Growing up a 'Hapa Girl' in America

A young woman of Chinese-Irish descent feels the sting of racism in an intolerant South Dakota town.

from the May 1, 2007 edition

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The family is unable to sell their farm; every loan application by potential buyers fails, and only a state lottery winner is eventually able to buy it outright at a loss for the family almost a decade later. With nowhere to go, they remain trapped in the suffocating town. While they directly survive everything from murdered pets to ferocious school fights, they are haunted by the gang rape, the suicides, the senseless violence that surround them.

Ironically, experiencing firsthand the 1988 anti-African student demonstrations in Nanjing, China, puts Chai's "years in South Dakota in perspective": "Their fears of change, of economic uncertainty, of racial anxiety ... were the same as China's," she concludes. Chai realizes that what her family endured "had not been my fault. We were all unique individuals, yet we had been labeled as some kind of enemy."

Throughout "Hapa Girl," Chai's mother proves an impressive heroine. Always her family's champion, she carves out a "place in our town": she forms her own "Irish gang," throws exotic Hawaiian luaus, and eventually helps a young man named Tom Daschle get elected to the US Senate. Chai herself adroitly balances her worst memories – at 17, keeping a Tylenol bottle in her dresser drawer as her "way out" – with her family's triumphs – "in 1988, my father fulfilled a personal dream, becoming a state-elected delegate to the Democratic Convention in Atlanta."

"Hapa Girl," Chai's fourth title ("The Girl from Purple Mountain with Winberg," "Glamorous Asians: Short Stories & Essays," and "My Lucky Face" came earlier), is itself a direct result of Chai's mother's initial efforts. From a two-page outline for an unfinished novel her mother intended, Chai begins "to write about things I thought I would never tell another soul as long as I lived, because ... I realized that my mother would have wanted me to do so."

• Terry Hong is media arts consultant at the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Program.

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