INTERRACIAL VOICE

Essay

"Hapa"
By Jason Rabbitt-Tomita

Kyoto, winter of 1996. The cab driver looks in the rear-view mirror and says, "You're not totally Asian, are you sir? But if I had to say, you look more like the Asian side."

The cabbies usually ask me if I'm Chinese, so I'm glad for the recognition. But it's strange that my biology is becoming a topic of conversation, as if I were a thoroughbred horse.

Brown, 1995. "Yeah, well, some of us are thoroughbreds," says the actress playing my wife. Some of us are full Asian. You are not. Even if you're playing one in this musical.

Back at home in Seattle. "You're becoming more integrated," my sociologist mother tells me. "Integrated" implies that I used to be "separated."

Yin and Yang, East and West, Bullshit and Bullshitter. I don't exoticize myself. I'm just me. Yet everyone else seems to have a problem with that.

When my professor suggested this paper, I was at a loss. For some reason I don't usually ponder the subject. There's already enough shit to deal with just being an Asian American. Second, since there is as yet little theory written by or for multiracial people, I barely have the framework with which to discuss my experience. It is hard to describe the issues I face when I must also invent new words to describe it. Most importantly, I never imagined that there would be anyone out there who would listen. Who would understand. Who would care. In a sea of monoracials, I am almost completely alone.

Desire

I am a colored person. To many, I am a diluted colored person. This must have made it easier for the white girls I dated in high school. People like Allison Pearsall, my girlfriend sophomore year. She was a junior, strawberry blonde, parents from France or California, I could never figure out which. We had our first three classes together. We start sitting next to each other in geometry class. We talk. We start going out. Once she gets her license, she drives me around in her red Mazda 626. She cuts up the first twenty bars of a song and gives them to me, piece by piece. All her hard work goes to waste when I guess the song after the first bar. "Stand by Me."

She has this close Hapa friend named Ben, who is a songwriter, like me. She plays me a tape of his once. Something about how he saw her in his dreams. It's pretty good. They are the kind of friends who might be going out if it wasn't for me. But I do not feel threatened. Instead, when I meet him I sense something familiar.

One night, she drops me off and we stand in front of my house for an hour, talking in the frost. I want to kiss her, she wants to kiss me. But neither of us can gather up the courage. She eventually goes home. Yet I know that once we cross that line, things will happen. We have been holding hands, shoulders. But for some reason, I don't want to get so deeply involved. So in the spring, I dump her cold.

It is my biggest mistake of high school. I start going out with a senior, an anorexic blond named Linda. Linda dumps me after she comes back from visiting colleges. In the summer, I hook up with a blond girl named Emily, my childhood sweetheart. But once she leaves for Canada, she writes me the "Dear John" letter and I never see her again. Heartbroken, I spend my junior year chasing after Allison while she grinds my heart into dust. There is justice in the world.

Around this time, I change my name from Rabbitt-Tomita to Rabbitt. Temporarily, just to make a point. I play an Irish song for St. Patrick's day at an assembly. The African American storyteller who goes after me compliments me for my ability to appreciate other people's cultures. "When I walked in here, he was playing Duke Ellington or something on the piano, and now he here he is playing an Irish folk song." Actually, the "Duke Ellington" song was one I wrote myself, and as for the Irish song, well, I'm Jason Rabbitt. By now, everyone knows. The audience laughs at the storyteller's good-natured mistake.

I remember being glad that I was not monoracial, like my Korean friend Dave. I could just forget about all the stereotypes of the Asian man by saying, "I'm different." But Dave, he hated himself so much it was palpable. One day, the all-star lacrosse goalie tries to tell me how Asians aren't as good at sports. On another occasion, he tries to tell me how European and Asian culture is superior to the African. In college, when I go to Japan, he goes to Ireland. Why would you want to live in the cold with a bunch of sheep, I wondered. When he falls in love with a Scandanavian girl there, I tease him for picking the whitest people on earth. He tells me that she's half Algerian.

It's a pattern, I realize. His mixed girlfriends. The last girl he fell in love with was German, Japanese and Malaysian. Unfortunately, she is in a Yakuza family and is betrothed to another Yakuza. When she breaks off the engagement, the man is shamed. He torments her, he beats her. If he knows about Dave, Dave is dead. She must phone him in secret.

Like a wise man, my friend gets out, fast.

One night, Dave and I are hanging out at UW with our high school buddies. When he goes out to his car to get some cigarettes, she is there, in the lot. She is on her way to Hawai'i and making a layover in Seattle. His mother told her where she could find him. She drove through the U District until she found his car.

The next girl Dave falls in love with is mixed Filipino/white. She is a model, leads him on, a teaser. She has a boyfriend at West Point, also mixed Filipino. Sometimes she tells Dave that she wants to sleep with him. They never do. She won't break up with the cadet. Things are never clearly resolved.

I have never gone out with a mixed person. I have always wanted to. Another hapa Japanese/haole, I imagine how it would feel. For the first time, never having to explain, for the first time, never having to worry about race. Our skin, the same caramel shades. Our eyes, our hair, the same. Had I been a girl, I would have maybe looked like her. It would be so relaxing, so revealing. I am so used to difference that I am curious about sameness.

I decide not to tell this to my monoracial Chinese American girlfriend. But then I resent her for this. She has gone out with another Chinese before. Since the age of 12, she has lived in Vancouver, B.C., the most Sinified city in the West. Moreover, Taiwanese Americans like her have the Love Boat to go on. But people like me, what do we get? The Japanese government won't sponsor a program inviting young Nikkei over to learn about "Japanese culture." The Japanese-descent visa only applies up to the third generation, so it doesn't apply to me. I've only been with one monoracial Japanese American. We West Coast hapa Yonsei, scattered across our whitewashed suburbs, college Nikkei clubs, and international exchange programs in Japan. The only place for us is Hawai'i. Land of the mixed person.

Post-Luau party. I am with a group of people from the Islands. I start a tongue-in-cheek debate about which people think look better: Japanese, Chinese, or Koreans. We wonder whether or not to include hapa people in the discussion. If so, which mixes? Chinese Hawai'ian, Japanese Hawai'ian, Chinese Japanese, Asian haole?

"Hapa haole is the crucial one," says Dave Tuan.

"All hapa haole people look better," says Erin Suzuki. "Oh no, wait, either they look really good, or they look really bad."

"Yeah, yeah exoticize the mixed race person. White enough to fulfill the fantasy, yellow enough to bring home to mom," I say. I'm quoting "American Knees," by Shawn Wong.

Dave and I discuss the bitchy, gorgeous Korean girl look. "In general, they look the best," I say. "I know a Korean guy who says that it's the water."

I turn to Erin Suzuki. "On average, Japanese girls look the worst." She looks kind of resentful and embarassed, as if she doesn't quite know what to say. "But a beautiful Japanese girl," I say, "is better looking than any of them. Sublime."

My girlfriend gives me a look. "But of course, I personally think that Chinese girls look the best," I say.

"You'd better, since Amy's here," jokes Dave.

"Is your dad or your mom haole?" he says, changing the subject. "You would look weird with blond hair, I couldn't picture you with blond hair, that would be weird."

"Yes, split me into my two halves! I am neither one, nor the other!" I yell in a crazed, joking, half-drunken voice. We laugh. I hope they won't sound so stupid next time.

Poster Boy for Assimilation

Chang-Rae Lee is one of my favorite authors. However, when he discusses hapa people I get a strange feeling in my gut. In his novels, they are too ideal, too ahead of their time. They die for their perfection. There is a New York Times interview with author Chang-Rae Lee which states:

Often, Mr. Lee and his wife, Michelle, who is white, talk about what will happen when they have children. "What are they going to think of us?" he asked. "I've already sort of steeled myself for them to resent it. 'Why did you do this to me?' Michelle is nervous too. She knows our kids will have an even more difficult time than I did."

Why would his kids have "an even more difficult time" than him? What is he afraid of? That they will be confused? Cultural Dyslexics? Unable to coordinate left with right, unable to play the piano? What on earth could they possibly be expected to resent? Except their own mule-like existence?

Their children are little biological equations, exoticized possibility. Fear and desire for the forbidden, white/yellow fruit, conveniently displaced onto the innocent, unsuspecting fetus. Even this is defiled by their binaries. When thinking about the somatic evidence of their miscegenation, "Michelle is nervous, too."

I want to read the books his children write.

I am sick of the little Black boy and the little Asian girl who appear on every children's show. And the Asian woman and the Black man who always appear selling toothpaste or conveying the news. My Asian man's face does not yet exist. I have never seen an Asian man kiss a white woman on t.v. I have never seen an Asian man kiss on t.v. Of course, I have always seen the white man kiss the slanty Asian woman.

Matt Dillon is in the home of the chinky young girl. She is wearing shiny, silky chinky clothes. She is holding an Oriental statue. Guan Ying, Guan Ying, she whispers, crying. He is drawn towards his face. He kisses her, slowly, over and over and over.

Images like these fill me with hurt and rage.

Then I think about why my parents got married, and it seems very simple. My father has had three wives, Filipina, Japanese, Korean. My mother, two husbands; Irish, Irish.

I ask my mother why she married a white man, and she says because the Asian guys wouldn't go out with her. And you fall in love, she adds. I ask my dad why he married only Asian women and he jokingly says "Because it was the farthest thing from my mother."

Strange, that people with the fetish, the yellow fever or the white fever, should have sane kids. What sweet revenge. Biology is irrelevant. Even Chang-Rae Lee won't be able to split his kids in the womb. What if he had twins? It'd be perfect if out popped one white kid and one Asian kid. He and his wife would be so relieved. About the hapa child who dies in his novel, he says "...maybe the time was not right for such a 'subversive, historic, unprecedented' blending of ethnicities." (NY Times)

Marginal Man

Where I live, I want it to be filled with light, like the apartment of Ellison's Invisible Man. In this underground space there are bulbs in the floors, the walls, all over the ceiling. There, I am human, I am purified. I love my girlfriend and my cats and my parents and I get a job and get on with my life. I am happy. But unlike the Invisible Man, I am not waiting to come out. I do not want to think about what lies outside my beautiful, warm room. I am not ready for revolution. Instead, I am afraid of the sound of speaking alone in the darkness.

Once, I had a debate in middle school. I was trying to convince this Christian girl that the theory of evolution was true. She was extremely mad at me, and eventually put her hands over her ears. She began to yell so that she wouldn't hear me. Why won't you listen, I asked. Because if I listen, my mother says I might begin to believe it.

1996, Kyoto. I am in a heated debate at my exchange program center. A white girl and a black girl are pissed when I insist that there is no such thing as race. Once again, I feel like I am debating a dead concept with fanatics who won't even listen.

It's purely social, I say.

No it's not, you can prove that race exists genetically, white girl says, red-faced. Her voice is a pinched, stifled yell.

How so? The difference between a Chinese and a Japanese is very real. Why isn't that a racial difference? It is to me. What do I have to do with a Chinese person? Even Northern and Southern Chinese look totally different. And what about the fact that I'm mixed? Am I just half of one race and half of the other?

Yes, the black girl named Felicia says. There are only three races, the yellow, the black, and the white.

What if I marry a mixed person, and our kid marries a mixed person? What happens when we all become Tiger Woods?

But it is pointless to continue. If they stopped believing the lie, their whole world would fall apart. They cannot accept that the world is round. It turns out that Felicia has a Chinese grandmother, but even that doesn't seem to change her point of view.

Often, I want to move to a Latin American country, where I, too, like Fujimori, could become the president. My Nikkei blood will not hold me back. My mixed heritage will not be attacked. All we will care about will be the words we speak, the curve and stop of our tongue. I will learn fifteen hundred words for skin color, Caramel, Cinnamon, Nougat. The binary will be broken by our language. Multiplicity will be the one true fact of life. I will walk the streets unnoticed, uncared for. I will be one of La Raza, the Human Race.

Fissures
In high school, I write a poem:

I'm Borderline,
I'm fringe
I'm ice in the vodka,
I'm twinge,

I'm bending,
before break;
I'm the heroin
before it takes

I'm not supposed to;
I'm not
What would you do
if you got caught?

I'm Borderline
and I bite!
I might be lying,
but I might be right

Not hot, not cold,
you're hated by the ends
Just like everyone
but everyone pretends

yeah I'm the whisper
You try forget
But I'm the Spider
I'm the man
I'm the net

I'm Borderline,
Going in the outside door,
You don't know where to meet me
But you need more

The paint
rubs off your face
The wrong time
But it's in the right place

Cause I'm you
I'm me
I'm Borderline

The poem came out of a deep encounter with Plato. Having been raised Buddhist, I felt that there was something fundamentally wrong with the philosopher's thinking. It was his absolute dualism, the dualism of the Western world, whose polarity left no room between an up and a down. But I, all of us, really, existed in the very fissure of that dualism, in the root of its very contradiction. Between the North and South poles lies the entire, real world.

This was also when I discovered Jazz, when I first touched the seething power within me. When I gave voice to that burning rage, it came out very sexily. With this poem, I had the power to speak and to challenge.

My senior year, we performed Borderline as part of a school play. I loped over the stage, inducing the actors to speak the lines. In the end, we all held up long masks painted half black and half white. I have a picture of it somewhere.

Later that year, I wrote a humorous song called "Faces Like Mine." The lyrics go:

I just want to be normal
Like those other white guys
I just want to be normal
Though I know that it's a lie
I want to be in a beer commercial
Cause I want to see faces like mine
On every street and
I want to see faces like mine

I don't want to be stared at
Everywhere I go
Will they hurt me will they hate me
Well you never really know
And I can't stand your
whitebread beer commercial cause
I don't see no faces like mine
On the t.v.
And I want to see faces like mine

I just want to exist
And I wanna get laid
And I don't want you white folk
Gettin' in my way
I want to save you from your
Sticky little brains
And I want to hold her hand
But I don't want to explain
And I want to see faces like mi-ine

Went to Honolulu
of the Pali Highway
My Grandfather's funeral
well it was yesterday
said I'm half a haole
and half Japanese and
I see so many faces like mine
In Hawai'i
and I see so many faces like mine

And I see so many faces
And I see so many faces
And I see so many faces like mine

Colored people just fucking love that song. I played it at Brown a few times and I couldn't believe how much applause I got. Months after I played it, I would still get requests from people who had heard it. When I perform it, for some reason I change "And I don't want you white folk gettin' in my way" to "I don't want anybody gettin' in my way." Just to be nice.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Final Scene

I have no deep revelation, no spiritual sleight of hand that will allow the reader to conveniently forget my suffering. I wish I did. I want to forget how the world would crush and burn and scar my body, how I am the picture boy for their oppression, the logical next step in Asian assimilation. "Go someplace where there isn't another Jap within a thousand miles. Marry a white girl or a Negro or an Italian or even a Chinese. Anything but a Japanese. After a few generations of that, you got the thing beat." (No-No Boy, p. 164) But no, there are no easy answers to your problems. You must figure this out for yourself. I offer you this parable:

There was once a wise man who discovered that the village water supply was soon going to be poisoned. He began to collect clean water in a huge basin. When he urged the other villagers to start saving clean water, they brushed him off. Soon after, the water went bad. The villagers drank it and they all went crazy. They started speaking pure gibberish.

The wise man was the only one who remembered how to speak. Luckily, he had saved enough water to sustain himself. But the crazy villagers began to treat him horribly. He became an outcast, drinking his clean water alone, in silence. After several years, he couldn't take it any more. One day, he went out to the stream where the other villagers got their water. Kneeling down, he cupped the water in his hands and drank.

In October, I will be leaving the country for several years. I must escape the insanity before it creeps beneath my skin. Before I forget how to speak. Before my world of light darkens and dims. Before I drown in your shit.