Lila Klopfenstein
Lila is a recent graduate from the College of Idaho, living and working in Nagasaki Japan. She loves running, hiking, and swimming.
Updated July 2018
Stories from This Author
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 …