Leah Nanako Winkler
@LeahNanakoLeah Nanako Winkler is a first generation hapa living in Brooklyn, New York. She is a writer of plays, essays and television pilots. You can learn more about Leah and her work at www.leahwinkler.org.
Updated February 2013
Stories from This Author
A Racial Criteria: Love, Family and Long-Term Consequences
Sept. 24, 2008 • Leah Nanako Winkler
Now, more than ever, we have the technology and freedom to manufacture and accommodate the specificity of our chosen families and social networks. In a mix-match world of diversity, tolerance, racism and cultural cluelessness, is love really blind when it comes long-term commitments? Or is it just a matter of social comfort? A little less than two years ago, I flew to Missouri and became an egg-donor to an interracial, infertile couple seeking to make a part-Asian baby. Although I …
Analyze My Face: Hapas, exoticism and the entertainment industry
May 14, 2008 • Leah Nanako Winkler
I have hazel eyes. My skin is pale, my nose is tall and my hips are hopelessly wide. At first glance there is nothing about me, or so I am constantly told, that looks remotely Japanese. This is why he wanted to take me out of the shot. I heard him utter the recurring phrase of my life, the one that was born in the mouths of the children at Hiroba Koen and echoed to lips of an up and …
Quarter Life Identity Crisis
April 4, 2008 • Leah Nanako Winkler
My quarter life identity crisis began out of nowhere on the late night G train back to Bedford Stuyvesent. Four stops away from my apartment I am suddenly plagued by an overwhelming sense of bittersweet loneliness and deep-rooted frustration. All I can do is dig out my journal from my backpack and write the following four sentences down on paper: “December 2007- I have realized…that all of my feelings of loneliness resorts from lacking a sense of belonging in this …
