Becoming Half

July 30, 2018 • Lila Klopfenstein

My mother is Japanese and my father is American. I am half-Japanese. Ha-fu. Some people dispute this term. They call mixed-race people ‘doubles’, to reflect that fact that both ethnicities exist at once. I do not identify as ‘double’. I identify as American. I know nothing else. My Japanese half is a hazy cloud of Japanese TV shows, the smell of tatami and fish, and a smattering of random words, all of which were slowly fading from memory. The older …