraham and Rachel Sofaer, Ezra Mir, RJ Minney, and Joseph David Penkar, each of whom played multiple roles in front of and behind-the-scenes in Bollywood…

Read the entire article here.

Do White-Passing People of Color Have Privilege?

Everyday Feminism
2015-09-07

Marina Watanabe

Today I’m going to be answering a question from one of my Patreon patrons (which sounds really redundant) about being a person of color who happens to be white-passing.

Before I start this, I want to explain the concept of white-passing. It basically means what it sounds like. It’s when you’re a person of color, whether that be Asian, Native American, black or mixed raced and other people perceive you, either some of the time or all of the time as white.

The question I received is from a person named Susie. She actually has a channel on YouTube which I’m going to link below. She titled her question “Passing Privilege” and she said,

“I am half Native Alaskan and half white but since I look mostly white, I am constantly told by strangers, specifically non-Natives, that I am not Native. It’s a weird concept. I know you’ve talked about it before in a video but is it the same with Asian culture? With Native culture you can be extremely cultural but if you don’t have dark skin, you aren’t really ‘Native.’”

As someone who is half Asian and half white, I totally feel you on this. One of the weirdest things I’ve noticed about being on YouTube is that typically in my everyday life, a lot of people read me as Asian or Japanese but then on the internet when I make videos, they assume that I’m white much more often…

Read the entire article here.

Play means to help people of mixed race find sense of belonging

MPR News
Minnesota Public Radio
2015-12-15

Marianne Combs, Arts and Culture Reporter

“Purple Cloud,” written by Jessica Huang and directed by Randy Reyes, looks at three generations of hapa, or mixed race, Chinese immigrants as they search to find a place where they belong. Courtesy Keri Pickett | Mu Performing Arts

“What are you?” It’s a question that people of mixed race get all the time.

“Purple Cloud,” a new play produced by Mu Performing Arts, explores what it means to be of mixed race. It’s inspired by playwright Jessica Huang’s own experiences growing up mixed race, and it tells the story of one family’s journey of self-discovery.

“For most of my life I had been struggling with feeling outside, because I’m not white and I’m not Chinese, and I didn’t really know where I belonged,” she explained. “But there was a theater director in town … and she saw me across the room and she pointed at me and said, ‘You — you’re hapa.’

“And I had no idea what that word meant.”…

Read or listen to the story here.