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What happens when you spend years trying to become the version of yourself you think other people will accept?
In this episode of What Kind of Asian Are You?, I sit down with poet, writer, performer, activist, and memoirist David Mura for a deeply personal conversation about identity, belonging, assimilation, masculinity, and learning to see yourself differently.
David grew up 3rd generation Japanese American in a predominantly white environment, carrying a family history shaped by the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. For years, he says, he thought of himself in ways that were closer to whiteness than to his own Japanese American identity.
That began to change when reading Black writers gave him a new language for understanding race. From there, David began exploring what it meant to be Japanese American and Asian American and what it meant to stop measuring himself against someone else's definition of belonging.
The conversation moves through Asian American masculinity, interracial dating, representation, the cultural impact of Miss Saigon, activism, therapy, art, community, and the experience of seeing people who look like you reflected back at you.
David Mura is the author of Exit: The End of White Supremacy and the forthcoming memoir Exit Miss Saigon, among other works.
Order the book now!
https://www.upress.umn.edu/9781517921217/exit-miss-saigon/
Follow David!
https://www.instagram.com/muradavid/
Website
https://davidmura.com/
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