{"id":43981,"date":"2015-11-16T03:28:12","date_gmt":"2015-11-16T03:28:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=43981"},"modified":"2015-11-16T03:28:12","modified_gmt":"2015-11-16T03:28:12","slug":"my-face-is-a-face-of-asian-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=43981","title":{"rendered":"My Face is a Face of Asian America"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em><strong><a href=\"http:\/\/hapamama.com\/2015\/11\/14\/racially-ambiguous-my-face-is-a-face-of-asian-america\/\" target=\"_blank\">My Face is a Face of Asian America<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/hapamama.com\" target=\"_blank\">Hapa Mama: Asian Fusion Family and Food<\/a><br \/>\n2015-11-14<\/p>\n<p><strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/in\/candacekita\" target=\"_blank\">Candace Kita<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>\u201cBlending in\u201d has never been my strong suit. As a generally shy and rather bookish individual, I have always wished that I could more naturally fit seamlessly into my surroundings. However, my inability to blend into established categories\u2013particularly in regards to race\u2013unexpectedly led me to become the Asian American community activist that I am today.<\/p>\n<p>As a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=329\" target=\"_blank\">hapa<\/a> Japanese American growing up in the flat plains of <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Chicago_metropolitan_area\" target=\"_blank\">suburban Chicago<\/a>, I knew that I stood out from a very young age. I looked different from the rest of my family, and especially from my mom, who was my primary caretaker. A second-generation Swedish American, my mother embodies the Scandinavian archetype: tall, lean, blonde, and blue-eyed. I, on the other hand, was a racially ambiguous, chubby, Asian-ish child with a chocolate brown mushroom cut. Although my mother and I sometimes sported matching <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Hanna_Andersson\" target=\"_blank\">Hanna Andersson<\/a> sweater sets (not that I had much say at age two, mind you), clothing was not enough to prevent the attention and astonishment that came from our largely mono-ethnic community. Once, on a family shopping trip to the neighborhood grocery store, a stranger oohed over my almond-shaped eyes, pointed to me and asked my mother, \u201cWhere did you get her from?\u201d Due to my \u201clook,\u201d my mother\u2019s womb was clearly not his first assumption. I was a foreigner two blocks away from my childhood home&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Read the entire article <a href=\"http:\/\/hapamama.com\/2015\/11\/14\/racially-ambiguous-my-face-is-a-face-of-asian-america\/\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My Face is a Face of Asian America Hapa Mama: Asian Fusion Family and Food 2015-11-14 Candace Kita \u201cBlending in\u201d has never been my strong suit. As a generally shy and rather bookish individual, I have always wished that I could more naturally fit seamlessly into my surroundings. However, my inability to blend into established [&hellip;]<\/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":[21902,18925,18924],"class_list":["post-43981","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-asia","category-autobiography","category-media-archive","category-usa","tag-candace-kita","tag-hapa-mama","tag-hapa-mama-asian-fusion-family-and-food"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43981","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=43981"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43981\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43982,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43981\/revisions\/43982"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=43981"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=43981"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=43981"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}