My name is Eryn and I live in Southern California.
My dad is Scottish, Irish, German and my mother is Japanese, and I constantly get asked “What are you?”
I identify with both my white and Asian side. My brothers and I speak Japanese and have visited Japan many times. We celebrate Japanese holidays such as boys’/girls’ day and on New Year’s, we go to Little Tokyo in Downtown L.A. to be part of the Japanese celebration. Read More
I was born in Vietnam and lived there until I was 5.
My dad is English, Irish, and Scottish. My mum is full Thai.
I moved to England and am still living there and I hope to move to Thailand when im older.
As I grew up people joked around about my race and found it funny, including my friends. Read More
Hey fellow Hapas! My name is Naomi, I’m from Northern California, but am going to film school in Southern California.
I just started my own t-shirt business, 6º of Hapa, it’s been fun and I’ve received really positive feedback (even non-Hapas have been buying them)!
My mom is Japanese-American and my dad is Caucasian (Italian, Irish, and Scottish, though the Scottish is not totally confirmed). Read More
I’m a graphic designer living in Hamilton, NZ with my partner and our baby daughter.
I have German, Chinese and Portuguese blood from my Mum’s side. My Dad is 3rd generation New Zealander of Scottish decent.
I find often that I try to incorporate a lot of pacific culture into my designs, and I think the more I learn about my ancestry, the more diverse my designs will be. Read More
Born in Australia to an Aussie Mother and A Viet father who immigrated from Vietnam in the 80s.
We travel frequently to Vietnam (every second year) so I am very used to both cultures and at home I eat Asian food.
In my younger days when I went to Vietnam there were no white people at all and Vietnamese women would always come up to me and pinch my cheeks so hard and always talk about me looking English. Read More
Hi, I’m Harusami (nee Linda Reiko Pickrell). My Mother was Japanese and my Father was Scottish, Welsh, Irish (actually, he disowned the Irish when they killed Lord Mountbatten), with some Powhatan Indian.
I’m an older Hapa, born in 1960. Growing up, there were not a lot of us around, and very few Asian role models.
I’m so happy to see this Hapa “tribe” grow and become empowered with their uniqueness. Growing up, people couldn’t guess that I was half-Japanese, they would assume I was white, or if I was tanned, they would mistake me for Mexican or Native American.
Once the other kids found out I was half-Japanese, I would be teased and called names. I remember once coming home from school and asking my Dad what a “slope head” was. I remember how angry he got when I told him some kid called me one… I was really concerned there was something wrong with my head! Kids would tease me about eating raw fish… there were no sushi bars back then, so I feel quite empowered now, knowing that these same kids probably grew up to pay big bucks for raw fish.
Growing up in a predominantly black neighborhood and being bussed to a predominately white school, I saw bigotry of all kinds. Anyone who believes the 60′s were “the good old days” never walked in my shoes. Read More
When people ask me, “What are you?” I usually say American. I identify with nationality first.
Through the years I’ve identified with being white as I was raised in a very homogeneous town in Connecticut. However, more and more I try to embrace all my heritages and believe that Hapa is not just another category, but a beautiful way to identify with other multiracial people.
I was born Analina Marea Stewart to a British, French, Japanese, Filipina mother and a father of Swedish and Scottish descent.
I grew up in Buffalo, New York, where there were not that many people of mixed descent. Growing up, I had no other Hapas to identify with except for my sister, Rachael. People always mistook me for being full Caucasian or ‘something they just can’t put their finger on.’ It’s usually the blue eyes that get them.
It delights me when people are surprised to learn that I am part Asian or when they start speaking Japanese to me, a language that I hope to become fluent in. (:
Up until recently, when I moved to Southern California for school, I did not identify as a Hapa and had not even heard of the term. But now, knowing what it is, I proudly identify as a not parts or bits of anything, but as a whole Hapa.
Hello everybody, my name is Michael Jurney. My mother is Korean and my father was of mostly English, but he is also of partial Scottish, Scotch-Irish and German ancestry.
My father was stationed in South Korea after the Vietnam War, he met my mother and they’ve got married and moved back to the United States. I was born in Seattle, Washington.
Growing up was very hard for me and also was very hard for my mother. My father had a great job but he quit to do gold mining. Everything went downhill after that. I was a hobo growing up after my father lost his job. My mother could barely speak English, and she never teaches me Korean. My father was very stiff and ignorant person, also he never support the family.
I’ve learn to speak Broken English when I was younger. I’ve been over 15 different schools from K-12. I was force to go to special education due to my learning disability and speech disorder. Read More
