{"id":43133,"date":"2015-10-08T19:17:17","date_gmt":"2015-10-08T19:17:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=43133"},"modified":"2017-05-12T17:40:44","modified_gmt":"2017-05-12T17:40:44","slug":"liminality-as-inheritance-on-being-mixed-and-third-culture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=43133","title":{"rendered":"Liminality as Inheritance: On Being Mixed and Third Culture"},"content":{"rendered":"

Liminality as Inheritance: On Being Mixed and Third Culture<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Mixed Roots Stories<\/a>
\n2015-10-07<\/p>\n

Mari L\u2019Esperance<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

The following is adapted from previous posts published at Discover Nikkei and Best American Poetry.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cTo be hybrid anticipates the future.\u201d<\/em> \u2014Isamu Noguchi<\/a>, 1942<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Noguchi\u2019s prescient words are manifesting on every level in our time. Just look around you: rigid binaries and categories continue to shift, dissolve, and flow into one another, creating a new \u201cthird\u201d. As a woman of mixed heritage I\u2019m compelled by the process that unfolds in this liminal space\u2014a space that isn\u2019t this or that, but is its own realm\u2014a borderland of both\/and. It is a space of fluidity and potentiality where all my \u201cselves\u201d are free to be, where I\u2019m beholden to no one culture, camp, or tribe, but can instead move between and among them. It\u2019s an exciting, and destabilizing, time in which to be alive.<\/p>\n

The symbolic and psychological meanings of \u201cborderlands\u201d\u2014both internal and external\u2014have been my preoccupation for years. It\u2019s a preoccupation that comes with the territory. I am the daughter of a Japanese mother born before World War II<\/a> in Tokyo<\/a> to an upper middle-class family and a French Canadian<\/a>–New Englander<\/a> father who grew up during the Great Depression<\/a> in a working class, bilingual family. My parents raised my brother and me with both cultures in various locations in California<\/a>, Micronesia<\/a>, and Japan<\/a>. This last is why I also consider myself an adult Third Culture Kid<\/a>\u2014a person who\u2019s been raised in places and cultures other than her parents\u2019 passport country\/countries. TCKs internalize aspects of all the cultures in which they\u2019ve been immersed while not having full ownership in any. Consequently, I\u2019m adaptable, curious, restless, and can live pretty much anywhere. My least favorite question is \u201cWhere are you from?\u201d because it is impossible to answer. If I were to use a food metaphor to describe my internal experience, Asian hot pot (or nabemono<\/a><\/em> in Japanese) probably comes closest. Although I often felt \u201cother\u201d as a younger person, in midlife I\u2019m finally learning to settle into and appreciate my unique background and have mostly let go of struggling to fit in. I\u2019ve come to learn that I prefer the in-between…<\/p>\n

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

\u201cTo be hybrid anticipates the future.\u201d \u2014Isamu Noguchi, 1942<\/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":[13469],"class_list":["post-43133","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-asia","category-autobiography","category-media-archive","category-usa","tag-mari-lesperance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43133","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=43133"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43133\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53888,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43133\/revisions\/53888"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=43133"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=43133"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=43133"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}