Culture
A magical web series, a rock concert, and transplant shock
In this episode of Other, host Alex Offland explores the complexities of mixed-race identity through the lens of art and community. Featuring conversations with author Ruth Azeke and creator Katie Mal...
A magical web series, a rock concert, and transplant shock
Culture •
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Back in November, I went to a show at the Black Cat, a music venue in DC to see Mitsuki.
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Mitsuki is just one woman, Mitsuki Miyawaki, who performs indie rock songs about love and identity and being a girl in America.
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She's half Japanese and half white, and she kind of looks like me.
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She has this song called Your Best American Girl, the single from her latest album that dominated critics list of the best songs of 2016.
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It's about being in love with someone who grew up in a world different from yours, and realizing that it's just not going to work out.
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Mitsuki lived a lot of places growing up.
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She's talked before about not having a strong American identity, and you can hear that in lyrics.
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Your mother wouldn't approve of how my mother raised me, but I do, I finally do.
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And you're an all-American boy. I guess I couldn't help trying to be the best American girl.
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I love you, I love you, but I do, I finally do.
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I love you, I guess I couldn't help trying to be the best American girl.
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That night of the show I stood in this crowd of people who didn't look like me, and they sang these lyrics.
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I wondered what that song meant to them.
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This is Other, Make Stric in America. I'm your host, Alex Offland, and in this last episode, I'm sharing two stories with you, of women who felt this weight of fruitlessness, and created art to deal with it.
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We'll also talk about the communities that spring up around art, communities that, in some ways, create a new root system for the rootless people in America.
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One of the first times I saw a mixed race protagonist grappling with those awkward identity questions was when I discovered Ruth Azeke.
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Ruth is an author, filmmaker, and Buddhist priest, whose work is mostly autobiographical.
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Her latest book, A Tale for the Time Being, was the first book of hers that I read.
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One of the main characters was a half Japanese half-white woman named Ruth, and the experience she depicted of being a half Asian half-white person living in North America really resonated with me.
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And it's weird, it took seeing a variation of my story told in pop culture for me to realize that I'd been missing that representation my whole life.
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So I called Ruth up to talk to her about how she thinks about representation and about creation.
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I grew up in New Haven, Connecticut, and my dad was a professor at Yale, and when I was growing up, there weren't a lot of Asian writers who were writing novels or fiction that I had access to.
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So I read primarily the canon. There really weren't a lot of writers who looked anything like me or who shared my background at all.
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So I honestly don't remember ever really seeing the mixed race perspective when I was growing up. I think that's one of the reasons why it took me a long time to understand that I needed to create this.
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That it was up to me to do this, and that I had the right to do it.
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And all of her protagonists so far at least have been half Japanese, half white Americans.
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But she didn't write her first novel until she was 40. Ruth spent the early part of her career working in Japanese television, and then in 1995 she made a film called Having the Bones.
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It was a documentary about her grandparents' lives, and about the aftermath of her grandmother's death.
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It's peppered with turn of the century footage of her grandmother as a young woman walking through the forests of Hawaii in a white dress.
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She narrates the shots with snippets of her grandmother's autobiography, read in accent at English.
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It's not till halfway through the film that Ruth vests up.
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Up until now I haven't been 100% accurate. There are a couple things that I made up. Like my grandmother's autobiography, for example.
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She never really wrote one, so I made it up from the real family stories I'd heard from her, and also from my other relatives.
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I did sort of the same thing with these home movies.
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I've seen a photo of my grandfather holding a movie camera, so I know he really did make movies, but his cameras and films were all confiscated after Pearl Harbor.
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I made up these things because I never really knew my grandparents, and now they're dead, and I didn't have very much to go on.
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I thought I would understand them better if I just pretended to be them.
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Anyway, I just wanted to set the records straight. Even though I made up the way I represented them, the facts of their lives are all true.
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And I did have my grandmother's bones in my closet for the last five years.
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Ruth's work blurs the lines between fact and fiction, which for her is how she creates scenarios that feel truthful.
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It is funny because through this act of imagination, of course, you're creating some kind of chimera, some kind of hybrid, something that is once again,
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mixed. It's half imaginary and half real, or half historical.
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It's built out of these little scraps of memory.
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And I suppose it was when I was traveling with having the bones.
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Young people, old people, people who, you know, of all different ethnicities and racial backgrounds, would come up to me after the screening, and they would say, that's my story.
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So that was very interesting to me. And that's when I started to realize that in spite of the very specific, you know, my own very specific ethnicity, which is half Japanese, half Caucasian American, that the story itself is in fact a very American story.
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So there's this web series called Almost Asian that I discovered last year on a blog about mixed race identity, because yes, those things exist.
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First episode entitled Almost Asian Driver features a half Japanese woman driving her Japanese gradient around in her car. Very badly.
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Oh stop going through the bump. Watch out, there's a car backing up. You have to watch the arrows. Oh my God.
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Oh, wow. What are you swarming for? Check out so close to be texting how you're driving. Oh my God, we're going to get in an accident.
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Katie Malia is the creator and star of Almost Asian.
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A web series about a half Japanese woman grappling with repeated identity crises. She persuaded her great aunt Sachi, who was 90 at the time to co-star in the first episode.
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We just wanted to show that full Asian could be in the passenger seat telling me what to do, that she's the good driver and I'm the bad one.
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Sometimes it makes me cringe because I feel so elementary and it feels so dated and yet when you're mixed for me, I so desperately wanted to feel recognized by a culture.
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Katie had been working as an actor for five years before creating Almost Asian in 2014.
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The concept for the show came out of a conversation she'd had with her brother Joel, who's a director.
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Katie had wanted to write and star in her own series for a while, but she just needed to come up with a concept.
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She spitballed ideas at him for a while and then he stopped her.
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He looked at me and he said, right, what you know, right what you feel is true to your heart and what you feel is lacking right now.
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And what I felt was lacking, inspired by his words, was the mixed race narrative.
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Their memory being so, it was just like this white bulb when off in my head and it was the path of least resistance.
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Oh right, nobody's talking about it, how fun and we shot it, not really thinking anything of it. And then it's snowballed.
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The first season of Almost Asian is about 12 episodes long, each episode about two or three minutes.
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In every episode, Katie tackles a different facet of being a half Japanese woman working in the entertainment industry.
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It's honest but not self-indulgent, a little bit self-deprecating, and it's really funny.
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In one episode, her character is out to eat with a friend, full Asian, and they're talking about a stand-up show they're going to after dinner.
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I got a stroke right now, I'd be grateful.
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You always do this, you know.
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But this, this trying to get out of things, not take any risks.
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This is my dose.
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Yes, you do last week you wanted to drive into a wall.
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Um, technically I said if I ever do drive into a wall, I'll be listening to Ricky Martin, so live in libido, loka is playing during the time of life.
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Our sick.
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And no, that's not what I meant.
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What do you mean?
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I mean, you're using your Asian fusion card again as an excuse to not fit in.
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I hate that.
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Effort.
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Fusion.
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I'm not a goddamn restaurant.
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And it's an Asian American stand-up show, Judy.
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Of course I don't fit in.
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I'm not stupid.
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You do fit in.
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Katie lets it go when the server comes with their food.
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Oh, gross.
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Here we go.
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Thank you.
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Your mom, eh?
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Nadi?
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Yeah.
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You do need anything else?
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No, I think we're good.
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Thanks for your help.
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Oh, actually, oh my god.
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I forgot.
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Joss, six.
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Which she hands to her friend.
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And no fork.
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And that's how the episode ends.
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With Katie staring at her friend, like, see, point proven.
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The first time I watched almost Asian, I watched all of the episodes in one sitting.
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I had never seen anything that embodied my experiences in such a specific way.
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Which is why Katie felt the need to create the series in the first place.
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Working as an actor and Los Angeles, Katie says she's judged by her appearance every day.
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I began auditioning with commercials.
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And that in itself is very much about, do you appeal to the demographic that they're selling to?
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Should they not want to go full Asian, especially in commercials, to be more, let's say, whitewash for Middle America.
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And not a full Asian that would be startling to see in a commercial.
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They throw us into the mix.
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We are the water down Asian.
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So Katie's writing this web series and creating a powerful conversation about the nuance of multiracial identity.
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Sounds awesome, right?
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The irony here is that in order to make things like almost Asian, Katie needs money.
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And she makes money by acting.
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And to get acting jobs, she has to audition for roles where she plays the stereotypes of Asian women.
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I remember having this one audition for,
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how it was like a house hunter show, but it was a comedy.
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And they asked me to do an Asian accent, which is always funny to me because Asian accent,
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it doesn't really get any more generic than that.
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You'd be a little bit more specific, but they don't care.
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So I went in and I did it and I immediately felt this wave of shame and guilt.
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And it just felt like such a lie and it also felt so offensive.
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And yet the cast network did look it.
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He was not Asian and he thought it was the greatest thing ever.
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And there are so few opportunities for people of color and Asians that then you want to get the job.
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So you play up the stereotype.
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This is the double buy in that creative people face when they're trying to create culture that reflects them and is different from the mainstream culture.
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But people don't invest in risky ideas.
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So to bootstrap it, they need to work within the system that's run primarily by people who don't get where you're coming from.
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They play the stereotypes, the end result, the stereotypes live on in the larger culture.
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Gosh, what are you doing? You're paying your bills with this industry.
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You suck it up and you do it.
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That only lasts so long until you just can't take it anymore.
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But here's the thing.
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Even though it's really hard to see these stories that reflect us, they do exist.
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And that work is worth highlighting.
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Because the way I felt when I first watched almost Asian, that was magic.
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There's this thing that happens to plants when you move them from one container to another.
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It's called transplant shock.
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Basically, the plants fruits are stunned from the new environment and they freak out because they don't know how to establish themselves in this new landscape or pot.
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Here's a report from Purdue University's Department of Botany.
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New transplants do not have extensive root systems and they're frequently stressed by a lack of sufficient water.
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Plant suffering from water stress may be more susceptible to injury from other causes such as the weather, insects or disease.
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When several stresses are being experienced, the plant may no longer be able to function properly.
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Reading that felt familiar.
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The story of immigration in this country is one of fruitlessness and often transplant shock.
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When people leave their lives and families to build new ones in a new country, they leave parts of themselves behind too.
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Whether through language or culture or sheer geography, chances are their kids will be more American, whatever that means,
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and less of whatever their native culture is.
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Often, you can't trace your family history back generations.
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Or you don't know your grandparents because you don't speak the same languages then.
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Maybe you don't even know their names.
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This rootlessness is more likely when you're in an interracial family of immigrants.
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Not only did one or both of your parents leave their homelands, but they've done this transgressive thing.
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They had a child with somebody of a different race.
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Sometimes the consequence of this is disownment, or at least strong disapproval.
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So for many years, I accepted my rootlessness and even defined myself by it.
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It wasn't until I started working on this podcast that I felt its weight.
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Crazy thing is, it took working on this podcast for me to discover the other people, journalists, writers, artists, musicians, who felt this pain too, and who created art with it.
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So, yes, transplant shock is a thing in plants.
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But there's this other thing you can do with plants, and it's called propagation.
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You take the cutting of a stem or leaf, and you take care of it.
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Place it in some water, give it lots of sunlight.
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And sometimes, when you do it just right, when the environment is just so, your little clipping will begin to grow its own roots.
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Working on this project, I felt like one of those cuttings, tenderly watching my own roots grow.
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I've been filling my head with books and music and articles and films that are parsing these themes in a way that feel so familiar.
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And somehow, I found a community for myself.
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And while it's not a fully grown root system, it's something close to that.
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Thanks for listening to other Mixed Race in America.
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This podcast was written and produced by me, Alex Lachlan, with editing from Terence Samuel.
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You can subscribe to other Mixed Race in America on Radio Public, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Thank you to JJ Pazway for writing our theme music and to Chris Kindred for designing our logo.
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Other Mixed Race in America is a podcast from the Washington Post.
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