OPINION Page 6 n THE ASIAN REPORTER March 7, 2022 Volume 32 Number 3 March 7, 2022 ISSN: 1094-9453 The Asian Reporter is published on the first Monday each month. Please send all correspondence to: The Asian Reporter 922 N Killingsworth Street, Suite 2D, Portland, OR 97217 Phone: (503) 283-4440, Fax: (503) 283-4445 News Department e-mail: news@asianreporter.com Advertising Department e-mail: ads@asianreporter.com Website: www.asianreporter.com Please send reader feedback, Asian-related press releases, and community interest ideas/stories to the addresses listed above. Please include a contact phone number. Advertising information available upon request. Publisher Jaime Lim Contributing Editors Ronault L.S. Catalani (Polo), Jeff Wenger Correspondents Ian Blazina, Josephine Bridges, Pamela Ellgen, Maileen Hamto, Edward J. Han, A.P. Kryza, Marie Lo, Simeon Mamaril, Julie Stegeman, Toni Tabora-Roberts, Allison Voigts Illustrator Jonathan Hill News Service Associated Press/Newsfinder Copyright 2022. Opinions expressed in this newspaper are those of the authors and not necessarily those of this publication. Member Associated Press/Newsfinder Asian American Journalists Association Better Business Bureau Pacific Northwest Minority Publishers (PNMP) Philippine American Chamber of Commerce of Oregon MY TURN n Dmae Lo Roberts Patti Duncan, my mixed-race friend Correspondence: The Asian Reporter welcomes reader response and participation. 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Back issues of The Asian Reporter may be ordered by mail at the following rates: First copy: $1.50 Additional copies ordered at the same time: $1.00 each Send orders to: Asian Reporter Back Issues, 922 N. Killingsworth St., Portland, OR 97217-2220 The Asian Reporter welcomes reader response and participation. If you have a comment on a story we have printed, or have an Asian-related personal or community focus idea, please contact us. Please include a contact name, address, and phone number on all correspondence. Thank you. G rowing up in rural Oregon, I didn’t lived near a military base where she was part of a encounter other mixed-race Asians. As an social club with other multiracial girls. She said adult, I have cherished opportunities to those friendships were empowering because they talk with mixed-race people about our shared talked about their identities and experiences. Yet experiences. One person I’ve talked to throughout the racism against her mom continued and kids in the years is Patti Duncan. their neighborhood mocked her. An associate professor of Women, Gender, and “They put a snake in our mailbox and that Sexuality Studies at Oregon State terrified her,” she said. “... And once University (OSU), Patti Duncan has they burned something in our front authored and co-edited several yard I thought was meant to look like literary collections such as Tell This a cross.” Silence: Asian American Women Patti said her mom was Writers and the Politics of Speech, frightened, but the police Mothering in East Asian determined there was “nothing to be Communities: Politics and Practices, done.” Another time some boys said and Women’s Lives around the World: “something really awful” to her mom A Global Encyclopedia. At OSU, she’s while she was watering in their the editor of Feminist Formations, a backyard, and she turned the hose leading scholarly journal in women’s, Patti Duncan, associate professor on full force and sprayed them. Patti gender, and sexuality studies found at Oregon State University. loved that response. at . She’s also I too can remember times when neighborhood co-editing an open-access online digital textbook for kids told my brother and I to “flake off, you colleges and universities that is scheduled for Chinese!” Hearing my mom tearfully recount how release this spring. her co-workers belittled her at the plywood mill This accomplished woman and I have had similar where she worked as “that little Chinese lady” was experiences as the daughters of military brides from heartbreaking. Like Patti, those events shaped our Asia. My Taiwanese mom and Oklahoman dad met lives. when my mom worked at the PX store in Taiwan “Witnessing it, experiencing it, but also being after the Korean War. Patti’s mother was in Seoul, mixed-race and being Asian American myself,” South Korea, working at a U.S. military base when Patti said, “... it’s like all of the ways that I think her father, a white American, was stationed there. growing up, being treated like I was exotic or After they married, her family lived in America. different, or somehow not belonging ... for me, I Moving to the U.S. became a difficult experience for think it was being mixed-race and struggling our moms as they left their languages and cultures sometimes with feeling like I’m in this in-between behind. space where it’s like you’re never Asian enough, or Before moving here, my family lived in Japan, you’re never like fully Korean.” where I recall my happiest childhood times. Patti I understand and share Patti’s feelings. We’re lived in Tehran, where her father was stationed, lucky to know each other because it’s been rare in and she has “very beautiful fond memories of the my life to meet people of my generation who entirely time living there.” get what it means to be a mixed-race Asian Our first experiences with racism occurred in American. Hopefully younger generations are able America. We were both told not to speak our to connect with other mixed-race youth so they mothers’ languages. Neither of our mothers had a don’t feel the isolation we once felt. It is my wish formal education and both grew up in war and they aren’t resigned to the fate of being “out of the poverty, so it was important for their children to norm.” excel in school and we were allowed to forget our For Patti, hope lies in her 11-year-old son and his first languages. generation. She says it’s important to her to tell him “Once I started in public school in the U.S.,” Patti about his family history and identity. said, “there were incidents of kids calling us names “He is so proud to be mixed-raced, and he claims and doing the slanty eyed thing to mock us when we his Korean-ness,” Patti said. “He claims all of it.” were growing up.” To listen to a podcast of my and Patti’s While my brother and I didn’t know any other conversation about being mixed race, please visit mixed-race kids during our youth, Patti fortunately . Opinions expressed in this newspaper are those of the authors and not necessarily those of this publication.