Wasian Wave
Wasians (mixed race White-Asians) aren’t 50/50. We’re 100/100.
There’s been a sudden hyper-visible surge of conversations around this specialized identity. I’ve heard the media call it a moment where narratives are building around the success and camera-readiness of Wasian global pop icons, musicians and athletes.
The Wasian Wave is not a fleeting aesthetic trend, it is timeless. The presence isn’t new; the newness is in the amplification of voices and the widening of the spotlight. And unmistakably, the increase of mixed-rice 😉 marriages in the 21st century parting seas for those of us on the current rise.
Biraciality is now in the public sphere. What about when it’s quiet and everyday; a lived-in, embodied experience taking shape? As a woman with an Irish-American father and South Korean immigrant mother, I’m fluent on the topic.
There are private complexities adjacent to this category. I’m a millennial who came of age before the language caught up to reality. In my public school system there were only a handful of Wasian families among thousands. We recognized each other without having to explain.
Back then the forms were limited and simple. We had neat boxes for the census and surveys. Under “Race” we had but one option to check; a marginal, disempowering and subliminally offensive word. We were Others.
The individual experience of learning how to label yourself is a kind of knowing oneself. Our shared human experience is a forward, continuous exercise of claiming our identity- of growing and representing our truth.
I see myself as a meeting point, a blending of Western and Eastern shores. My father’s Irish lineage traces back in New York City history as working class folks way before the lightbulb was invented.
My mother is a South Korean immigrant who arrived in New York more than fifty years ago with her family, carrying the weight of assimilation, stereotype, and survival. In different ways both built lives that taught me to believe in the American Dream.
Wholeness comes into focus when you stop staring at the fractions.
Both of my grandfathers fought in the Korean War as brothers-in-arms, one from the United States and one from South Korea before their children met.
My 할아버지 (Korean Grandfather) is not English-fluent, but we speak the universal language of presence, laughter and food; joys in life that fill up our hearts more than just a plate.
For most of my life I was the one woman in my bloodline that didn’t have a family-modeled mirror. That shifted when my niece and goddaughter Magnolia was born. In her, I see myself reflected back in a way that I never had in the past; a profound and powerful feeling.
Representation matters. This is a reconfiguration of what was once cornered and selectively embraced to something buoyant, expansive and openly celebrated. It’s remarkable to witness cultural pluralism in motion, not theoretically or in abstraction, but in real-time.
Olympian and figure skater Alysa Liu is recognized as one of the greatest athletes of our time and became an international symbol of identity, excellence, and belonging. Not as solely an “American woman,” not as just an “Asian-American Gen-Z” but as part of this movement.
Many of us Wasians grew up being questioned and treated like an ethnically ambiguous gray splash.
