Mixed Race Studies

“Certain promoters would want to highlight that I was mixed race, and they’d want me to say that I was like, Southeast Asian, or not Black. Or one guy wanted me to not speak English. I was uncomfortable with a lot, obviously.

I was told I couldn’t have my hair natural. It’s not like I have the curliest of ‘fros. But they didn’t want me to have natural hair, so I would wear a hair weave because you couldn’t be a mixed Blasian if you didn’t have silky straight hair.

I had to buy my identity for $220 a pop.” —N’jaila Rhee

Esther Wang, “Let’s talk about sex (and race, and gender, and intersectionality),” Open City, March 23, 2015. http://opencitymag.aaww.org/lets-talk-njaila-rhee/.

Let’s talk about sex (and race, and gender, and intersectionality)

Open City
2015-03-23

Esther Wang

N’jaila Rhee is many things — a writer; a phone sex operator, web cam girl, and former exotic dancer; a nerd; and a self-described “Blasian bitch.”

A native of New Jersey and a Rutgers University alumna, she’s carved out a niche for herself as a vocal critic and commentator on issues ranging from sex workers’ rights to favorite toys to racism in the porn industry. She uses her blog, social media, and “After Dark,” the popular podcast she co-hosts on the “This Week in Blackness” network, as platforms to voice her provocative positions.

N’jaila’s mission, it seems, is to get us all to bring our private desires out from the bedroom and into the open. Do this, and “we’re all going to be a little more healthy,” she explained on a recent evening in a Brooklyn coffee shop.

We chatted about the need for more Asian American porn, her thoughts on 50 Shades of Grey, and what it’s like to, as she put it, be constantly “dancing at the intersections of race, sex, and identity.”,,,

You became a stripper in college. Why did you decide to become a dancer?

Sex is the most natural way that I can relate to other people. And it’s always something that just felt innately right. So because it was so easy for me to express myself sexually, it was something that I felt very comfortable with…

…Did being Blasian impact the kind of work you got?

Certain promoters would want to highlight that I was mixed race, and they’d want me to say that I was like, Southeast Asian, or not Black. Or one guy wanted me to not speak English. I was uncomfortable with a lot, obviously.

I was told I couldn’t have my hair natural. It’s not like I have the curliest of ‘fros. But they didn’t want me to have natural hair, so I would wear a hair weave because you couldn’t be a mixed Blasian if you didn’t have silky straight hair.

I had to buy my identity for $220 a pop…

Read the entire interview here.

The Forgotten Amerasians

Open City
Asian American Writers’ Workshop
2016-02-11

Enrico Dungca

Unwanted in their mothers’ country and unwelcome in their fathers’ homeland, Filipino Amerasians are still in search of a home.

“Do you know your father?” I asked him.

It was a humid, rainy night in Angeles City, some 50 miles north of Manila. I was aboard a jeepney on my way home after partying with friends during a recent trip to the Philippines. He was also a passenger on that jeepney, the most popular mode of public transportation in the Philippines that were originally made from U.S. military jeeps left over from World War II – one of the more visible and enduring vestiges of American military presence in the Philippines.

“My mother is a Filipino, and my father is an American,” Eric said, as he lowered his gaze and kept it fixed on the jeepney floor. He started shaking his head and said he has no recollection of his father, although he often wondered about him — where he lives, if he is still alive, or if he remembers him or if he knew that he existed at all.

His father is a U.S. serviceman, one of the hundreds of thousands of American military men who were stationed in the Philippines since 1898 when the U.S. became the new colonial master of the former Spanish colony. Eric is what Nobel Prize for literature awardee Pearl Buck called an “Amerasian” — born of Asian mothers and sired and abandoned by their American soldier-fathers who were momentarily posted in countries that were either stages or hosts to U.S. military adventures…

Read the entire article here.