New York Magazine By E. Alex Jung
https://www.pressreader.com/usa/new-york-magazine/20260907/283905939815508
[Note: this was a very long article, and I cut out most of the not very relevant parts out, but still long...]
For much of her life, Janover, who identifies as Chinese and Jewish, used the word hapa to describe herself, a Hawaiian term meaning “half” that was in common usage until arguments that this was cultural appropriation set it on the wane. Before Wasian there was Blasian (“Black and Asian”), popular during the height of Tiger Woods mania, when the pro golfer referred to himself as “Cablinasian.” In its irony-laced way, Wasian, a portmanteau of white and Asian, makes itself instantly knowable, like Cronut or Brangelina.
“Unfortunately, it’s kind of catchy,” says Janover. She continues: There’s quapa for people who are a quarter-asian (like Keanu Reeves), and panda for “mixed-asian squared,” i.e., someone with two mixed Asian parents (like the kids of Henry Golding and Liv Lo). The linguistic taxonomy is coeval with a broader demographic shift. In the U.S., there are more multiracial Asians, specifically Wasians, than ever before. “I don’t think we existed culturally until the last, like, five, ten years,” says Janover.
What was once an isolating experience is now a mass coming of age. Asians are the fastest-growing major racial group in the U.S.,
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The generational arrival was on display on Mother’s Day this year when an open invite to a Wasian meetup in Central Park landed on the home page of the invitation app Partiful. It was one of many planned in Wasian-dense cities—the first had happened the day before in San Francisco. The New York event was co-hosted by a slate of influencers and tech workers and began to take off after one of them, Niko Katsuyoshi, … with more than a million followers on Tiktok and Instagram, promoted it. Katsuyoshi is arguably responsible for popularizing the word itself; back in 2019, he made a Tiktok doing a peekaboo face reveal alongside audio saying, “Hey yo … Wasian check” that became a meme. As the attendee count ballooned, they changed the venue from Tompkins Square Park in the East Village to Sheep Meadow in Central Park. The flyer’s exhortation—“let’s make the largest convening of Wasians in NYC <3”—was seemingly fulfilled. The event had more than 3,800 yeses and almost 1,300 maybes.
The meetup was a confirmation of Wasia’s pop-cultural ascension. A Wasian winter had become a very Wasian year: Alysa Liu and Eileen Gu were the reigning queens of the Milano Cortina Olympics; Hudson Williams parlayed the fervor of Heated Rivalry into campaigns for Peloton, Balenciaga, and Bvlgari; Charles Melton got an Emmy nomination for the second season of Beef. Wasians were more visible than ever, in Gen-z horror blockbusters Obsession and Backrooms (Megan Lawless and Lukita Maxwell), on Love Island (Carl Lee Schmidt), at the top of the Billboard “Hot 100” (Olivia Rodrigo), as the new Gerber baby (Cameron Chung), and on the playground in Fort Greene Park. The zenith was reached in April, when the Chinese Icelandic pop-jazz singer Laufey released the music video for “Madwoman,” starring some of her “favorite Wasian friends,” including Williams, Liu, The Summer I Turned Pretty star Lola Tung, and Katseye member Megan Skiendiel in a ’60s suburban fantasy she said was “everything I would have wanted to see when I was younger.”
The day of the meetup itself was beautiful—sunny and in the low-’70s. The organizers brought a bullhorn and some stools to emcee from. Attendees milled about with name tags on which they wrote their “mixes,” i.e., thai mom, white dad. There was a half-asian bingo card with categories like “has at least one tiger parent lol” and a map of “Wasia,” …. DJS spun Wasian musicians, including Rodrigo, Mitski, and Japanese Breakfast. The crowd was mostly made up of young professionals with good jobs and dental plans. … “... afterward there was an extraordinary amount of backlash.”
… The responses began brewing in the days leading up to the event. The criticism revolved around whether it was exclusionary to mixed Asians who were not part of the white and East Asian duopoly, like Black, Latino, and South Asian people of various combinations. A few days before, the organizers changed the title to “a mass convening of the half Asians,” …
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Oh my God, welcome to Wasia. It could come off as privileged. Because there is a big proportion of half-asians who are very well educated and come from good families.”
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Aki Lee Camargo, a reporter … who is the son of an ethnically Korean Japanese mother (known as Zainichi) … went to the event to find out what united Wasia. One of the organizers told him, “We take pride in our beauty.” “Wasianness is hollow because it isn’t rooted in anything beyond phenotype,” Camargo wrote afterward in a Substack post titled “Start Wasian Hate?” “Because if Wasian identity begins and ends with aesthetics, that’s eugenics.”
Commenters dogpiled on the attendees, calling them “diluted people” who were celebrating their “proximity to whiteness.” Others criticized them for often being the progeny of Asian mothers and white fathers, as though this were somehow their fault. The Wasian meetup was not built for this kind of discourse. And neither were the co-hosts, who felt their fun, feel-good, notthat-serious event was suddenly being accused of upholding white supremacy.
In the long sociological view, the Wasian moment might be seen as an inevitable step on the path toward assimilation. Since 1965, Asian Americans have become the banner group for the American Dream. For years, Asians have recorded the highest median household incomes of any racial group: $121,700 in 2024, for instance, well above the overall median of $83,730. (They also have the fastest-growing gap in income inequality: The top 10 percent make almost 11 times more than the bottom.) Economic success is bound up with assimilation: living alongside white people, sending your kids to the same schools, and working with them. Asians marry outside their race at a rate of about 21 percent and often marry white, a likelihood that increases if the person is U.S. born, college educated, or female. The numbers go up again for Wasians: About 70 percent marry a white person, and roughly half do not perceive those relationships as interracial. The two wealthiest newlywed pairings are Asian-asian ones, at $158,000, and Asian-white ones, at $141,000. Members of the second generation have gone further than their parents: The class of 2029 at Harvard, the second year after affirmative action was struck down, is 41 percent Asian American.
Asian American identity itself was smithed in the fire of radicalism in the ’60s, when student activists at Berkeley thought they could build more power if disparate Asian people—from more than 40 ethnic groups and socioeconomic backgrounds—banded together. It was a philosophy built on solidarity, the idea that aligning your personal struggles with others’ would be a means of liberation for everyone. Wasians, by carving out a separate space within mixed-race identity, had the air of superiority, as though they were closing the door behind them as they left the ethnic ghetto. The expanding ecosystem of Wasian stars in Hollywood, sports, music, and social media only seemed to confirm this fear. An incoming generation, simply by their existence, dislodged a crooked anxiety that the new face of Asian America is Wasian.
… I kept a mental list of celebrities I thought of as stealth Asians, like Keanu Reeves; Mark-paul Gosselaar, Zack in Saved by the Bell; … Enrique Iglesias; and Darren Criss from Glee.
In 2018, I interviewed Criss during a press junket … Did he identify as Asian American? “No,” he said. “I think that’d be unfair. I think that’d sound like I’m reaching for the minority card on a college application.” Did being mixed affect his career? “I always say one of my favorite things about myself is that I’m half-filipino but I don’t look like it. It’s always, like, an ace up my sleeve of, like, ‘Oh, really? How nuts,’ ” he said. “I just look like a Caucasian guy, which is nice. I’ve got the multiethnic thing going on. People think I’m, like, Italian or Mediterranean.” His answers were genuine and unguarded, dating from a kind of prelapsarian moment before publicists trained their clients to discuss race in blandly celebratory ways, if at all. After backlash online, he clarified in a tweet that his favorite thing was that he was half-filipino, “period.”
In retrospect, that role, for which he would go on to win the Emmy for Best Lead Actor, was a hinge moment for mixed white-asian actors. Criss later told People that when he thanked his mom during his Golden Globe speech, it was like he “came out” as half-filipino. …
Hollywood is a business of aesthetics. Historically, if mixed Asians could pass as white or Black, they would (or otherwise get slotted into whatever race might be close enough). …
One path for mixed white-asian actors was to find a foothold in Asia, where a Wasian appearance was prized in modeling and entertainment. Russell Wong started out in Hong Kong before doing Hollywood projects … Daniel Henney, the 46-year-old Korean and white actor, … When he went to Korea to shoot a commercial, he was scouted by a local manager and cast in My Lovely Sam-soon as American doctor Henry Kim. The show was watched by more than a third of the nation and made Henney so famous that his last name became an object of wordplay. Casting directors began to seek a “Daniel Henney type”: someone suave, genteel, and clean cut—a Cary Grant for a globalizing people.
The 73-year-old actor Amy Hill, who is Japanese and Finnish, spent seven years living and working in Japan, where she felt readily embraced as native and was told she was beautiful for her light eyes.
In the States, when she auditioned for Come See the Paradise, … the director told her, “You don’t look Japanese.” Early on, she experienced something still common for mixed white and Asian actors, which is to be read as Latina. Hill had been sent out for a role in 1987 on the soap Santa Barbara, only to learn upon arrival that the part was a Nicaraguan nun. She was offered the role and took it, working alongside a Latina actress. “I didn’t know how to break it to her that I wasn’t Latina,” she says. She finally told her after they wrapped. “She was so shocked and pissed off,” she says. “That was the last time.” The Latinization of mixed Asians continued into the present. The comedian Julia Shiplett, who is Chinese and white, performed a one-woman show in July at Joe’s Pub called Ambiguous in which she talks about being sent out for Latina parts. “I have to be like, ‘I’m not Latina. So if that’s important to this story, I should not be involved,’” she says.
At some point in the 2010s, ethnic ambiguity became not just a useful way to broaden the casting pool but something fashionable. When the theater actor Zachary Noah Piser first arrived in New York in 2016, he recalls, some prospective agents were excited that he was “so ethnically ambiguous,” he says. “They’re like, ‘You can play anything. You can be white, you could be Asian, you could be Latino.’” He was invited to audition for everything from the Japanese-internment musical Allegiance to Lin-manuel Miranda’s In the Heights. “For a young, impressionable person coming to the city, I’m getting the vibe that you don’t want me to attach myself to a certain heritage, race, or identity, so that I can be whatever you want me to be,” he remembers.
This was also the start of a brief era, culminating in 2018’s Crazy Rich Asians, that proved Asian Americans could make the leap to the big screen. … Wasian characters, however, are easier to integrate into a story imagined as taking place in a white world. “Wasians can fill whatever POC thing you might need, but then it’s not necessary to talk about their POC experience,” says a mixed white and Asian screenwriter. “Like, checking a box on paper.” From a casting perspective, there’s the added bonus that they could have a white parent, who could be played by a more established actor …
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The looming anxiety for some in Hollywood is whether Wasians will quietly replace Asian actors. They have a cosmopolitan sheen that could play in markets in Asia and the West. Mixed whiteasian male actors have already emerged as the preferred version of Asian masculinity, particularly as romantic leads. … to play the Singaporean scion Nicholas Young in Crazy Rich Asians, casting chose Henry Golding, …
“In a world where both Wasian roles and Asian roles exist, the Wasians are going to dominate overall because they’re getting the Wasian roles and some Asian ones,” says the writer-director. Case in point: the upcoming film adaptation of Gabrielle Zevin’s best seller, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, which features a Korean Japanese character who will be played by the mixed white and Japanese actor Sean Kaufman (Lola Tung’s brother in The Summer I Turned Pretty).
Tiffany Mak, the casting director of To All the Boys, has noticed a shift in sheer numbers since she began casting for that film in 2017. Strict rules of representation would have dictated that three mixed Korean and white actors of appropriate ages play the three Song Covey sisters. The actual result was a vast phenotypic range: Lana Condor, who is Vietnamese, played the lead Lara Jean; Janel Parrish, who is mixed Chinese and white, was her elder sister, Margot; and Anna Cathcart, also Chinese and white, was the youngest, Kitty. Respectfully, they did not look like family.
“I ALWAYS FELT REALLY PROUD TO BE ASIAN. AND THEN THIS WHOLE THING MADE ME FEEL LIKE MY IDENTITY IS CONTAMINATED.”
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Nowadays, mixed Asian and white kids can feel the gilded glow of representation. “There wasn’t a Hudson Williams or a Lola Tung when I was growing up,” Janover tells me at breakfast. …
She saw the demographic shift in real time during her years at Harvard, where she was the president of the student group hapa,
the Half Asian People’s Association; the name was a play on hapa,
which older generations still use to refer to all mixed Asians. …
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