1953: Mixed Race Lives

What would we glean if we placed mixed race experiences at the center of Asian American histories? This chapter spotlights three revelations. First, the American occupation of Japan and US involvement in the Korean War ushered the first mass wave of international and interracial adoptions in world history. Mixed race children, born of American servicemen and Japanese and Korean women, and subsequently adopted by American families, were among the pioneers of this distinctive form of family formation.¹ In 1953, the passage of Public Law 162 created five hundred non-quota immigration visas that facilitated the admission of adopted children. The Orphan Section of the Refugee Relief Act of 1953 provided an additional four thousand non-quota immigrant visas to orphans under the age of ten years. Since the 1950s, over two hundred thousand Korean children have been adopted by families in more than fifteen countries, with the vast majority living in the United States.² Although most of these children were fully Korean, mixed race children played a formative role in the phenomenon of international and transracial adoption, in which parents adopt children of a different racial background. It was, as writer Bettijane Levine observes, “the forerunner of all those that have since become commonplace.”³

The second revelation is that multiracial Asian Americans have a history that is over 150 years old. They emerge from nineteenth-century port cultures in New York City and New Orleans and extend across to midwestern and western urban and rural areas. In the 1920s, a white American woman provided an account of her marriages to a Chinese American man and, after his death, a Japanese American man. She met her first husband, Rev. Walter Ngon Fong, pastor of the Methodist Mission of San Jose, in an economics class at Stanford University. Although she noted that he was well liked by classmates and that her parents were “not narrow-minded,” after Fong proposed to her in 1896, “it was then that the race question and popular prejudice against the Chinese” loomed before her. ⁴ Yet, she was convinced that “there was no reasonable ground for one member of the human family to regard himself as superior to another no matter what the race or the color of the skin that individual might be.”⁵ After they married, they settled in Berkeley, California, and had two sons. She described their first son as “a most precocious child, talking and carrying a tune at six months, and at nine forming short sentences and replying to questions.”⁶ Their younger son was a quiet, deep thinker. Her recollection of both their personalities and achievements brims with pride.

The third and final revelation is that our society today is increasingly multiracial. Mixed race Asian Americans are documenting their lived experiences, challenging social attitudes that dismiss them as incomplete, and charting holistic ways of seeing and being. In her essay “Rising Sun, Rising Soul: On Mixed Race Identity That Includes Blackness,” writer Velina Hasu Houston juxtaposes a photo of her biological mother, Setsuko Okazaki Takechi, circa 1952, next to one of herself, circa 1990. Houston writes:

It is likely that you have met someone who is an Asian of African descent. If, however, they are under the age of fifty-five, they may differ from me culturally. I am one of the last of my kind—a person of Japanese, Black, Native American Indian, and Cuban descent with a Japanese grandmother born in Japan’s Meiji era, Japanese aunts born in the Taisho era, and a Showa-era Japanese mother.⁷

Houston reminds us that histories of people who are of multiple lines of minority descent deserve our attention.

INTERNATIONAL ADOPTION NATION

In the destructive and chaotic aftermath of World War II, Germany, Greece, and Italy, as well as Japan and Korea, were among the nations sending the highest number of adoptive children. Largely untouched by war damage, the United States became the top receiving country of these children. Why then is it important to study the history of Asian international adoption in the United States on its own terms? Histories of race informed early Asian international adoption history in ways that distinguished it from international adoption from Europe.

In the 1950s, interracial intimacy—both romance and marriage—was a central feature of US-Asian relations. A social outcome of the post-World War II US occupation of Japan (1945–52) and US Cold War involvement in the Korean War (1950–53) was a population of mixed race children of American servicemen and Japanese and Korean women. Although war had a devastating impact on all sectors of Japanese and Korean societies, the lives of these children were especially bleak. Japanese and Korean societies rejected them as “improper” children because many were conceived out of wedlock, and they embodied the unequal political relationship between the US and these nations. The distinctive racial features of these mixed Asian and American children made them visible targets for abuse. Separate orphanages for mixed race children in Japan, such as the Elizabeth Saunders Home in Oiso and Our Lady of Lourdes Baby Home in Yokohama, and special wings of orphanages in Korea, such as the Choong Hyun Baby Home near Seoul, offered better care for these children. Yet, the possibility of the children leaving institutional care was minimal.⁸

In the 1950s, popular culture presented utopian visions of interracial relationships. Hollywood films such as Sayonara popularized these relationships to the American masses with hopeful messages about the peaceful integration of East and West. These messages enabled current and future generations to imagine an interracial world. However, the plight of children born to US servicemen and Japanese or Korean women, also referred to as “occupation babies” and “GI babies,” received little attention or support. An American military presence in Japan and Korea was responsible for these children’s births, but the US government bore no official responsibility for the children’s or their mothers’ welfare. The US military actively discouraged marriages between American servicemen and Japanese and Korean women. Thus, discrimination against these children in Japan and Korea, the lack of US governmental support, and desertion by their American fathers influenced their mothers’ decisions to abandon them, creating a group of children in need of rescue and available for adoption.⁹

Non-governmental organizations and concerned individuals stepped in to provide some relief and to arrange international adoptions. Given restrictive quotas, they were dependent upon ad hoc government actions.¹⁰ For example, in the early 1950s, American military families stationed in Japan who had adopted children there were able to bring these children to the United States only after the passage of private bills that authorized the immigration of each child.¹¹ The most important piece of legislation to enable the immigration of internationally adopted children, the Orphan Section of the 1953 Refugee Relief Act, was set to expire on December 31, 1956. These short temporal windows of opportunity intensified the link between international adoption and humanitarian rescue.

In the broader history of US expansionism in Asia, mixed race children were not a new people. US colonization of the Philippines resulted in a population of mixed race children of US servicemen and Filipino women. By 1925, there were an estimated eighteen thousand Filipino and American mestizo, or mixed, children in the Philippines. US governor-general Leonard Wood formed a charity, the American Guardian Association, which aimed to protect these children. According to scholar Gladys Nubla, association members believed that the Caucasian roots of the American mestizo children endowed them with the potential to lead the Philippines with American interests in mind, unlike the “inferior” Filipino natives.¹²

In the early twentieth century, there was also a small population of African American and Filipino children in the Philippines. In her memoir, Evangeline Canonizado Buell recounts how her grandfather, Ernest Stokes, was among six thousand African American soldiers, known as “Buffalo Soldiers,” who were sent to the Philippines in 1898 to fight in the Spanish-American War. A group of these men, including her grandfather, remained in the Philippines, married Filipino women, and had children. After the death of his Filipina wife, Maria, Buell’s grandfather had his three daughters stay with his wife’s relatives while he completed his army service. While one daughter found love and acceptance in her new home, a different set of relatives treated the other two daughters “like servants because they were half black and did not look like their cousins with straight hair and fairer skin.”¹³ Although these children did not fare well, there was no outcry from the American public, and the US colonial government did not assume responsibility for these children. In addition to the overt American racism against both African Americans and Filipinos during this period, the US colonial government’s major objective of preparing Filipinos and the Philippines for gradual independence involved American tutelage but no commitment to integrate these children with families in the United States.

By the 1950s, however, the escalation of the Cold War posed fundamental challenges to American racism. Communist governments challenged US claims of democracy and freedom by pointing to the social realities of racial segregation, violence, and protest in the United States. Although the Soviet Union led the communist world, the role of Asian nations in the Cold War was a major concern of the US government, especially after the victory of the Chinese Communist Party in the Chinese Revolution of 1949. The international politics of race heightened debates about US accountability for the population of mixed race Asian and American children and informed the moral urgency to rescue them.

News articles popularized international adoption by publicizing the arrivals of the adopted children and their new life-altering circumstances. A January 1955 article in the New York Times announced that five children from Japan—”all are children of American fathers and Japanese mothers”—were getting homes in the United States. One adoptive family “welcomed their new sister with an armful of dolls.”¹⁴ A 1956 Kansas City Times news article featured the excitement of adoptive parents of five Korean African American children who had just arrived from Seoul. One mother commented that when the children arrived in Chicago, they lacked warm clothes, but, upon arrival, were wrapped in blankets and later had sufficient clothes purchased for them.¹⁵

Television also spread the idea of Asian international adoption as a benevolent one. A 1957 episode, “Have Jacket, Will Travel,” of the long-running series Armstrong Circle Theatre featured the international adoption stories of a mixed race Korean American boy as well as a Greek boy and an Italian girl. In the closing “real life” segment of the episode, Armstrong Circle Theatre host Douglas Edwards explains that, for the last three years, an adoption division of the International Social Service-USA (ISS-USA) branch, called World Adoption International Fund (WAIF), played a part in more than four thousand adoptions by families in the United States. He introduces two Korean children, Deborah and Johnny, who were adopted by a couple in New York. Edwards tells the audience viewers that Johnny—a kindergartner dressed smartly in a blazer and tie—spoke only Korean when he came to the United States but says he now speaks “American.” Edwards describes the younger Deborah—who wears a poofy ball gown—as “a doll” who “doesn’t speak very much yet.” Noting that these were two of the many children who find families through ISS-USA and WAIF, he concludes, “Every child in this world is entitled to a home and loving parents.”¹⁶

These stories created a simplistic narrative about the rescue of mixed race children and their successful Americanization. However, the realities in Asian countries as well as in the United States were more nuanced and complex. Japan’s Ministry of Education supported integrated schooling by 1952. In 1953, the Ministry of Welfare issued a statement claiming that various government agencies would pay special attention to mixed race children who remained in Japan, supporting them to become respectable Japanese citizens.¹⁷ The Korean government admitted mixed race children in middle and upper schools in the 1960s.¹⁸ Such improvements toward the treatment of these children raised questions about whether their widespread adoption was necessary.

In the United States, the shared desire of adoption advocates and adoptive families for less oversight, bureaucracy, and waiting periods resulted in tragic cases that moved children from one abusive situation in Asia to another in the United States. Individual advocates, such as Harry and Bertha Holt; social service organizations, such as the US branch of the International Social Service; and the Pearl S. Buck Foundation espoused different philosophies about adoption and often criticized each other’s tactics regarding what was best for the mixed race child. Sometimes these disagreements resulted in competition for children and their commodification for a nascent international adoption market.

Potential adoptive parents underwent extensive social service investigations and experienced the emotional and financial stress of having to conform to the nuclear-family and middle-class ideals of the period. They also learned that the simple joys of adoptive family life that had been publicized in news stories were far from simple. The profound sorrow (sometimes expressed through incessant crying) that adopted children felt because they missed their birth mothers or foster mothers challenged idealized notions of adoptive family life and signaled the significance of their birth families and countries of origin. Although the plight of “GI babies” persisted in the 1970s in the context of the Vietnam War, by that time more American families had turned to international adoption not as an expression of cultural superiority or humanitarianism but rather as a critique of the failure of US policy.¹⁹

Nevertheless, the international adoption of mixed race Asian and American children created a paradigm shift regarding the meaning and the making of a family. It contributed to making international and transracial adoption more of a social norm. By the late twentieth century, the United States distinguished itself as an international adoption nation. According to the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, international adoptions in the United States more than doubled between 1991 and 2001. While Russia, Guatemala, Romania, and Ukraine have been among the top sending countries of adoptive children, Asian children have constituted the majority of children internationally adopted by US citizens.

OUR MULTIRACIAL HERITAGE

Asian American interracial intimacies—romance, marriage, and family and community formation—have a history that is over 150 years old. One of the developments behind their origins was the flourishing of international port cultures in places such as nineteenth-century New York City. The centuries-long seafaring traditions of Chinese traders and adventurers, European participation in Asian markets, and Western fascination with export luxury goods shaped an international diaspora of Chinese seamen. Scholar John Kuo Wei Tchen’s research documents the history of a Chinese community in New York City before the advent of its Chinatown in the 1870s. It was a community that included Chinese-Irish families.²⁰

In the mid-1850s, a census official who walked the streets of lower New York encountered John Huston and his Irish wife, Margaret, at home with their two young daughters, Kate and Mary. Although Huston was a common Anglo-American name, John was born in China. He arrived in New York in 1829 and worked as a seaman.²¹ The Hustons were part of a pattern. The census taker found five apartments in one building, each occupied by a Chinese man married to an Irish woman. They included William Brown, a Chinese ship steward, who was married to Irishwoman Rebecca Brown. They had a six-year-old son, William, who, like Kate and Mary, was a native New Yorker.²²

Why did these Chinese men take on Western names? Tchen presents multiple possibilities. Their Anglo-Christian names may have stemmed from British influence after Hong Kong became a British colony in 1842. A British or American shipmaster might have given them these names as they sometimes did to Chinese crew members. Or, the men could have taken on these names as the result of the influence of Bible and English-language classes they took in American churches, such as the Fourth Avenue Presbyterian Church, which had a Chinese Mission.²³ Furthermore, in Chinese culture, it was traditional to take on various names. Taking on a new Western name suggested a willingness to live and work with non-Chinese workers and neighbors. It performed the same function as intermarriage in that it signaled that they had intended to stay.²⁴

In the 1910s, the maritime trade brought hundreds of Indian seamen to the waterfronts of New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. Most of these men were Muslims, coming primarily from rural villages in East Bengal—which would later become the nation of Bangladesh—but also from regions that are part of present-day Pakistan, such as Punjab, Kashmir, and the Northwest Frontier. They formed networks that inspired them to jump ship and escape the harsh working conditions onboard. And they helped each other to find work in the expanding US steel, shipbuilding, and munitions industries.

While the majority returned to the subcontinent, scholar and filmmaker Vivek Bald found that some remained in the United States for good, with the majority settling in Harlem.²⁵ They married local women, had children, and developed new networks that included Puerto Rican, African American, and West Indian extended families and friends. Living on the same neighborhood block forged a communal identity that superseded other kinds of difference. At the same time, these Bengali Muslim men kept in touch with one another. They gathered at one another’s homes and at restaurants and other businesses that they had opened. They prayed together and celebrated Eid. Their multicultural worlds were distinct from the ethnic enclaves that had more recently emerged, such as the Little Indias of post-1965 Asian America. Still, their presence was an integral part of New York City’s multiracial community in Harlem and beyond during the 1930s through the 1960s.

Firsthand accounts by community members, such as Noor Chowdry, offer a glimpse into this history. During his early childhood, Chowdry lived with his mother and maternal grandmother in East Harlem, speaking only Spanish until the age of six. Later he lived with his Bengali uncle, African American aunt, and his aunt’s son in Belleville, New Jersey. During Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays, the extended family gathered in an African American section of Montclair, New Jersey. It included more than a dozen American-born cousins who were Bengali and Puerto Rican, Bengali and African American, and Bengali and white. They shared different kinds of traditional food and conversed in multiple languages.²⁶

New Orleans’s Tremé neighborhood was also the site of a mixed Bengali Muslim, African American, and Creole community. According to Bald, these Bengali Muslims were not seamen, but rather groups of peddlers from the present-day Indian state of West Bengal who came to the United States as early as the 1880s. They brought exotic goods, such as embroidered silk, to sell to an American public fascinated by “Oriental” items.²⁷

New Orleans’s international port culture also gave birth to a multiracial Filipino Irish American community in the nineteenth century. Seaman Felipe Madrigal hailed from the Philippines and arrived in New Orleans in the early 1800s. While working on a passenger ship between Europe and the United States, he met Bridgett Nugent, an Irish woman. After getting to know one another during the three-month journey, they married upon their arrival in New Orleans. Bridgett’s parents were disappointed. They had hoped their daughter would marry a rich American and, after proceeding north, they never contacted her again.²⁸

Undeterred by their disapproval, Felipe and Bridgett settled in New Orleans’s Westbank. Felipe quit seafaring and engaged in business, opening his own restaurant. During the Civil War, when Confederate money replaced US dollars in the region, he hid two hundred Yankee dollars. His prescience paid off. After the war, he became a rich Filipino in a land of Confederate money. Librarian Marina Espina’s research traces the multiple generations of their Filipino Irish American family. Felipe and Bridgett had three daughters, Helen, Mary Ellen, and Elizabeth, all of whom married Filipinos: Teodoro Victoriano, Daniel Reyes, and Baltic Borabod. Elizabeth became a fluent speaker of French, Spanish, English, and Tagalog. She and Baltic had five children, Mathilda, Othelia, Sidonia, Rosalie, and Peter. Espina writes that the descendants return to New Orleans for regular reunions, fulfilling Elizabeth’s wish that they keep in touch “no matter how far they might be apart and no matter how many years might intervene.”²⁹

Ideas of racial purity and white supremacy ran counter to this vibrant multiracial heritage. As the numbers of Asians increased in the second half of the nineteenth century, attempts to define Americanness as whiteness included the passage of anti-miscegenation laws that prohibited Asian-white marriages. Thirty-eight states adopted laws that regulated interracial sex and marriage. All of these laws banned Black-white relationships; seven states prohibited Native American-white unions, and fourteen states prohibited Asian-white marriages.³⁰ Many of the states prohibiting Asian-white marriages were in the American West.³¹ They included the state of California, which forbade the issuance of marriage licenses to Mongolian-white couples beginning in 1880, until the California Supreme Court declared the anti-miscegenation law unconstitutional in the 1948 case of Perez v. Sharp. While there were Asian-white married couples in California during this period, they typically faced the threat of violence and strong prejudice against their unions.

Thus, the marriage of the white American woman (whose story appears in this chapter’s introduction) and Rev. Walter Ngon Fong in June 1897, took place in Denver, Colorado, instead of San Francisco. Their marriage was the subject of cruel gossip. The woman had heard that she had disgraced her family by marrying a Chinese man. When they relocated to Berkeley, she recounted that “women in their clubs and various chit-chat societies raked me over unmercifully.”³² These discriminatory attitudes contributed to why, she explained, “many American girls married to Orientals . . . have tried to conceal, from all but their immediate associates, the fact that the head of the house was Oriental.”³³

Such prejudice extended beyond Berkeley to Chicago. After historian Barbara Posadas’s Filipino father and Polish mother met in Chicago and eloped in 1931, their marriage sent a “shock wave” in her family that lasted for years.³⁴ By 1945, when Barbara was born, her mother’s family had been mostly reconciled to her choice of a husband but continued to exclude them from celebrations that involved the broader Polish community. This exclusion contributed to Posadas’s reflection that she never thought of herself as Polish despite some cultural exposure to her heritage. She heard polkas played on records but did not learn the polka dance. She enjoyed eating pierogis with plums, but rarely ate them after the death of her step-grandmother, who prepared the dish this way. Her mother spoke Polish to her father and her sisters, but Posadas suspected that she did not want her to hear their conversations.

Although Posadas did not experience overt racial discrimination at school or in her neighborhood, having a non-white father and a white mother profoundly shaped her identity. She keenly observed how “race constantly defined how my parents dealt with the world around them.”³⁵ It restricted their lives in public spaces. To reduce the likelihood of racial confrontations, they avoided being seen together as a couple. Either her mother took her shopping, or her father did. On those rare occasions when they did go out, they dined at Chinese restaurants, which seemed relatively safer. Posadas recollected a one-time family outing to a neighborhood theater to see the 1957 movie Sayonara, about interracial love and racial prejudice in postwar Japan, starring Marlon Brando and Miiko Taka. The constant physical and social maneuvering to avoid harm could not fully protect their mixed race family, however. It also took an emotional toll. Posadas recalls:

Most traumatically, when they tried to buy a single-family home in the newly developed area on the far Northwest side to which my mother’s sister, her husband, and their daughter had recently moved, neighbors on the block made clear that my father was not welcome, and the seller backed out.³⁶

The social and spatial impacts of racism contributed to the formation of mixed race families among non-whites in California in the first half of the twentieth century. In her study of “romantic crossings,” scholar Allison Varzally argues that “non-whites mixed in churches, farms, schools, working districts, and neighborhoods because it was difficult not to.”³⁷ Restrictive housing covenants, alien land laws, employment discrimination, and school segregation circumscribed their mobility, often compelling them to interact in the same places.

Restrictive immigration laws prevented the approximately 6,800 Indian men who came to the American West between 1899 and 1914 from bringing wives. Most of these men hailed from the Punjab province. Collectively—though incorrectly—labeled as “Hindus” during this period, the vast majority of them were Sikh and a smaller percentage were Muslim. They faced intense prejudice from their relationships with white women. When one Punjabi man mentioned a romance he had had with a white woman, his Anglo neighbor threatened him with a shotgun and had him arrested.³⁸

Although Mexican Americans were “white” by law, their relationships with non-white men, including romantic ones, were generally more acceptable in county clerk offices and in everyday life. If a clerk decided not to issue a marriage license, couples went to another county, state, or even on the high seas for a ship captain’s ceremony.³⁹ In her study of California’s Punjabi Mexican American community, scholar Karen Leonard traces a pattern of intermarriage that extended from El Paso and Canutillo in Texas to Las Cruces, New Mexico, to California’s Imperial Valley, where most of the Punjabi Mexican couples lived. Their labor in cotton fields as well as racial segregation brought them together. Mexican women played a major role in growing this community by arranging matches between relatives and friends and Punjabis.

These marriages produced many children, including stepchildren, and a multigenerational Punjabi Mexican American community emerged. Their histories are reflected in their children’s names, such as Maria Jesusita Singh, Jose Akbar Khan, and Armando Chand.⁴⁰ A strong Mexican cultural influence came from mothers, aunts and grandmothers, godmothers, and other children, including older Spanish-speaking stepchildren who helped take care of the younger ones, and classmates, many of whom were Spanish speakers. According to Leonard, even in the present day, some in the Imperial Valley think of Singh as a Mexican American surname.⁴¹

Although Punjabi culture may not have been as prominent in the children’s upbringing, it still mattered. The men taught their wives how to prepare Punjabi-style vegetables and chicken curry. Some took off their traditional turbans but kept the iron wrist bangles that symbolized their Sikh faith.⁴² Many did not teach their children Punjabi language in part because they considered their children to be American, but also because of their own intense work schedules in the agricultural fields. As they aged and became grandfathers, they had more time to share stories about the Punjab. Some of their descendants relished this time, such as John Diwan’s daughter, Janie, who felt a sense of loss when her father suddenly stopped their evening story sessions about Punjabi culture.⁴³ Overall, Leonard found that Punjabi Mexican children grew up taking great pride in their Indian heritage.⁴⁴

Like Punjabi Mexican couples, Filipino Mexican couples did not face the harsh social ostracism and violence that Filipino-white couples endured in California and beyond. In 1933, an amendment to California’s anti-miscegenation law prohibited Filipino-white intermarriage. Scholar Rudy P. Guevarra Jr.’s research shows that multiracial areas in San Diego brought Filipino men and Mexican women together. ⁴⁵ These places included the Southeast, the South Bay, and along the waterfront, such as Logan Heights and National City. The labor needs of the agricultural, fish canning, defense, and service industries attracted Mexican and Filipino workers to these areas. While San Diego’s proximity to the Mexican border contributed to continual migration flows, the US Navy’s recruitment of Filipinos beginning in the early twentieth century facilitated Filipino migration to San Diego. Until 1998, San Diego was the site of the largest US naval base and the Naval Training Center. Approximately half of San Diego’s Filipino population has ties to the US Navy.⁴⁶

A shared Spanish colonial past that intertwined Mexico and the Philippines through the Acapulco-Manila Galleon Trade (1565–1815) and its cultural legacies—most notably Catholicism, Spanish language, cuisine, and practices such as compadrazgo, or “godparenthood”—created common ground. Beginning in the 1930s, marriages between Filipino men and Mexican women produced generations of Mexipino children. Their mothers’ influence as well as the geographic proximity to Mexico contributed to the strong Mexican cultural influence in Mexipino lives. In spite of the vast ocean that separated San Diego from the Philippine Islands, Filipino traditions were also maintained. The sound of conversations in Tagalog and Ilocano, the sight of Filipino elders, and the tastes of traditional food at Filipino community events and family gatherings enabled the transmission of Filipino culture. Like Mexican cuisine, Filipino dishes, such as menudo, empanadas, adobo, and caldo de arroz, displayed Spanish influences, but were also uniquely Filipino in their preparation, presentation, and flavor.⁴⁷

Sometimes a sense of belonging was a challenge for Mexipinos even in these multiracial spaces. Suzanna Balino Fernandez explained: “The Mexicans thought you were too ‘Oriental’ and the Filipinos thought you were too Mexican. If you didn’t know Spanish, they [the Mexicans] would make fun of you, and if you didn’t know Tagalog, they [the Filipinos] would make fun of you too.”⁴⁸

Rituals surrounding the preparation and consumption of food were among the strongest factors in a holistic formation of Mexipinos’ mixed identity. Rashaan Meneses related that both of her parents prepared Mexican and Filipino dishes: “They would both cook adobo. . . . They definitely mixed it. We’d have lumpia and homemade enchiladas together.”⁴⁹ Sophia Limjoco shared: “When we have parties, both the Mexican and Filipino sides of our family get together. There are a lot of people there! Our food is a combination of Mexican and Filipino. We have tortillas, beans, salsa, nopales, as well as lumpia, rice, pan de sal, and sandwiches. It’s great!” People’s eagerness to participate in everyday activities and special occasions created belonging and sustained community.

Guevarra concludes that the Mexipino experience presents a new perspective, one forged out of multiracial spaces and comparative and relational histories.⁵⁰ This perspective is needed because our future is becoming more multiracial.

OUR MULTIRACIAL FUTURE

According to the first racial and ethnic breakdown from the 2020 census, the biggest population increase was among people who identified as more than one race. Americans who identified as non-Hispanic and more than one race rose from 6 million to 13.5 million. For people who identified as Hispanic and multiracial, the increase was even higher, from 3 million to 20.3 million. The 2000 census was the first time Americans were able to choose more than one race to describe themselves.⁵¹

Public figures, such as Vice President Kamala Harris, who is the daughter of Indian and Jamaican parents, and the first female, first Black, and first Asian American US vice president, are bringing more attention to multiracial individuals and families. Harris has spoken openly and positively about her multiracial background. Her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, immigrated to the US to pursue a doctorate in nutrition and endocrinology at the University of California, Berkeley, and became a civil rights activist and a breast cancer researcher. On the campaign trail, Harris described her mother as a proud woman: “She was a brown woman. She was a woman with a heavy accent. She was a woman who, many times, people would overlook her or not take her seriously.”⁵² After Harris’s parents’ divorce, Gopalan raised Harris and her younger sister as a single mother. She exposed them to their Indian heritage, while being equally committed to having them grow into confident Black women.

Many factors contributed to the growing multiracial Asian American population of our present day. Changing laws and judicial precedents, most notably with the Supreme Court decision of Loving v. Virginia in 1967, made anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional, enabling a rise in intermarriage from 7 percent in 1980 to 17 percent in 2015.⁵³ The pioneering research of scholars such as Paul Spickard and Maria P. P. Root, featuring multiracial Asian American histories and contemporary experiences, expanded both the Black-white paradigm of mixed race studies and the monoracial approaches of Asian American studies.⁵⁴ Root’s Filipino American background and work as a clinical psychologist influenced her research and advocacy. She explained that “because most Filipinos have racially diverse family roots—like Spanish, Malay and Chinese—they often struggle to find a place within the Asian-American community.”⁵⁵

Root authored the 1993 Bill of Rights for People of Mixed Heritage, a groundbreaking and generative text. The bill opens with “I have the right . . .” and includes the following phrases: “Not to justify my existence in the world”; “To identify myself differently than strangers expect me to identify”; and “To create a vocabulary to communicate about being multiracial or multiethnic.” It concludes with the right “to freely choose whom I befriend and love.”⁵⁶

In 2006, artist Kip Fulbeck’s landmark project, Part Asian, 100% Hapa, became the first museum exhibition to explicitly explore multiracial Asian identity. Hapa, the Hawai’ian word for “half,” has been used by many multiracial Asian Americans to describe themselves, although some have become more critical of this use of the Hawai’ian word and no longer use it.⁵⁷ The project showcases individual photographic portraits of multiracial Asian people accompanied by their own answers to the ubiquitous question: “What are you?”

Alongside their portrait, one person responds, “African American, Japanese,” and in their own handwriting writes, “I am 100% Black and 100% Japanese.”⁵⁸ Another replies, “Vietnamese, Spanish, French,” and “No. Spain never colonized Viet Nam. But, thanks for asking. I am a scholar, organizer & adventurer. I strive for unique thoughts with universal understandings—precisely because it is expected of me & not expected of me.”⁵⁹ The exhibition was first displayed at the Japanese American National Museum (JANM) before traveling throughout the United States and abroad. It was one of the most popular exhibitions in JANM’s history.

In 2018, a new exhibition, hapa.me: 15 years of the hapa project, paired the original photographs and statements from the 2006 exhibition with contemporary portraits of the same individuals and new statements, showing not only their physical changes over fifteen years, but also their changes in perspective and outlook on the world.⁶⁰ The person who responded “African American, Japanese” to the question “What are you?” expanded on the answer to include “son, husband, father.” The other person replied, “Being mixed-race means having the gift of empathy and knowing that differing ideas, beliefs, backgrounds . . . can, and have, come together for love, peace, and understanding.”⁶¹

Fulbeck, who is of Chinese, English, and Irish descent, shares that, like many Hapa children, he felt like he was “the only one.” The project produced two companion volumes, the kind of books Fulbeck wishes he had when he was growing up. He writes that the project started with a simple idea: “To photograph a couple hundred Hapas and have them write about themselves. Give them the opportunity to show their image and respond in their own words to the question that accompanies the lives of us in-betweens like a second skin.”⁶²

New multiracial histories are emerging. After his mother was killed in the Atlanta spa shootings on March 16, 2021, Robert Peterson took up an offer to receive a free tattoo from celebrity tattoo artist Young Bae to memorialize his mother. Like Bae, Robert is Black and Korean. His tattoo features his mother’s name, Yong Ae Yue, and a boiling stone pot of kimchi jjigae, the first dish that she taught him to make and his favorite.

In an insightful and moving story for the Washington Post, Michelle Ye Hee Lee reports that Yue was born in 1957 and grew up in South Korea. She married an American soldier who she met there, and they moved to Fort Benning, Georgia, around 1980. Yue taught herself to read and write in English and became a US citizen. After she and her husband divorced around 1984, she gave him full custody of their sons, Elliott and Robert. It was a difficult choice for her, but she was mindful that her sons looked more Black than Asian, and she believed that they could better understand their experiences as Black men in America with their father.

After Elliott joined the army, Yue eventually moved back to Georgia where Robert was still in high school. She loved to cook Korean food for her sons, once bringing a large amount of kimchi for Robert in his dormitory at Morehouse College, a historically Black men’s liberal arts college. Yue also loved working. She had worked at a grocery store before cooking and cleaning for a spa. When she lost that job during the pandemic, she found a similar one at another spa, where she monitored the security cameras and opened the door for customers. The shooter took Yue’s life with a single gunshot to her head. The Atlanta spa shootings took place at three spas and claimed the lives of eight people, six of whom were Asian women.

In the midst of their grief, Elliott and Robert have pondered over their mother’s life history in relation to their own. Elliott said, “I’m very proud to be mixed. I’m very proud that when she was young, in Korea, that she gave my father a chance.” After receiving support from both Black and Asian communities, Robert, who has a doctorate in medical sociology, has been working toward bringing both communities together to fight for greater equity. The Congressional Asian Pacific American and Black Caucuses have invited him to speak about his experience. Robert believes that, had his mother been alive to see him and his brother “embraced” by both communities, “she would have loved that.”⁶³

By placing mixed race lives at the center of Asian American histories, we are able to glean distinctive viewpoints and voices. They offer new perspectives about our past and present. And they present new possibilities for making and re-making a family, a community, a nation.