Those of mixed ethnicities often asked ‘What Are You?’

By Eric George Tauber

SAN DIEGO –What are you? For people of mixed ethnicity, this is a common question. That’s why it’s the title of a new work by Asian Story Theater along with Teatro Máscara Mágica and San Diego Black Ensemble Theatre.

I first saw Asian Story Theater back in ’98 at Kids Night Out of the San Diego Actors Festival. They presented some traditional Chinese Monkey King stories with delightfully cartoonish slapstick comedy and acrobatics. I recently sat down with Kent Brisby, one of the founders of AST and the director of What Are You?

EGT: So what are you?

KB:   According to 23 & Me, I am very white. Mostly European, but a little Ashkenazi Jewish and a little Native American, but like Elizabeth Warren’s Native American. But pretty white though.

[To be honest, when Kent answered the door, he was not what I was expecting.]

EGT: I’m wondering what motivated you to do this.

KB: My wife is Chinese American, so there’s a family investment there. And our daughter is Hapa, half and half. So “What are you?” is certainly part of her life. The nature of that question varies. I think there’s some honest, simple curiosity, but it also has the potential to be this iceberg of pre-judgment based on the answer. You really have to decode it.

EGT: Why do you think they’re asking? A normal cocktail party question is, “What do you do?” And that establishes your social ranking. So why do you think they ask, “What are you?”

KB:   I don’t know exactly. It’s recognizing a difference. I think the question comes from different places for different people. There’s an inferred status. For a little kid, it’s just, “What are you? You look different.” Other Asian ethnic groups have established communities. The Hapa Community is trickier because there is no single Hapa Community. There’s a company up in [Vancouver] Canada that every other year has a “Hapa-Palooza.” There’s a teacher an UCSB with a website hapa.me taking pictures of people who are mixed race. He’s contributing a piece to what we’re doing. One of his stickers says “100% HAPA.”

EGT: What issues has your daughter faced being Hapa?

KB:   That’s part of the fun we have in the show. The experiences vary a lot and there’s an impressive amount of common ground. We took a broad approach to a topic that is so enormous, you could make your life out of it. One of the filmmakers of Hapa-Palooza gave us a film clip that we’re using. We’re using a clip from Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime. Each of the shows has a co-host. We’re working with Teatro Máscara Mágica and the Black Ensemble Theatre.

We’re trying to focus on the experience of people living in the midst of this transition. It is a transition. Race separation just depends on which arbitrary cutoff point you look at. At some point, it’s all the same source. Okay, we’re going to pick 5000 years ago. Latino is not a race. It’s a culture. We explore those definitions.

There are forty different characters with different genetic combinations. You can’t cast that. So the device that we use is cards on lanyards to identify different parts of the world. That’s the way we address this particular challenge.

* *

Kent didn’t want to give too much away, but it sounds like an interesting show and an increasingly relevant one to our own community as mixed marriages become more common. One rabbi recently noted that he’s seeing ethnic combinations he’s never seen before in weddings and later in his Hebrew classes. And as it’s usually the Jewish-by-choice spouses who are more interested in observing Judaism, he thinks we need to change our priorities. Rather than look for spouses who are Jewish, we should look for those who want to do Jewish for they will keep it going.

What Are You? Is playing at the Lyceum Space Theatre May 3-5. Advanced tickets can be purchased at www.AsianStoryTheater.org.

*
Tauber is a freelance writer specializing in coverage of the arts.  He may be contacted via eric.tauber@sdjewishworld.com