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Serving As Your Voice of the Nikkei Community Since 1902
Vol. 63, Issue 19 / April 30, 2008
Hapa Headaches, Hopes, History
By David K. Yamaguchi
The North American Post
Anna Tamura |
Sharon Sobie-Seymour |
Eugene Levin |
TO BE HAPA-biracial, especially Asian biracial- is a complex thing. For many, like activists Anna Tamura and Sharon Sobie-Seymour, their blended features enhance their attractiveness, and thus must ease their lives. Yet for others, depending on time, place, and gender, the same background has been a source of angst.
One example of the latter is Eugene Levin, who grew up in Japan. To converse with Mr. Levin today in Japanese is to laugh, for there is something amusing about hearing such natural Japanese coming from his grinning Jewish face. But as a boy, Mr. Levin learned to box out of necessity, for bullies at both Japanese and international schools were out to get him.
"What happened to your face?" his mother would ask. Some days he lost his bouts, other days he won. But he learned to watch out after he won, for the next day there might be five guys waiting for him.
In briefly meeting Mr. Levin's daughter Nicole, she mentioned that she is trying to find her place in the world. Also fluid in Japanese, she has a bit more soul-searching to do than most of us.
While I am not hapa, I suggested to Nicole that some of the answers she seeks must lie in the writings of hapas who have come before her. As many of these narratives fly under the normal radar, today I thought I would mention the three I have come across to date. Such reading is prerequisite not only for hapas, but for all of us who have them in our lives.
An oldie but goodie is the chapter on Theresa Takayoshi in the book of Redress hearings testimony, And Justice For All, An Oral History of the Japanese American Detention Camps (John Tateishi, Random House, 1984). My dad's late cousin, Ms. Takayoshi relates a straight-shooter's tell-it-like-it-was tale of how her she and her siblings' hapa faces made their lives different from those of other Japanese Americans before and during World War II. The children of a New York Japanese-Irish marriage, only on the 2006 Minidoka Pilgrimage did I learn, from a grandchild of one such union, that there were many such marriages in those days. For just as the Issei first arrived as single men, the Irish frequently arrived as single women-as washerwomen who took in laundry. Apparently the couples met as they lived cheek by jowl in crowded immigrant neighborhoods of the day. Yet as few know this, people thought that Ms. Takayoshi's Irish mother must have been a prostitute-why else would a Caucasian woman marry a Japanese man?
A newer title is Hapa Girl (May-lee Chai, Temple Univ. Press, 2007). Its 232 well-written pages read so fast it makes a two to three-night read, tops. I added it to my list after its opening sentence caught my eye, the gist of which is that growing up, her family could stop traffic just by crossing the street. As Ms. Chai is a young writer, this is the title I recommended to Nicole Levin.
In turn, Nisei readers might more appreciate Holy Prayers in a Horses Ear, just republished after its 1932 edition had long been forgotten (Rutgers Univ. Press). Its title is a translation of the vivid Japanese proverb, "Uma no mimi ni nembutsu," a metaphor for how what is valuable to you can mean nothing to another. Its author Kathleen Tamagawa spins a tale revealing of the plights of early hapas, as well as of daily living conditions in the eastern U.S., Japan, and China during the 1910s and 1920s. Holy Prayers also holds the distinction of being the first Nisei autobiography:
"The facts were these--In America I was Japanese. In Japan I was an American. I had an Oriental father who wished to live like an Occidental and an Irish mother who wished to live like a Japanesec
"Somewhere in between all this, I existed. I was neither American, nor Irish, nor Japanese. I had no race, nationality or home. Everybodyc immediately focused upon me an eye glued to a microscope or a monocle. I was a curiosityc"
For hapas, as with the rest of us, reading to supplement life experience can be a path to deeper understanding
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