A very good article that I read today and posted on YW:

                      Without/Within: Hapas and their Own Fetish                              2470

By: Julie Fischer

Disclaimer: I am not, by all means, a representative of or spokesperson for hapas here at UC Berkeley, nor do I purpose to. I also realize that much of this article is based only on the experiences and opinions of Asian/white hapas, and that in itself is often not sufficient enough to reflect the sentiments of many other types of hapas, such as Asian/Black hapas. This article is also not intended to exemplify those hapas who have never experienced fetishism themselves, but rather hostility, or those particular hapas who actually enjoy being fetishized - admit it you crazy fools.

We have heard it all before: the coos of admiration, the gratuitous compliments, the prying curiosity, the sly-intentioned, yet obvious sexual implications of that oh-so famous, “Oooh! You’re hapa?! I love hapas. They’re the hottest people”. Our faces get racially nitpicked into neat phenotypic categories, and our blood becomes a guessing game, but the thing is, no matter how un-PC or vain it sounds, we’ve become quite accustomed to it. We’ve grown up with this image that we are a product of the “best of both worlds”, and furthermore this has been touted and propagated by our “both worlds”. Whether it be your Asian ,white, black, or Latino side of your family or friends, from the moment we’re born into this racially stratified earth, our individual mixes are immediately exotified to exhaustion, and our assumed beauty is owed to our “unique” blood -- okay, so do I sound like the poor, rich girl, the “tragic mulatto”? Well hold your trousers, I’m getting to my point: hapas are fetishsized, and that is understood -- but what happens to the dynamics of this issue when this hyper-sexually charged superficiality creeps out, let’s say, not from a white man or an Asian woman, but rather from a fellow hapa?

This might sound weird -- its as though I’m critiquing a fetish of a black man by a black woman, or an Asian woman by an Asian man. But even then, this hypothetical analogy assumes that all hapas are the same -- and well, we can attest to it that we aren’t. Hapa, that annoying yet convenient, encompassing umbrella word, covers all people who have that bit of Asian blood in them. So let’s get this straight once and for all: if your mamma is half Mexican and half German, and your pappa is Filipino, you’re ‘hapa’. If your daddy is Scandinavian, and your mom is Okinawan, you’re ‘hapa’. Hell, if you’re 1/8 Vietnamese and 7/8 French, you’re still considered ‘hapa’, though a select few would differ. So because of all the endlessly exciting variations a hapa can inhibit, a commonality between us all is difficult to locate. Sure we’ve all had those ‘struggles for identity’ phases, our internalization of a played out, tragic life of a human being so hopelessly confused as to whether we were white or Asian, or whatever our “mono-racial” parents were. Or it was the complete opposite, where our lives were super happy, with the romantic blending of ‘East and West’, where our parent’s union symbolized a crossing over a rigid racial barrier, and so on and so on (insert gag here).Whatever it was, the similarity usually stops there. Can we really claim that a person raised in a household led by a Jewish American father and a Japanese American mother has a similar history, culture, and lifestyle to that of a person raised by a Chinese American father and a Jamaican mother? You’d answer most probably ‘no’, yet both these persons are still considered to be hapa. 

Before I delve into this further, maybe it’s imperative to define what a fetish is in the first place. There’s a lot of confusion in this word ‘fetish’ and the connotations it strings along (usually negative).A lot of people are quick to be defensive and are in denial when the issue of fetishism becomes something personal. So what does having a ‘fetish’ involve? In its contemporary terms, a fetish occurs when a non-erotic person or object creates sexual feelings in another person, leaving the latter to be fixated and obsessed with the former. So, lets say someone gets turned on by feet -- feet are nasty, smelly headquarters of germs and fungus, yet for some people it gets their juices flowing. Or maybe some people might get turned on by a certain group of people, based purely on their race or ethnicity. This is where the infamous, quite evil, Asian fetishism, or as some would like to put it delicately, “Yellow Fever”, takes place: for example, a white man actively assigning sexualized, so-called ‘Asian’ images onto an Asian woman, who perhaps hasn’t necessarily hyper-sexualized herself.

So where does this leave hapas? Well, for starters, most of us (I hope) abhor fetishism from others. One hapa woman at UC Berkeley, who’d like to remain anonymous, replied to my questions: “I hate it when Asian or white guys make it so obvious as to why they’re asking me out -- they’d literally say, ‘Hey, you’re hapa? Can I have your number?’ It doesn’t leave much to the imagination”. Another hapa man from San Jose complained to me about how his friends would purposefully attempt to set him up with other women they knew ‘had a thing for hapa guys’: “It made me feel like it was the genes they were solely interested in - not for the actual guy I am”. Interestingly enough though, this fellow kept on talking, sheepishly I might add: “Yah, I do go for hapa girls -- they are really just cuter, you know!” So, apparently hapa women are cuter, and apparently this is common knowledge, and apparently, as this man spoke for his many hapa guy friends, it’s cool and alright if this ‘hapa preference’ is coming from them; but is this ‘preference’ any different from when if a white man ‘prefers’ hapa women?

Let me tell you a little anecdote of mine, its quite charming and concise: I went to the first general meeting of Hapa Issues Forum here at UC Berkeley, one of the many chapters of the non-profit organization based in San Francisco. Created to address the ignored issues of mixed race peoples of Asian heritage, I came in to the meeting feeling curious as to what it actually accomplishes, and dare I say, a bit proud? But then as I physically walked across the room and sat down, I saw the faces of everyone look me over, and I could actually witness the interested queries pertaining to my ethnicity washing over their faces. You can accuse me of over-dramatizing the situation, or you can believe that my version of events were through my own paranoid, critical interpretation, but let me swear to you, my uncomfortable sentiments were soon confirmed when we split up into small groups. They were itching to ask me -- hell they were all itching to ask everyone there exactly what our blood consisted of. So isn’t this a bit contradictory? We rally and cry “Racial insensitivity!” when others ask that notorious question, “What are you?”, but what was one of the first things another hapa asked me when we sat in our circles? Take a guess, it was “What are you?” The topic of white or Asian men asking me my ethnicity with that sly, nasty grin has become an almost desensitized subject for me -- almost; but then picture my surprise upon meeting a bunch of hapa people, of whom I expect to know better, at this club, of which ultimately everyone was just basically checking each other out! This is the same group of people I expected to culminate a space for intellectual and conscious awareness-dialogue concerning over matters of race and its social and material consequences in this segregated American society -- but expectations are hardly fulfilled in reality, right?

I take a quick glance over their agenda sheet for the club, and its all social: barbeques, scavenger hunts, dances, and ice-cream socials. Of course, there are a few good, political events offered by the club, such as the debate on Prop. 54 or the recent screening of Mikko Jokela’s documentary entitled Mixed Feelings. And you might be thinking I’m this big old, academic snob, thinking these social gatherings aren’t crucial. But listen, I do think they’re necessary -- good, fun times in a club should be offered continually and is vital to bond and connect with others. But is that all there is? Bonding, bonding, and more bonding? Bonding for the sake of relating to each other sob stories of our identity crisis, bonding for the sake of answering that tortured question, “Who am I?”

 And thus, that is where the underlying problem I have with the Hapa Issues Forum occurs, and that is where this newfound fetishism within hapa clubs, groups, or even within those superfluous websites with the million pictures of individual hapas comes to fruition: everything is centered around “I” -- tell us your experience as a hapa, what do you think about identity as a hapa, and so on and so on. Every ‘hapa issue’ now is self-reflective, and ultimately, has transformed into matters of “me, me, me” and “boo hoo hoo”. Instead of asking ourselves, “Who am I?”, we should begin with asking, “Why am I?” -- and no, this isn’t another egocentric, vain attempt to look at ourselves in the mirror all day, but it rather begs us to examine our world’s history, our past histories, and ultimately, our parents’ union; it forces us to look at social, political, economic, and yes, even racial factors that contributed to our birth.

Something interesting happened to me last spring, where I was asked to be a part of a hapa panel during Asian American History month at my community college in the South Bay. On the panel were students, a couple of staff members, a professor from San Jose State University, and also Eric Tate, one of the founding members of the Hapa Issues Forum at UC Berkeley. As we all reminisced and relayed our individual experiences as a hapa (because you know my story is so much more important than yours!), a weird revelation presented itself to me afterwards: half of the panelists were products of a military base marriage; that is, they’re the so-called ‘military brats’, children of the army/captain/sergeant/American man whom married the local Asian woman available around their bases. Even more interesting was the fact that no one acknowledged this “insignificant” piece of information. No one even discussed that little point that they are existing in this world specifically because of US military power/imperialism and the consequential barbaric/exoticism complex that is strung along in the military mentality when interacting with the local women.

The thing that just ate me up though was Tate’s insistence that he is a happy hapa, and that his parent’s marriage is happy -- and though I have no right to claim the opposite, can’t we still be at least a little more critical and insightful about our families and actually maybe admit that we ourselves exist because of a fetish? And maybe its not a military thing, maybe it’s an “I’m an English teacher in X-Asian country” or maybe its simply an “I like Asian women because they’re exotic and submissive” thing.

Have we reached this point in our lives and experiences that any possibility of a fetish among our parents is immediately denied and revoked just because we won’t be able to handle the idea that our parent’s union is based on something other than love? And so I guess we have instead internalized and reverted those same sentiments learned through our parent’s marriage complex (i.e. a fetish) for ourselves. This must be the case because I sure as hell know that I’ve witnessed and gone through the same fetish bullshit with many hapa guys. One hapa woman even told me after a Hapa Issues Forum potluck gathering that she felt “really uncomfortable”: “All of the hapa guys stared at me, and you know what? I felt like they were basically just white guys who just happened to have an Asian parent at home -- what makes their fetish with me, a hapa, any different from when its coming from a full white guy? I was insulted”.

The issue of fetishism is hard to absorb because it begs us to reexamine the choices we make in matters of love and dating. It leaves us no room to consider the possibility of actual “love”, whatever that abstract concept may be, but rather makes us reconsider what factors have influenced our supposed choices in our relationships. The thing is, I know I made a generalization; I know that not every interracial relationship took place because of a fetish. I know that there are those relationships existing in this country where the core between two people go deeper than anything spoken. Yet there still remains those vast amount of hapas that do exist because of an Asian fetish -- one cannot ignore the fact that half a hapa panel were the results of a military-based marriage. And so if we keep on denying this fact, if we keep on insisting that imperialism and a colonial mentality are something of the past, if we keep insisting that an Asian fetish took no place within our family -- well, what has a hapa to do but to internalize the very thing that gave him/her life? Or maybe it’s something different. Janice Fitch, a sophomore at UCSD, sees this hapa fetish found in hapas as some strange thing which formed “…because of the whole "tragic mulatto" thing -- yet with a twist, a new tragic mulatto with a superiority trip…hapas think, ‘Oh, no one understands me, no one understands my unique beauty, I must find another hapa.’ This superiority trip, I think, comes from the recent wave of ‘it's cool to be mixed because it proves your parents aren’t racist’.”

A fetish is a fetish, but when the fetish becomes racialized, no matter what type of race, it becomes problematic; because when we are dealing with race, we are dealing with people, and all that a fetish accomplishes is the very objectification and dehumanization of that certain race of people. In the end, I suppose that I cannot do anything -- people will date and have sex with whomever they want to. But at least think twice about the choices you make, and look past the citations of love, romance, or beauty. Critically think why, as a hapa, you only have a thing for hapas, and hopefully, this will invoke personal discussions and introspect to yourself and your family within the context of a social, political, and racialized history.