Word: hapas
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...house was shot at from passing cars, and their pet dogs gunned down on the lawn. Her father ultimately resigned his academic job in frustration over narrow-minded colleagues. "It felt as though we were being punished for crimes we hadn't realized we had committed," Chai writes in Hapa Girl, her searing memoir of growing up half-Chinese in the American heartland. "There were many people who wanted my father to suffer. They were going to show this 'Chinaman' his place...
...Hapa Girl (the adjective is a Hawaiian word for mixed race) is published by Temple University Press. Why the book did not find a commercial publisher is a mystery. The writing is vigorous, and Chai's descriptions of the murderous winters and corrosive boredom of the Great Plains are compelling. Besides, Chai is hardly an unknown: The Girl from Purple Mountain, the World War II family history she co-authored with her father, was a finalist for the 2001 National Book Award. Could it be racism, stalking the hapa girl once again...
...only. The U.S. has a curious preoccupation with race, which runs through its history like a varicose vein, half-buried and chronically painful. Just ask disgraced talk-show host Don Imus and the Rutgers University women's basketball team, or any Arab American trying to board a flight. Hapa Girl is a reminder that Americans cannot have too many reminders of the un-American things they do when they're afraid...
...usually tell from other people’s physicality that they’re hapa [Half-Asian]. I thought other hapas would share that bond,” Tu says...
Parker says she felt the “obvious difference” at HAPA events, where students discussed East Asian identities and went out for dim sum, “which I enjoy, but don’t identify with culturally,” she says...