{"id":42475,"date":"2015-08-31T17:42:06","date_gmt":"2015-08-31T17:42:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=42475"},"modified":"2015-10-09T15:45:57","modified_gmt":"2015-10-09T15:45:57","slug":"from-okinawa-to-hawaii-and-back-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=42475","title":{"rendered":"From Okinawa to Hawaii and Back Again"},"content":{"rendered":"

From Okinawa to Hawaii and Back Again<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

What It Means to Be American: Hosted by The Smithsonian and Z\u00f3calo Public Square<\/a>
\n2015-08-31<\/p>\n

Laua Kina<\/a><\/strong>, Vincent de Paul Professor of Art, Media, & Design
\nDePaul University, Chicago, Illinois<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
\nKibei Nisei<\/em>, 30 x 45 inches Oil on canvas (2012)<\/small><\/p>\n

A Painter Follows the Currents of Her Family History<\/em><\/p>\n

I am a hapa<\/a>, yonsei<\/a> Uchinanchu<\/a><\/em> (a mixed-race, 4th-generation Okinawan-American) who was born in Riverside, California<\/a>, in 1973 and raised in the shadow of the Cascade Mountains<\/a> in Washington state<\/a>. My mom\u2019s roots stem from Spanish-Basque<\/a> migrants in California<\/a> and white southerners in Tennessee<\/a>. My father is Okinawan<\/a> from Hawaii<\/a>. Because I don\u2019t look quite white, people frequently ask, \u201cWhat are you?\u201d From an early age, even though Hawaii and Japan<\/a> were enigmas to me, I have had to explain my relationship to these \u201cexotic\u201d places.<\/p>\n

Growing up, we lived by my mother\u2019s family and visited her parents weekly at their road-side motel near a Puget Sound<\/a> ferry landing, but I knew little about my father\u2019s childhood, an ocean away, on a Piihonua sugarcane plantation near Hilo<\/a>. I got a glimpse on occasional vacations to visit family on the Big Island of Hawaii<\/a> or my aunties in Los Angeles<\/a>. The only other traces were evident in the Spam<\/a> in our sushi, the fact that we called instant ramen noodles saimin<\/a>, and in the echoes of Pidgin English<\/a> in Dad\u2019s accent that refused to be erased.<\/p>\n

I am a painter, and at the heart of my paintings is the journey I\u2019ve been on to understand how these different currents have formed my American experience. I\u2019ve followed their flow back in time to the canefields of Territorial Hawaii<\/a> and early 20th-century Okinawa, Japan…<\/p>\n

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

From Okinawa to Hawaii and Back Again What It Means to Be American: Hosted by The Smithsonian and Z\u00f3calo Public Square 2015-08-31 Laua Kina, Vincent de Paul Professor of Art, Media, & Design DePaul University, Chicago, Illinois Kibei Nisei, 30 x 45 inches Oil on canvas (2012) A Painter Follows the Currents of Her Family […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,24,16,395,459,8,20],"tags":[911,17018,1793,41,5098,20874],"class_list":{"0":"post-42475","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"hentry","6":"category-articles","7":"category-arts","8":"category-asia","9":"category-autobiography","10":"category-history","11":"category-media-archive","12":"category-usa","13":"tag-hawaii","15":"tag-japan","16":"tag-laura-kina","17":"tag-okinawa","18":"tag-what-it-means-to-be-american"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42475","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=42475"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42475\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42476,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42475\/revisions\/42476"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=42475"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=42475"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=42475"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}