Mika Ellison

Yes, I was definitely in the tail end of what we'll call the hapa generation.

For people who don't know, hapa is taken from this Hawaiian phrase, hapa haole, which means half white.

So depending on the context, it can really refer to anyone who's half white.

But hapa ended up being used to refer to mixed Asian people in general, regardless of percentages.

And it was definitely super popular to use that term to refer to mixed Asian people in the past 30 years or so.

I learned more about it from Rebecca King-Arian.

She's now a sociology professor who studies the intersection of Asians, social media, and pop culture.

But back in the 90s, she was part of this student group in Berkeley called the Hapa Issues Forum.

We were young.

But then people started to be like, wait, isn't referring to mixed Asian people using an indigenous Hawaiian term, maybe cultural appropriation?

And the general consensus was kind of, yeah.

Even though a lot of people like Rebecca and myself liked and used the term, it did fall out of favor a little bit.

Interesting.

I would say middle school, early high school.

And then after that, we just kind of didn't have any other labels.

So when Waysian came along, it was very exciting.

Well, as I mentioned, my whole life I've kind of been surrounded by Waysians, so it's not exactly new to me.

And I will admit that having a label is kind of nice.

But the thing that feels new is seeing more Waysian stories.

So Asians have been around for a long time.