“What are you?”
As a mixed race person, it’s a question that has been asked of me countless times. When your face is unidentifiable—your eyes have a slight slant, but your hair is chestnut brown and you have a tendency to burn in the sun—complete strangers seem compelled to figure you out. “Where are you from? No, where are you from.”
“What are you?”
This question was posed in Kip Fulbeck’s exhibit, “Hapa.Me,” now on display at the Morikami Museum & Japanese Gardens in Delray Beach. Filling the gallery walls are portraits of 46 mixed-race Asian people with their handwritten answers to that question. Fifteen years later, Fulbeck—who is part Chinese—revisited the subjects, retook their photo, and asked them the same question. With age, the answers appear to be simplified and less concerned with satisfying the curiosity of others who can’t figure you out.
One woman first said, “I am a person of color. I am not half- ‘white.’ I am not half- ‘Asian.’ I am a whole ‘other.’” More than a decade later, her answer is projected to viewers: “I am a challenge for the simple mind to try to make sense of with labels, prejudice & stereotypes.” Another woman answered as a child, “I am a person.” Her older self agreed, “Now that I’m older I can’t think of anything better to say.”
The word “hapa” has Hawaiian roots and is used to describe someone with mixed ancestry. Typically, someone who is half Polynesian. It’s since spread within the Asian American/Pacific Islander (AAPI) community to describe being mixed; the playful term “quapa” has sprouted for those who are quarter-Asian.
Another word that’s use to describe the mixed race experience is “hafu,” Japanese for “half” (although some feel it has a negative connotation, more along the lines of “half breed”). This past weekend, the Morikami hosted filmmaker Megumi Sasaki, who is half Japanese, to screen her 2013 documentary “Hafu: The Mixed Race Experience in Japan.” She follows five hafus through their own struggles, from David, who is half Japanese, half Ghanaian who was raised in a Japanese orphanage and speaks perfect Japanese, to Sophia, who is Japanese Australian and challenges herself to live in Japan for a year to learn more about her Japanese culture and the language. As a half-Chinese woman, I understood the longing to fit in, to be easily categorized in a world that asks you to “choose one” when filling out your race demographics.
“I could never forget that I was not fully Japanese,” Sasaki said of living in Japan as a hafu.
During the screening, Dr. Mitzi Carter, an FIU teaching professor of Global and Sociocultural Studies, shared being half Japanese and half Black and the “interrogative” nature and “demands to perform” when you’re discovered to be mixed. She quoted Ralph Ellison, “When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.”
In the crowd, viewers touted how diverse the United States is, that it’s more accepting than Japan. My friend and I who attended—she is a hafu—agreed that though the country is far more heterogeneous, mixed people are still a mystery and perhaps even a novelty.
Hence the question that comes to us even before “hello” or “how are you?”
“What are you?”
“Hapa.Me” is on display at the Morikami Museum & Japanese Gardens through Aug. 25, 2024. “Hafu” can be viewed on Amazon Prime or Vimeo.
