Pop Culture for Crazy Mixed Asians

Pop Culture for Crazy Rich Mixed Asians Lauren: I’m Asian American, but like most if not all of the media I consume, Crazy Rich Asians was never for me anymore than, say, any adaptation of Pride and Prejudice was for me. Yet the idea of someone else representing your experience accurately fascinates me, not in small part because it’s not something I ever expect to experience. My mother is white and Vietnamese, my father is Black. They both grew up in the DMV where I live currently. It’s not exactly everybody’s go to romance (although Blasian romances certainly exist as I listed here), lest the background for a significant character. Like a lot of multiracial people I’ve always collected scraps of myself from books, movies, and shows and pasted them together into a collage that felt close enough.  Cassandra Cain spending years of her character history as white and some unidentified Asian ancestry, reading poet Staceyann Chin’s memoir The Other Side of Paradise, the moment Black, white, and Korean superhero Connor Hawke made me gasp just by existing. None of them were me but they were… enough.

Mikkel: I grew up in the third richest county in the US (at the time) in a predominantly white neighborhood watching shows with white protagonists. Most of my friends and heroes were white and as a mixed kid, I once made the mistake of telling my Filipino mother I identified as white. It took a couple days of reflection before formulating an acceptable apology. It took a couple years to …