Hapa Girl: A Memoir

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Description

In the mid-1960s, Winberg Chai, a young academic and the son of Chinese immigrants, married an Irish-American artist. In Hapa Girl (“hapa” is Hawaiian for “mixed”) their daughter tells the story of this loving circle of relatives as they moved from Southern California to New York to a South Dakota farm by the 1980s. In their new Midwestern home, the circle of relatives finds itself the object of unwelcome attention, which all of a sudden escalates to violence. The Chais are all of sudden socially isolated and barely ready to deal with the tension that arises from day by day incidents of racial animosity, including random acts of cruelty.

May-lee Chai’s memoir leads to China, where she arrives just in time to witness a revolt and demonstrations. Here she realizes that the rural Americans’ “fears of change, of economic uncertainty, of racial anxiety, of the unknowable future in comparison to the known past were the same as China’s. And I realized in the end that it had not been my fault.”


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