Mia Nakaji Monnier

Mi madre es una japonesa de Osaka; mi padre, un americano de un pueblo pequeño del oeste de Oregon.  Hay una palabra para la gente como yo, usada especialmente en la Costa Oeste y popularizada en años recientes, quizás de manera más notable por el artista Kip Fulbeck:

Hapa.

De la frase hawaiana “hapa haole” (mitad blanco), la palabra “hapa” se ha convertido en una etiqueta que mucha gente multirracial, con alguna herencia asiática, incorpora en sus identidades, sea que la lleve con orgullo o con ambivalencia.

Yo no la uso para nada

No es ...

On still-damp, foggy mornings after the rain has cleared, Sayuri Shinya and her husband drive from their home in the San Francisco Bay Area and into the woods, looking for mushrooms. Shinya began forging five years ago, when she met her husband, who grew up in Germany and has hunted for mushrooms since childhood.

“At first, I thought it was weird,” she told me. “I was like, mushrooms, really? Foraging is not something you hear about all the time. Mushrooms sound like, you could buy that in the store, right? But the kinds we pick, they're not like button ...

When we talk about World War II, it’s often in terms of major milestones: the racist incarceration of Japanese Americans; the bombings of Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki. But there are infinite smaller-scale stories that many of us will never hear, like that of Nobuo Fujita, a Japanese pilot sent on a mission to bomb Oregon. Because nobody was injured during the bombings, they didn’t become major news in either the U.S. or Japan. Twenty years later, the town of Brookings, Oregon invited Fujita to their Memorial Day festival, sparking a lifelong friendship and a mini cultural ...

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Monnier: How do you describe your identity when you describe yourself? What words do you like?

Tsurumi: Well, it depends on who I'm talking to or why I'm describing it. If it's with a friend or somebody I'm close with or in the context of this interview, it's a longer conversation, right? If it's somebody who's like, 'Well, what are you?" which is the common thing, I think, if you're mixed-race in America, then it's like, "Well, my dad's Japanese and my mom's Jewish. I'm ...

In the undersea world of Andrea Tsurumi’s new picture book, Crab Cake, the community has a steady rhythm: “ Seahorse pretends to be seaweed…Parrotfish crunches coral and poops sand…Pufferfish puffs up…And crab bakes cakes.” When a (human-caused) disaster brings this routine to a halt and all the animals into hiding, Crab takes action. What results is a warm-hearted affirmation of individual effort, art, and caretaking, with joyful, richly textured illustrations sure to inspire curiosity about ocean ecology, environmental responsibility, and the taste of mussel-topped cupcakes.

Tsurumi—who is also the author of picture book Accident! (about a ...