Hapa Girl

Hapa Girl (Temple University Press 978-1-59213-615-5) (based on the Hawaiian term hapa-haole, meaning half-foreign) documents May-lee Chai’s rise above a childhood of racist targeting in provincial South Dakota. This memoirist of Chinese-American and Irish-American heritage was nominated for a National Book Award for The Girl From Purple Mountain, co-written with her father, Winberg Chai.

Although constantly harassed, the family resolutely avoided discussing ethnicity. The initial stares and slurs are weathered with a nervous humor, but “[a]fter men started driving by our house to shoot, after our dogs were killed, it wasn’t funny at all,” the author writes. Chai’s observations of race-based friction include the nearly monolithic prejudice of Dakota whites against Indians, exacerbated by the AIM / FBI showdown at Pine Ridge and lawsuits over ownership of the Black Hills. She proposes that denominational identity is what subdivides the locals—Lutherans versus Catholics, and so on. In hopes of achieving parity, her tenacious mother Carolyn pulls together a small “Irish gang.” A visit to China during the student unrest of the late eighties clarifies how widespread xenophobia is; it ends Chai’s self-blame and frees her to move forward