Mia Nakaji Monnier
@miamMia Nakaji Monnier is a writer in Los Angeles. Her journalism and essays have appeared in BuzzFeed News, Shondaland, The Washington Post, and more. She started her career in Little Tokyo at Discover Nikkei and The Rafu Shimpo. You can find her on Twitter @miagabb and read more of her work at mianakajimonnier.com.
Updated May 2021
Stories from This Author
Keiro Addresses Community at Open Meeting
Oct. 26, 2015 • Mia Nakaji Monnier
Each July during Obon, Japanese Americans gather in the Nishi Hongwanji Temple gym to buy udon. Under the basketball hoops, they slurp noodles out of Styrofoam bowls before wandering back into the cooling night to dance Obon odori, pacing ovals in the parking lot, waving uchiwa, those round paper fans with the plastic skeletons that you can find, any time of year, in Japanese American houses and in the pockets of car doors. Thursday night, around 400 people packed into …
Neither One Nor The Other: Why I Love Being Mixed-Race
Oct. 20, 2015 • Mia Nakaji Monnier
I love those parts that seem incompatible but that, in a person, come together. During my first week of college, I met a guy who, like me, had a long, four-part name. When I told him mine, he said, “Mine are better because they all match.” This guy wasn’t exactly representative of my classmates at this New England liberal arts college. He was pretty obnoxious, and our friendship ended right along with freshman orientation. But he had a point. His …
The Rumpus Interview With Yumi Sakugawa - Part 2
Oct. 1, 2015 • Mia Nakaji Monnier
Read Part 1 >> Rumpus: Besides the monsters, it seems like a lot of people in your comics are Asian American or Japanese American based on how they look or what they’re eating, or in Cassie’s case, her last name, but it’s usually something that’s in the background, not being explicitly discussed. Is that anything that you ever did explicitly explore in your art, or is identity something that you like to leave in the background and not necessarily spend …
The Rumpus Interview With Yumi Sakugawa - Part 1
Sept. 30, 2015 • Mia Nakaji Monnier
In Yumi Sakugawa’s breakout comic, I Think I Am in Friend-Love with You, a one-eyed monster pines for a faceless creature. The pair look something like Cousin It and a soft-bodied Stormtrooper—ageless, genderless, of unrecognizable species—but their story resonated with readers around the world, so much so that the free webcomic was republished in hardcover form. Since that first book came out in 2013, Sakugawa has contributed comics to sites, including The Rumpus, and self-published several zines, two of which …
Nina Revoyr On Writing About Race and the Mountains - Q&A: Mixed-Race Japanese American Writer Discusses Her Latest Novel, "Lost Canyon"
Sept. 21, 2015 • Mia Nakaji Monnier
I’ll always have a special love for Nina Revoyr’s writing. Her 2003 novel, Southland, was the first book I ever encountered by a mixed-race Japanese American woman, not to mention one, like me, with a French last name and a face not obviously Asian. Born in Japan, Revoyr spent part of her childhood in Tokyo and Wisconsin, but most of her books take place in Los Angeles, where she has spent most of her life. She writes about the city …
What Meeting My Long-lost Uncle Taught Me About Family
Aug. 26, 2015 • Mia Nakaji Monnier
Until I went to Japan, I’d talked to my uncle only twice: once when my Japanese grandmother died, and again when my grandfather did. Only two people regularly called the house and spoke in Japanese, and I knew both their voices well: the elderly one was my great-aunt; the younger one with a British accent was Mayumi, an old friend of my mom’s, who Anglicized her name herself, as “Muh-you-me.” So when the “moshi-moshi”—that special phone version of “hello”—came across …
MFA’s kimono controversy should spark deeper conversation
July 16, 2015 • Mia Nakaji Monnier
I work at a Japanese-American community newspaper where, every Halloween, we have the same conversation. Then something happens — like Katy Perry gives a performance, or a fraternity has a theme party — and we have the conversation again. If I had strong feelings in the beginning, they’ve been numbed by time and frequency. I just don’t have the energy to react each time a white person wears a kimono as a costume. But when the Boston Museum of Fine …
One Beautiful, Unbearable Year in Japan
March 18, 2014 • Mia Nakaji Monnier
When I tell people about my year in Japan, I tell the best parts. The unexpected shrines in the middle of city blocks. The chestnut cakes that sweetened bitter tea. The wooden temples that stood so tall I could bend my neck back and barely see the place where they disappeared into the fog. There were so many best parts. I can’t think about Japan without romanticizing it, imagining the streets swallowed up by one color or another: yellow gingko, …
Funeral
Dec. 13, 2012 • Mia Nakaji Monnier
One of my great aunts died this week [Note: This article was written in September 2010]. She was in her late 80s, an age that another of our elderly family friends once called something that translates like “an age you can’t complain about dying at,” and she had been sick for almost as long as I can remember. To me, the news didn’t come as a huge surprise and, through this point in my life, death has always felt so …
Part Asian, Not Hapa
Dec. 6, 2012 • Mia Nakaji Monnier
My mother is Japanese from Osaka; my father, American from a small town in Western Oregon. There’s a word for people like me, used especially on the West Coast and popularized in recent years, maybe most notably by artist Kip Fulbeck:Hapa. From the Hawaiian phrase “hapa haole” (“half white”), the word “hapa” has come to be a label that many multiracial people with some Asian heritage incorporate into their identities, whether they wear it with pride or with ambivalence. I …
