The Cost of Assimilation: Author David Mura on Race, Memory, Belonging, and the American Dream
- 2 days ago
- 10 min read
David Mura is an award-winning Japanese American author. His last book was The Stories Whiteness Tells Itself: Racial Myths and Our American Narratives. His two memoirs are Where the Body Meets Memory and Turning Japanese (a NY Times Notable Book). His poetry books are After We Lost Our Way (National Poetry Contest winner), The Colors of Desire (Carl Sandburg Award), Angels for the Burning, The Last Incantations. His book, A Stranger’s Journey: Race, Identity and Narrative Craft in Writing, is a staple in MFA programs. With Carolyn Holbrook, he co-edited We Are Meant to Rise: Voices for Justice from Minneapolis to the World. He co-produced, wrote, and narrated the Emmy-winning PBS documentary, Armed With Language, about the Japanese American linguists who served during WWII. In 2024, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in General Non-fiction.
His new work, Exit, Miss Saigon, is a profound memoir of coming to terms with a lost racial identity. David was well into his twenties when he began to explore his Asian American identity. His Japanese American parents had been incarcerated in internment camps during World War II, and in response to their traumatic experience, they abandoned their Japanese roots to try to assimilate into white, middle-class America. As a result, Mura was raised to consider himself a white person, and his journey toward understanding and accepting his Asianness was a fraught road—one that left many fractured relationships in its wake. In this new work, he writes with frank openness about his personal experiences and the irrevocable ways they are rooted in the internalized, systemic racism that permeates American culture.
Writer’s Life connected with David recently to talk about his work, what inspires him, and the importance of culture in today’s society.
Tell us a bit about your background and career.
In my new book, Exit, Miss Saigon, I write: “…. When America has a war or problems with an Asian country, the xenophobia and racism against Asian Americans, the view of us as an alien threat, marches to the forefront, as it did for Japanese Americans during World War II.”
I’m a third-generation Japanese American, and my teenage parents and their families were imprisoned by the US government during World War II because their community was deemed an internal military threat (years later, it was revealed that the FBI had concluded Japanese Americans posed no such threat but lied to the public).
My parents’ imprisonment affected how they thought of their place in America. To understand this, I often tell audiences: “If you are imprisoned by for shoplifting, to show you’re reformed afterwards, you don’t shoplift. But what do you do if you are imprisoned for your race and ethnicity?”
My parents reacted to this dilemma by trying to assimilate into a white middle-class identity, and they encouraged me to do the same. When I was in high school, and a white friend said to me, “I think of you, David, like a white person,” I would think, Great, that’s how I wanted to be regarded.
It was only in my late twenties, as a young writer, that I began to question my identity, and that was at first through the influence of Black writers. I found in them a language to talk about race that I had not encountered in any of the white authors in my English Literature Ph.D. program. And I realized, “Oh, I’m not white. I’m never going to be white. So what does it mean for me to be a Japanese American? An Asian American? A person of color?”
After my epiphany about my identity, I began to explore the issues of race, and I spent a year living in Japan, investigating my ethnic identity and thinking about the history of Japanese Americans; from that experience, I wrote my first memoir, Turning Japanese. Ever since, my writing has centered on the issues of race and history and how they shape psychology. In other words, our identities and who we are and how we think about ourselves are shaped by the history of race in this country and the historical moment we grow up in.
I’ve written four books of poetry, two memoirs, a novel, and four books of essays. My last book, The Stories Whiteness Tells Itself: Racial Myths and Our American Narratives, started with essays on the police murders of Philando Castile and George Floyd, which took place a few miles from my home. Out of that writing, I realized that there are two different versions of narratives about our history, one white and one Black, and my book analyzes the differences between those histories.
Lately, I’ve written three essays on the response of the Twin Cities to Operation Metro-Surge and the ICE invasion of Minnesota. Part of that resistance was shaped by the BIPOC artistic community and its work to educate others about issues of race, immigration, activism, and history. In delineating my experiences as an Asian American artist in the Twin Cities, Exit, Miss Saigon tells a portion of that story.
When did you first know you wanted to be a writer?
I took a course in Major British poets in college, and the professor asked us to write imitations of the English poets Edmund Spencer and Alexander Pope. I got an A+ for my effort, and he held it up to the class as an example of what he was looking for. I was writing songs at the time, and so I switched my efforts towards poetry.
When the time came for me to apply to grad school, I told my father I wanted to study English literature, but he made me apply to law schools too.
It was only a few years later that I found a briefcase of my father’s poems and stories in the basement and realized he had wanted to become a writer as well.
Tell us about your new book, Exit, Miss Saigon.
Exit, Miss Saigon is a memoir exploring my career as an Asian American artist and activist; it tells the story of how, as I began to explore my identity as an Asian American, my writing and activism led me to forge connections with other Asian Americans and people of color. In the process of telling this story, I examine a variety of issues affecting Asian Americans—the anti-Asian hate crimes during Covid; the Harvard admissions case and affirmative action; racial and sexual stereotypes in the media and on Tinder and Grindr; Asian-Black and other interracial relationships; the legacy of the Japanese American internment; and Asian Americans and mental health.
Written over the past thirty years, the essays form an autobiographical narrative. Recounting “the education of David Mura”, the memoir tells how I transformed from what could be termed a “banana”—yellow on the outside, white on the inside—into an Asian American writer
The memoir starts with the story of arguments I had in my thirties with white friends over the yellow face casting, racial stereotypes, and Orientalism in Miss Saigon. Eventually, those arguments, along with an article I wrote for Mother Jones, led to further arguments about race and the dissolution of many of those friendships.
At the same time as these white friendships fell apart, I was helping to build a community-based Asian American arts organization and beginning to make contacts with Asian American artists both locally in the Twin Cities and around the nation. I was also making friends with Black artists, like the novelist Alexs Pate (Amistad), and learning from them about the racism they faced, and this significantly altered the ways I viewed my own racial and ethnic identity.
In the last section of the book, I narrate how my work with writers of color at the VONA writers’ conference caused me again to complicate my vision of the world and thus, my own identity. At VONA I was not only encountering other American writers of color but also writers whose backgrounds stemmed from countries around the globe—Nigeria, Trinidad, the Dominican Republic, Ghana, Tanzania, Lebanon, Iran, Columbia. As part of VONA, I encountered new stories from the diversity of America, and I learned how to view America through a set of multiracial and multiethnic lenses and to forge connections across racial lines.
Throughout the book, I critically analyze various racial stereotypes of Asian Americans, particularly regarding sex and gender. I argue that Asian Americans can combat the internalized racism created by these stereotypes through art and activism, through coming together and working collectively.
What was your impetus for writing your book?
In exploring Asian American identity, Exit, Miss Saigon doesn’t posit the term Asian American as an ideal or essentialist identity or a given set of political beliefs, but as a “field of inquiry” and a tool for community building. As I write in the Introduction: “….in my life as an artist and activist, the term [Asian American] has served as a field of inquiry, as a launching space for the arts and political organizing, as a way of combatting the loneliness and alienation Asian Americans often feel in American society. It has helped me to analyze not just the ways Whiteness and the dominant culture have affected my life and my community; it has enabled me to see more clearly the struggles of other communities of color and learn from them….It's my hope that after reading this book, all Americans, no matter their race, will see themselves in a more nuanced dialectic, one where the multiplicity of the American experiment must be acknowledged and articulated. As I frequently tell Asian American audiences: Yes, we Asian Americans lead far more complex lives than those outside our communities realize. But our lives are often more complex than even we ourselves understand or possess the language to acknowledge.”
What are the messages you want readers to take away from reading your work?
In Exit, Miss Saigon, I write: “…this book can be seen as a psychological self-help manual for Asian Americans and other BIPOC; I want to help them heal from the damaging effects of American racism, particularly internalized racism and the lack of adequate tools to investigate our identities and our experiences.” The book critically examines the racialized sexual stereotypes of Asians and particularly how that affects views of Asian and Asian American males.
For non-Asian Americans, I hope this book gives them a more complex and historically grounded picture of who Asian Americans are. In a recent survey, when asked to name famous Asian Americans, the first answer was Jackie Chan—who is Chinese and not an Asian American—and Bruce Lee—who died several decades ago. We are still often seen as invisible or inscrutable, as perpetually foreign, as not a legitimate part of America.
One reason for this is that we are often viewed as “the model minority,” a stereotype that whites developed to criticize the Civil Rights movement and the Black protests for equal rights. But our history is rife with acts of prejudice and discrimination, and we’ve been at the center of debates about immigration since the late 1800’s. And yet, people outside our community often believe racism hasn’t affected Asian Americans—this despite the imprisonment of my parents and our community during World War II or the 150% rise in anti-Asian hate crimes during Covid.
How much of your personal self is injected into this work?
All my writing comes out of my personal self and involves the various lenses through which I view my personal self---ethnicity, race, nationality, history, region, age, gender/orientation, class, etc. Obviously, my memoirs and Exit, Miss Saigon concern my own personal story; the same goes for my poems.
The current political and social climate is in turmoil, and every day there are new disturbing headlines. Your book celebrates culture. Tell us about why this is important to you.
The cultural critic Jeff Chang has observed that cultural change always precedes political change. In his book, Who We Be, about art in the post-Civil Rights era, Chang views artists as those who show the unseen, tell the unheard, narrate the stories that haven’t been told. So artists hold up a mirror not just to contemporary society but to our entire American history.
In the past, people of color have not seen themselves in traditional American narratives, and we have not heard our stories as part of the voices that are great within us. But what BIPOC artists do is tell the stories that haven’t been told, and in doing so, they change not only how people of color see themselves but white people, too. And they do this by more than simply critiquing or engaging political issues; artists also create pleasure, and if people find pleasure in new narratives and new artwork that brings in unheard or neglected voices, that pleasure creates new links and connections, conveys new information.
For example, every new Asian American artwork creates a fuller and more complete picture of who we Asian Americans are, and when people find that work interesting, that interest connects not to just Asian American art but to Asian Americans in general. So Exit, Miss Saigon is my attempt to help create a more detailed and complex narrative, not just about my own life, but my community.
Who are some writers or performers who have influenced you along the way?
James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Maxine Hong Kingston, Edward Said, Bertold Brecht, Philip Roth (I grew up in a Jewish suburb), Marguerite Duras, Frantz Fanon, Frank Wilderson, Alexs Pate, Junot Diaz, Quincy Troupe, Lucille Clifton.
You’re also a poet; who inspires you?
Derek Walcott, Garrett Hongo, Czeslaw Milosz, C.K. Williams, Frank Bidart, Kimiko Hahn, Whitman, Yeats, Shakespeare.
What are you working on now, and what can we expect from you next?
My parents died in the past four years, and I’ve just completed a memoir about their passing, their lives, and my relationship with them. I’m the oldest in my extended family now, the vessel and voice of our history. In writing the memoir, I came to a more complex understanding of who my parents were than when I wrote my first two memoirs back in my thirties. I’ve got children and grandchildren now, and I am also facing my own mortality. Part of the book also explores how my mother hated my writing because I divulged things about our family, and this went against her very private nature as well as certain Japanese cultural norms.
I’ve also just completed a manuscript for my new and selected poems, Why Bruce Lee Is Sad.
Where can people find out more about you and your work?
My Website: https://davidmura.com/
My TED Talk for Grinnell College, The American Story, has a million views on YouTube:
On YouTube: David Mura Reading: The Stories Whiteness Tells Itself, East Side Freedom Library 1.1 K views:
David Mura on Alyssa Milano’s podcast Sorry Not Sorry:
Article in Lit Hub on the ICE invasion of Minnesota: