“Thoughts on Multiraciality” by Thomas Moy, Class of 2021
I went to high school in a wealthy suburb of Atlanta, one that was 60% Asian. Before that, I had spent most of my life in overwhelmingly white Central Illinois and Arkansas, so I was always just an Asian kid. Yeah, my mom has blonde hair and green eyes, but kids in particular like to notice differences, so I was just Asian. When I moved to Georgia, however, the narrative changed entirely. It was no longer obvious that I was Asian; in fact, being Asian now felt performative. “Oh, you’re Asian, but you’re not really Asian.” “You don’t speak Cantonese? Are you even Asian?” My identity had become a scorecard: I played piano and had a blackbelt in TaeKwonDo, but I also had parents that were native English speakers and did not send me to Chinese school. I was more than just Asian; I was now specifically mixed . Here are a few of my thoughts on being a multiracial Asian. .
I always find it hard to talk about being a multiracial Asian in contexts like this. There’s a lot of extra nuance and balance that comes with the mixed experience. Asians are not a monolith, and multiracial Asians are especially no exception; I can only try and speak to my own experience as someone who is white and Chinese with light skin, and I expect my thoughts on these issues will be quite different than someone who doesn’t get made fun of for being “pasty” (I don’t go outside a lot, okay, Chloe. I promise I tan really well.).
Fetishization and Beauty
The fetishization of mixed Asians in Asian American culture in particular is well-documented. I had a friend in high school that would only date mixed Asians, saying that it was her type. LeendaDProductions, in her Youtube skits, often questions whether her love interests are mixed, because they are hot. Comments on Tiktok videos posted by attractive mixed people are often filled with some form of “I’m Asian and I want to marry a white guy so my child will look like this.”
This is gross.
It’s trivializing to reduce us down to a single category. It’s essentially a fixation on white beauty while being accessible to an Asian gaze. A lot of Asians that are not multiracial tend to talk about the features that I have. They mention things like double eyelids, brown hair, and light skin, and talk about how lucky I am to have these features, and how they wish they could have them. I want to tell them that their features are beautiful and that my features are only socially desired due to the influence of colonialism and white standards, but who am I to say anything?
It’s condescending to talk about, especially when I am the beneficiary of these systems. Even beyond all this, the obsession with mixed Asian beauty always tends to center around those who are light-skinned and white. Being someone who is both, I cannot speak personally about this issue, but it is obvious that all the “benefits” of the attention inevitably goes to those who fit into white standards most easily.
Representation
We’ve had good representation in American media for much longer than full Asians. Keanu Reeves has been starring in movies since the 80s, Bruno Mars has been dropping bangers for years, and inevitably, every stupid entertainment website with a list titled “22 OF THE MOST DROOL-WORTHY CELEBRITIES OF ASIAN DESCENT” will fill it with mixed actors and artists. Even Crazy Rich Asians, hailed as one of the first major productions with an Asian-led cast, still cast a mixed person as the love interest.
Depictions of Asians always felt like pandering to me for a variety of reasons beyond the scope of this essay, but especially because of the prominence of white mixed actors over non-mixed. Representation that includes people who look like me feels like a sanitization of Asian America to make it palatable to a white audience. This is a problem in and of itself for obvious reasons, but less obvious is the erasure of any truly mixed representation in media. Mixed actors tell the stories of non-multiracial Asians, and in doing so, do not speak about our own unique experiences. Fitting any Asians, including mixed ones, into roles where they act and tell stories from our perspective is important, but I never feel fully represented.
My friend sent me an article by Laura Carther recently titled “The Spectrum: Deconstructing whiteness from a multiracial perspective.” I read a lot of Asian writers who speak about their experiences; I thought I could identify with their works as well, despite coming from a different background. I didn’t realize how strongly I could identify, however, until I read the Carther article. The article is admittedly short, probably less than a thousand words, but those thousand words excited me. Solidarity is truly everything; recognizing that there is someone else out there that shares your experiences, your anxieties, your questions, your joys - there is nothing more comforting. The way representation is currently expressed in the media robs us of being able to tell our experiences and only offers a milquetoast, whitewashed facsimile of a broader Asian America.
Language
This essay took me a long time to write. I can be kind of a slow writer in general (shoutout to all the professors who granted me last-minutes extensions), but this was in no small part due to the difficulty I had figuring out how to describe myself and how to develop proper contrasts. I tend to default to “mixed” or “multiracial” Asian in day-to-day conversation: it’s simple, quick, and most people understand it. The issue I have with these is that both inherently imply that my experience is just a blend of white experience and Asian experiences, rather than its own unique experience. The common corollary to that term to refer to people who are monoracial Asian, i.e. “full”, is also problematic, as it implies that because I am not “full,” then I should not be considered fully Asian, which raises its own identity questions about what I am allowed to identify as and what I want to be identified as.
The term “hapa” is a Hawaiian term meaning “half” that originally referred to Hawaiians that were part Native Hawaiian and part foreigner. In the 1990s, it was appropriated by student groups to describe more broadly mixed Asians in general. There are a lot of mixed people who use this term. I understand the appeal; it’s a term that does not obviously define us in relation to someone else. The word, however, is fraught with problematic history; there is some evidence that it was derogatory, and the idea that light-skinned Chinese people are allowed to use a term developed by and for Pacific Islanders is misguided at best. We do not get to decide if that is our word to use, and as a result, I refuse to appropriate and strengthen systems of colonization.
The language to talk about our identity and experiences just does not exist. I wish I had something more to say here, like a call to action or some suggestions on how to fix it, but I honestly don’t. This is a broad issue that every mixed person faces, including people whose backgrounds are not Asian, and changing language is difficult. I can only hope that sometime soon, as systems of oppression and hierarchy are broken down and new, better systems emerge, new words and meanings will also develop in society and give us the ability to better describe our identity.
Final Thoughts
I mentioned at the beginning of this essay that I find it difficult to talk about being mixed in this context. A big reason for that is the privilege that comes with being white, and I almost chose not to write about this topic, for fear that I am just whining and complaining about little problems instead of recognizing that privilege. I spend a lot of time on “Woke Twitter,” and I get paranoid.
Despite not telling stories and speaking to mixed experiences, I still did get to see people who looked like me in lead roles and in modeling positions from a young age, something that a lot of other people did not get to do. It is a lot easier for me to code switch into traditionally white spaces, giving me access to opportunities that are closed off to others. There is a lot of privilege for mixed Asians who look like me, but the systems that perpetuate that privilege are just as corrosive to me as they are to everyone else. My issues that come with mixed Asian representation go hand in hand with the broader issues that plague all Asians. The fact that I still need to code switch to gain access is still problematic.
I decided to write this essay because there’s not that many of us, despite our outsized presence in the media. I wanted these thoughts to get out there and hopefully connect with someone of my background, to have a moment of shared experience, but also to share my experience with other people who may have not thought about these issues. As I said earlier, solidarity is everything; only by sharing our experiences and working together can we end the systems that perpetuate these issues.
ARTIST STATEMENT
I spend a lot of time reading, but I don't write very frequently. With quarantine, I've had a lot of time to think about what it means to be mixed and the implications of that. Solidarity is everything, so I wanted to share these thoughts with the community.
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