The hapa way…

 

My folks and I don’t see eye-to-eye on any number of things.  That’s normal – the next generation frequently chews on the values of the previous generation and spits out that which it can’t digest for lack of identical experiences as their progenitors.

 

In my case, the difference is the nature of being “hapa”.  I’m hapa, that is to say, hapa-haole.  Half –white in Hawaiian.

 

Mom’s background is a skip around northern Europe.  She’s the Sta-Puff marshmallow in the family, gets crispy in the sun after only minutes of exposure.  Green-eyed, red-haired as a young adult, tow-headed blonde as a child, she’s White (with a capital W).  She was raised in the even-whiter north of Michigan, where most people were also as fair-skinned and of mixed northern European ethnicity – all unified by poverty.

 

Dad, on the other hand, is a trip around the Pacific, but mostly Hawaiian and Chinese.  Poly-Asian, Pan-Asian, something like that for lack of a better label.  He’s pretty typical of many locals in Hawaii.  My dad’s the light one in the family, fairer by far than the rest, but still markedly dark by standards of most white people.  Because of his polyglot lineage, he’s frequently mistaken for Filipino, Latino, Korean, Indonesian and a few others I can’t even recall.  Poor, utterly Hawaiian red dirt poor, his family had nothing but a tradition of self-sufficiency.  (Dad, trying to decide between two different mainland universities’ engineering programs, chose the one without an entrance fee.)

 

So what did these two people have in common?  To this day I’m not certain.  I speculate that it was two things: the attraction of yin-and-yang, light and dark, as well as the commonality of poverty.  Things did not possess them or get between them as they owned not a thing.  All they had was each other and this yin-yang thing.  Love’s like that, inexplicable, even to the closest of observers.

 

They had three kids, representing the range of possible outcomes one might expect to see in the typical high school biology textbook under the topic “Genetics”.  My sister is dark and looks very much the island girl; my brother is not quite as dark, having startling hazel eyes and as a child, dark blonde hair with a café au lait complexion. 

 

Me?  I’m the pasty one of the bunch – I’m picked on by my siblings for being the fairest.  Not blonde, but not dark; not fair, but not darkly tanned.  I have a difficult time finding makeup that works; most of the stuff designed for white women or fair black women doesn’t quite work.  If you saw me you’d think I was of some southern European ethnic group or maybe a mestiza / Latina-white girl.  (Kind of like J. Lo in a decade after two kids and none of the cosmetic improvements that come with her career and lifestyle.  Squint hard next time you see her on television – it’ll be me, although I wear more clothing.)

 

Hapa – having a foot in both worlds.  Not quite white enough to “pass” all the time, or possess the capital of that racial group.  Not quite dark enough not to be harassed by others darker than me.

 

Hapa, having a sensibility that’s shaped by being both white/not white.  All too painfully I can see both sides of the coin that is race in America.  It’s not pretty – it really is a two-headed monster.  Acquaintances have made racially biased comments, told me offensive jokes, practiced discrimination on the sly and share it with me, not realizing that I see it for what it is.  I call them on it and they’re shocked. 

 

No, really, you’re not white?  Wow, cool, you’re Hawaiian-Asian?  I can see them carefully stepping away from whatever it was I just called them on, as if changing the subject to me would somehow absolve them, that I’d forget.  As if not being entirely Asian or even part African-American means I wasn’t entirely offended.

 

If I see this, and I’m certain other persons of color see this, how is it that many white Americans can’t?  My mother’s become conscious of it, now a colored person by association.  She sees it, notices it, acts indignant about it when it’s directed at us.  But she can’t see that she too, still has biases against certain groups of people.

 

One topic on which Mom and I will not agree is the sovereignty of the Hawaiian Islands.  She consciously knows the history, but she’s fully bought into the concept of “manifest destiny”, that somehow Hawaii was meant to be a U.S. state and that Hawaiians should embrace and accept this.  (Listen to the music of Israel "IZ" Kamakawiwo'ole sometime and understand that this loss of the land is still close in the hearts of Hawaiians.  It’s in part why Iz was so popular in his lifetime – he acknowledged and gave voice to this loss in songs like “Living in a Sovereign Land”).  She is angry when she hears that Hawaiians still long for their own sovereign nation.  She thinks little of impoverished Hawaiians who rely on welfare saying they can’t have it both ways, sovereignty and welfare.

 

Dad is more pragmatic, or perhaps a lifetime of little slights has taught him to shut them off.  He’s not angry about the Hawaiian homeland; he chooses to be practical about the state of things today.  But still, I find myself wondering how he can be so placid and accepting of this lot; his own family will lose their land because of their poverty.  The family must pay from their meager subsistence income property taxes for land on which they’ve lived as long as they’ve been Hawaiian.  The property values now demand far more taxes than the family can support.

 

And I am not in agreement with either of them.  There is a middle ground, something between these two places, there has to be a way to compromise on this.  To some extent I’ve written off the positions of my parents; I’ve closed the doors to people who have violated my space with their racist garbage (and it’s not just white against black, either).  I know in my heart that I am the leading edge of a wave of people who are white and not-white, who must live in at least two worlds at any time.  My face and those of my children are that of the future.  This growing critical mass insists on coming to terms with this hapa state of being.

 

Now imagine that I’m black and I’ve just explained this all to you.  No, I can’t say I know myself exactly what it is to be African-American, or even mulatto, the progeny of a black-and-white couple.  My friends who are black can’t tell me exactly what it’s like since it’s rather like describing how it is to be human, how it is to have blood coursing in your veins.  It simply is.  They have similar stories to the one I’ve told, some with far worse details, some with better.   My Asian friends are incredibly similar, too…because they too can tell only of human experience.  But I do have something in common with them, besides the fact of our humanity: I do know what it is to have a heritage tainted by the derailment, theft or denial of culture; I know what it is to want to succeed in a world that only partially accepts me, in words but not in deeds, that resents you and yet claims you.  In spite of the nearly forty years that have passed since the Civil Rights Act became the law of the land, we are still not fully reconciled as a single humanity.

 

So what is my unique and special role here?  Perhaps to make this point: we cannot separate race and ethnicity from who we are; it’s our culture, our families, our heritage.  Even I can’t deny it – I may not agree with my parents, but they are my flesh.  To deny our heritage is to deny our origin and humanity; to deny us is to deny the future.  And yet in time this blending and merging of peoples and cultures that produced me and my siblings and now my children will entirely change the concept of race in America.  It’s inescapable, inevitable; it’s the new “manifest destiny”.

 

From my vantage point, a foot in both worlds, I see that we must bridge a space between now when things continue to be so absolute, literally black-and-white, to a place where we are all shades at once.  We are building something new upon the heritage we preserve.

 

But to do this we must find some place we can meet half-way, maybe a hapa place.

 

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Honoring the intent of Martin Luther King Jr. today.

~Rayne

  7:27:36 PM    comment []