Mixed Race Studies

Anne Liu Kellor with Kristen Millares Young — Heart Radical

Third Place Books Events
Third Place Books
2021-10-01

Kristen Millares Young, Host

On September 28th, 2021, Third Place Books was honored to host Anne Liu Kellor for the release of her debut memoir, Heart Radical: A Search for Language, Love, and Belonging. She will be joined in conversation by Kristen Millares Young, author of the critically-acclaimed novel Subduction.

Language as a Kind of Home: Talking with Anne Liu Kellor

The Rumpus
2021-09-02

Grace Loh Prasad

Anne Liu Kellor

How far do you need to travel to unlock the truth of your own heart? This is the central question in Anne Liu Kellor’s lyrical memoir Heart Radical: A Search for Language, Love, and Belonging, forthcoming from She Writes Press on September 7. Propelled by a spiritual quest and a longing to reconnect with the language her mother spoke to her growing up, Kellor left the comfort of her Pacific Northwest home to embark on a journey to Tibet and China in her twenties. Although it wasn’t her first time there—she’d visited before in college—this time she returned to China with a stronger resolve to find a sense of purpose and renew a part of her identity that felt stifled at home.

After traveling to Lhasa, visiting a remote monastery, and almost losing her passport, Kellor set up a home base in Chengdu, a bustling metropolis in Western China that’s bigger than New York City. She found work teaching English to college and graduate students but quickly became overwhelmed with the workload and the stress of having to be a role model and tiptoeing around sensitive topics such as Tibet and Tiananmen. Without a job and determined to stay in Chengdu, she moved in with an artist friend, Yizhong, who soon became her lover.

The safe shelter of her tender relationship with Yizhong allowed her to explore more confidently, develop her vocabulary, and pursue her creative impulses to paint and write in her journal. But even as her Mandarin fluency grew and she settled into a comforting rhythm, as a mixed-race and bicultural woman living in China she ultimately decided she wanted more—choosing a life that would be expansive enough to embrace all of her various identities.

I spoke with Kellor in late July about her debut memoir, her relationship to language, her evolving impressions of China, and having the heart of a seeker…

Read the entire interview here.

Heart Radical: A Search for Language, Love, and Belonging

She Writes Press
2021-09-07
253 pages
5.43 x 0.94 x 8.35 inches
Paperback ISBN: 978-1647421731

Anne Liu Kellor

Wanting to understand how her path is tied to her mother tongue, Anne, a young, multiracial American woman, travels through China, the country of her mother’s birth. Along the way, she tries on different roles—seeker, teacher, student, girlfriend, artist, and daughter—and continually asks herself: Why do I feel called to make this journey?

Whether witnessing a Tibetan sky burial, teaching English at a university in Chengdu, visiting her grandmother in LA, or falling in love with a Chinese painter, Anne is always in pursuit of intimacy with others, even as she is all too aware of her silences and separation. For two years, she settles into a comfortable routine in her boyfriend’s apartment and regains fluency in Chinese, a language she spoke as a young child but has used less and less as an adult. Eventually, however, her desire to know herself in other ways surfaces again. She misses speaking English, she feels suffocated by urban, polluted China, and she starts to fall for another man. Ultimately, Anne realizes that to live her truth as a mixed-race, bilingual woman she must embrace all of her influences and layers. In a world that often wants us to choose a side or fit an ideal, she learns that she can both belong and not belong wherever she is, and that home is ultimately found within.

Seaweed Soup (Miyuk Gook 미역국)

The Rumpus
2020-03-10

Maria T. Alloccoo

Ingredients:

• A handful of miyuk (미역) seaweed

My pregnant grandmother walked through miles of man-made bombs in North Korea to reach the south. Once a wealthy woman, she now wore her remaining possessions. A local South Korean woman allowed my grandmother to enter her empty shed. There, my grandmother gave birth to my mother.

The woman made my grandmother 미역국. Fed it to her. It is tradition to serve seaweed soup to new mothers. Also, to loved ones on birthdays. Both birth and survival are miracles…

Read the entire article/recipe here.

Conservatives More Likely To See Vice President Harris as ‘White’ than Liberals

CSUN Today
California State University, Northridge
2021-10-26

Media Contact: Carmen Ramos Chandler, Director of Media Relations

As the fight for the White House heated up last year and Kamala Harris became the first woman of color on a major party ticket, California State University, Northridge researchers wondered if political ideology would influence how people perceived her biracial ancestry.

What they found surprised them. Conservatives labeled now-Vice President Harris — whose mother is South Asian and was born in India and father is Black and was born in Jamaica — as “white” much more often than liberals, who tended to categorize her as multiracial.

“There were some theories out there suggesting that conservatives were less willing to acknowledge that she is Black — she identifies herself as a Black woman and frequently references her Indian heritage — than liberals, who would be more willing to recognize her multiracial ancestry,” said CSUN psychology professor Debbie Ma…

Read the entire article here.

Famous Adopted People

Unnamed Press
2018-10-16
331 pages
5.5 x 1.1 x 8.4 inches
12 ounces
Paperback ISBN: 9781944700744

Alice Stephens

Debut novelist Alice Stephens combines dark humor and a keen wit to examine the profound implications of not knowing where you come from; and how our perceptions of an unknown world reflect deeper truths about our own.

Lisa Pearl is an American teaching English in Japan and the situation there—thanks mostly to her spontaneous, hard-partying ways—has become problematic. Now she’s in Seoul, South Korea, with her childhood best-friend Mindy. The young women share a special bond: they are both Korean-born adoptees into white American families. Mindy is in Seoul to track down her birth mom, and wants Lisa to do the same. Trouble is, Lisa isn’t convinced she needs to know about her past, much less meet her biological mother.

She’d much rather spend time with Harrison, an almost supernaturally handsome local who works for the Motherfinder’s agency. When Lisa wakes up inside a palatial mountain compound, the captive of a glamorous, surgically-enhanced blonde named Honey, she soon realizes she is going to learn about her past whether she likes it or not. What happens next only could in one place: North Korea.

Eurasians and Racial Capital in a “Race War”

Asia Pacific Perspectives: A Publication of the Center for Asia Pacific Studies
Volume 14, Number 2 (Spring 2017)
pages 4-19

W. Puck Brecher, Ph.D., Professor of History
Washington State University

The ubiquity of racist propaganda in Japan and the U.S. during the Pacific War and the extraordinary cruelty of the fighting have fostered the perception that Japanese and Americans harbored a deep racial hatred for each other. Indeed, historical research convincingly interprets the Pacific War as a “race war” within the contexts of military engagement and state rhetoric. We know little, however, about how resident Westerners lived and interacted with Japanese during the war and whether they became victims of racial hatred. This article explores the impacts of state ideology on Japanese citizens’ racial attitudes by examining the treatment and experiences of mixed-race individuals, and Eurasians particularly, stranded in Japan during the war. In doing so, it contextualizes and corrects harmful allegations of racism among civilian Japanese.

Read the entire article in PDF or HTML format.

Personal Attention Roleplay, Stories

Metonymy Press
2021-10-19
280 pages
13.3 x 20.5 x 1.27 cm
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-7774852-1-4

Helen Chau Bradley

A young gymnast crushes on an older, more talented teammate while contending with her overworked mother. A newly queer twenty-something juggles two intimate relationships—with a slippery anarchist lover and an idiosyncratic meals-on-wheels recipient. A queer metal band’s summer tour unravels amid the sticky heat of the Northeastern US. A codependent listicle writer becomes obsessed with a Japanese ASMR channel.

The stories in Personal Attention Roleplay are propelled by queer loneliness, mixed-race confusion, late capitalist despondency, and the pitfalls of intimacy. Taking place in Montreal, Toronto, and elsewhere, they feature young Asian misfits struggling with the desire to see themselves reflected—in their surroundings, in others, online. Chau Bradley’s precise language and investigation of our more troubling motivations stand out in this wryly funny debut, through stories that hint at the uncanny while remaining grounded in the everyday.

Beyond being either-or: identification of multiracial and multiethnic Japanese

Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies
Volume 47, 2021 – Issue 4: Special Issue: Re-constructing Ways of Belonging: Cross-country Experiences of Multiethnic and Multiracial People
pages 802-820
DOI: 10.1080/1369183X.2019.1654155

Sayaka Osanami Törngren
Malmö Institute for Studies of Migration, Diversity and Welfare
Malmö University, Malmö, Sweden

Yuna Satob
Graduate School of Human Relations
Keio University, Tokyo, Japan

Although the number of multiracial and multiethnic Japanese who are socially recognised and identified as haafu (mixed) has increased due to a rise in intermarriages, the identities and experiences of mixed persons in Japan are seldom critically analysed. Based on interviews with 29 multiracial and multiethnic individuals residing in Japan, this article explores not only how multiracial and multiethnic Japanese identify themselves but also how they feel they are identified by others in society. The analysis shows that multiracial and multiethnic persons self-identify in a way that goes beyond either-or categories and the binary notions of Japanese/foreigner. It also reveals how both multiracial and multiethnic persons face a gap between self-identity and ascribed identity and that they negotiate this gap in various ways. However, the gap and the negotiation process that multiracial persons face differ to those of multiethnic persons. Multiracial persons whose mixedness is phenotypically visible experience more constraints in their ethnic options and have more difficulty in passing as Japanese, whereas multiethnic persons whose mixedness is invisible can pass as Japanese more easily but face constraints in their ethnic option to be identified as mixed and in claiming their multiethnic background.

Read the entire article in HTML or PDF format.

Sidesplitter: How to be from Two Worlds at Once

Hodder & Stoughton
2021-09-16
304 pages
Hardcover ISBN-13: 9781529350272
eBook ISBN-13: 9781529350296
Audiobook ISBN-13: 9781529350302

Phil Wang

One of the UK’s brightest and best comedians takes an incisive look at race and belonging.

‘But where are you really from?’

Phil Wang has been asked this question so many times he’s finally written a book about it.

In this mix of comic memoir and observational essay, one of the UK’s most exciting stand-up comedians reflects on his experiences as a Eurasian man in the West and in the East. Phil was born in Stoke-on-Trent, raised in Malaysia, and then came of age in Bath – ‘a spa town for people who find Cheltenham too ethnic’.

Phil takes an incisive look at what it means to be mixed race, as he explores the contrasts between cultures and delves into Britain and Malaysia’s shared histories, bringing his trademark cynicism and wit to topics ranging from family, food, and comedy to race, empire, and colonialism.