{"id":42213,"date":"2015-08-13T00:09:10","date_gmt":"2015-08-13T00:09:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=42213"},"modified":"2015-08-13T00:09:10","modified_gmt":"2015-08-13T00:09:10","slug":"the-beauty-of-being-mixed-race-how-i-learned-to-love-my-hapa-eyes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=42213","title":{"rendered":"The beauty of being mixed race: How I learned to love my hapa eyes"},"content":{"rendered":"

The beauty of being mixed race: How I learned to love my hapa eyes<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Today Show<\/a>
\n2015-08-12<\/p>\n

Samantha Okazaki<\/a><\/strong>, Multimedia Producer<\/p>\n

“Chinese eyes, Chinese eyes,” the whole table mocked me with their stupid song, pulling at the corners of their eyelids until they were tiny slits; a gross exaggeration of my actual eye shape.<\/p>\n

They weren’t being very nice \u2026 or creative. I’m not even Chinese.<\/p>\n

But 8-year-old me didn’t know how to say that or how to put them in their place. How to tell them that I was born in Japan, but was just as much an American as they were. And that my eyes weren’t a caricature: they were real, they were mine and they were welling with tears.<\/p>\n

Instead I wished I could bury myself in my cubby with my baseball cap and glitter pens and never come out. I blamed myself for giving them reason to taunt me. I hated my stupid eyes! I hated how small they were and how skinny. I hated the tic I had developed, a hard deliberate blink that got worse when I was nervous or self-conscious. I hated my dad for giving me my eyes. And I hated being half-Japanese because it meant I looked different than everyone else.<\/p>\n

Fast-forward 10 years later. Aside from the tic, which followed me wherever I went, I had pretty much buried all memories of the bullying my eyes had inspired. Then, I moved to the East Coast for college.<\/p>\n

I moved away from my hometown that was surprisingly diverse and my friend group that was predominantly mixed race. I unpacked my bags in upstate New York and was greeted with a level of racism I had thought to be extinct…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The beauty of being mixed race: How I learned to love my hapa eyes Today Show 2015-08-12 Samantha Okazaki, Multimedia Producer “Chinese eyes, Chinese eyes,” the whole table mocked me with their stupid song, pulling at the corners of their eyelids until they were tiny slits; a gross exaggeration of my actual eye shape. They […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,16,395,8,20],"tags":[20675,20676],"class_list":["post-42213","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-asia","category-autobiography","category-media-archive","category-usa","tag-samantha-okazaki","tag-today-show"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42213","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=42213"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42213\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42214,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42213\/revisions\/42214"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=42213"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=42213"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=42213"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}