'Exit, Miss Saigon' with David Mura

I would like to welcome author David Mura. David, welcome to the show. Well, thank you for having me. Of course. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come on. And you have a new book and it's called Exit Miss Saigon. And it's essentially a memoir about your life growing up, you know, how you saw yourself at a young age. And then when you were in your 20s, kind of investigating and digging a little deeper into your life. So tell readers a little bit, you know, about what's involved in this memoir of yours. Well, one way I put it is... It tells of my transformation from what we Asians call a banana. Yellow on the outside, white on the inside. And I know African-Americans have a similar term, Oreo, right? Yeah. And how I transformed from being a banana into an Asian-American artist and activist. And part of that came from, I'm a third-generation Japanese-American. So my parents at ages 10 and 14 and my grandparents and their families were imprisoned by the American government during World War II because supposedly they were a fifth column threat. Now, unknown at the time is the FBI and the military actually did an investigation and found that the Japanese American community was not a threat, but they lied to the public. And so my parents' response to be in prison for their race and ethnicity was to try to assimilate into a white middle-class identity. I mean, say you're arrested for shoplifting. If you show your reform, you don't shoplifting anymore. But if you're imprisoned for your race and ethnicity, how do you show your reform? To them, it became, let's become as close as we can to white middle-class, and that's the way they raised me. And I grew up in a white suburb without much diversity, Thank So when a white friend would say to me, I think of you, David, like a white person, I would go, that's what I want to be. And I went to English graduate school and read through all of English and American literature, but they didn't teach me any authors of color. And only after I left grad school and I began reading black writers, you. and I realized, oh, there's a whole other way of looking at race. There's a whole other language of looking at race. And I said to myself, oh, I'm not white. I'm never going to be white. So what does it mean that I'm a Japanese-American, an Asian-American, a person of color? And part of that meant going back and looking at what happened to my parents, because my parents never talked about being imprisoned by the U.S. government. Their whole generation kept silent about it to their kids. I had a friend who, when her parents talked about the intern camps, she thought they were talking about summer camps. Because when we were kids, nobody... came up to us and said, you know, David, we were all removed from our homes when we were kids and put in these prisons behind barbed wire and rifle towers pointing inward. And part of that was a sense of shame that that happened to it. And part of it was nobody really wanted to deal with it or hear with it. And it wasn't like white people wanted to hear like, oh, you imprisoned Um... The title of the book, Exit Miss Saigon, here's the cover, it refers to when Miss Saigon came out in the early 90s. And one of the aspects of it was there were yellow-faced castings. They had a British actor playing an Asian. And, you know, he squinted up his eyes and, you know, just ridiculous, right? And my white friends couldn't understand why I objected to yellow-face. They couldn't understand why I objected to the fact that all the Vietnamese males in the musical were evil and corrupt. And the more we discussed about issues of the race, the more arguments we had. And then I wrote an article about Mother Jones, and they freaked out. They asked me if I'd become a racial separatist. They asked if I was going to divorce my wife, who's white. But the same things I was saying to my white friends, which were angering them. I'd go to college campuses and speak, and not only Asian students, but the Black students, the Latino students, the Native students, the Arab students would come up to me and say, I'm glad you said those things. And I realized, oh, that's my audience. That's who I'm writing to. Now, growing up, being raised as essentially white, how did that upbringing kind of, I would say, not really cloud, but how did that actually make you see other minorities growing up? I didn't think that much, you know, I grew up, my father was a Republican, but I grew up being a Democrat. But as I talk about in the group, in the book, I became friends with somebody who's still my really good friend, Alex Pate, who's a black writer. And we decided to do a performance piece about the Rodney King beating. Because there were images there of Korean store owners and African Americans in the community being... in conflict with each other and we just thought we got up on stage and I just said I'm Asian American he's African American we're friends we would show a different image of what the ways that our communities can be aligned but it was also learning I mean around that time I was sitting around with seven black male artists and they all started talking and really joking about being arrested driving while black DWB And I realized, like, as an Asian-American, I don't experience that. And when you learn something like that, it can either make you more curious or you don't want to hear it. It can either make you go, that's not my problem or that is my problem. But these were my friends. These were my colleagues. And the more I found out about things like that, the angrier I got. And my friend Alex and I did both a performance piece and a movie together. And he said, You know, it was only when I saw you developing anger and not being afraid of angering white people that I thought, oh, I can trust him. He's going to have my back, right? And he said, you developing anger allowed me to retire some of my anger because somebody else was fighting on the same side. And he said, you're coming from a direction they don't expect. You're like a southpaw. And so, you know, we made a great combination doing the show because We were aligned and people were going, yeah, they're aligned. We haven't seen that before, right? That they're creating this possibility, the Asian-American community and the African-American community can come together and both fight for justice, both fight for equal rights, both fight for equality and support each other. And it didn't take away from our fight. It actually made it easier for all of us. And so when you started doing, you know, digging into, you know, your background and your family's history, and, you know, you mentioned, you know, how your parents were, you know, in prison and during the World War, how did your digging and asking questions, how did that affect your relationship with your parents? Well, I'm laughing because my father voted for Trump. He recently passed. And my mother didn't like my writing. Because I wrote a memoir, my first memoir I wrote about some arguments and difficulties I had with them, and she never read a book of mine after that. But that was okay. I mean, I went through therapy, I dealt with issues with my parents, I sort of forgave them, and it wasn't a big deal. Although I'm writing the book now about their passing and my relationship to them. But no, No, it was more that. At the beginning, I lost a lot of white friends, even people who'd been part of my wedding. But that was, eventually I realized, as painful as that was, it was part of the price of my sticking to my truth. But at the same time, I was meeting other Asian American artists and other African American artists, and as a book, I tell in the book, I began teaching at a writer's conference I was at a conference of writers of color, and I was meeting writers and artists. whose backgrounds went all over the globe, from the Dominican Republic, from Trinidad, from the Philippines, from Nigeria. And every person I met who was different from me, I was learning more about what America actually is now. You know, because I live in Minneapolis. We just had this whole reaction and resistance to Operation Metro Search. And part of that was because we're a multiracial, multiethnic city. That's our lives. My middle son is married to a Somali-American. My youngest son is going to marry a Mexican-American. And my daughter is married to an ex-evangelical white guy. So our family is like America. And it's like, why wouldn't you celebrate that? You know, why do you have to fear that? Why do you have to fear that, oh, my neighbor's different? And I think one of the things that happened in Minneapolis and St. Paul during the Operation Metro Surge is we just said, no. Like J.D. Vance says, oh, your neighbor should be like you. We went, no, our neighbor is our neighbor, whether they're born in Minneapolis or Mogadishu, whether they come from America or they came from Vietnam or Liberia, they're our neighbors. Of course we're going to protect them. They're parents of the kids our kids go to school with, our kids are friends with. This is what it means to have a community. And it was awful. Everything ICE was doing was just horrible. But we stuck together. And that was important. Because we showed that you don't have to fear difference. You don't have to fear the immigrant next door. And as I tell people, you know, because I write in Exit Miss Saigon about my interracial marriage to a white woman who's three-quarters WASP and one-quarter Jewish, and what I often say is we're a country of Romeo and Juliet. It's like back in the day, if you're German Lutheran and you're married and found in love with an Irish Catholic, both families freaked out. Generation later, nobody cared. It's the same thing. Back in the day, the Irish-American were denigrated. They should remember that, because they were barred from jobs. They were looked at as garbage. So when the Somali community is called garbage, I remember as a Japanese-American, my community was called vermin. My community were called rats when they were actually patriotic. and part of America and I have to stand up for my Somali friends for my you know I mean I have Somali people in my family now I mean they're my family members like the end of my son's marriage uh uh when I gave the toast I said we're gonna dance to the Pointer Sisters we are off we are family because we're creating a new family and isn't that beautiful Now, what final words do you have, especially for the younger generation of Asian-Americans that may be kind of in like an identity crisis, trying to figure things out, you know, from what they were taught and what was passed down to them and as they try to come into their own? Same as, you know, as you did. Well, great African-American author James Baldwin talked about how it's very difficult sometimes to change your identity, but it's a good thing. Because as you meet new people, you learn more about the world. When I was sitting talking to those seven black artists who were friends of mine about learning about driving while black more than 30 years ago, it was important for me to learn that and to change my sense of, oh, these black friends have to deal with something I don't deal with. And if I'm going to be friends with them, I have to fight for them. And that's a good thing. So you can't be afraid of change. You know, you have to ask questions. I talk in the book about what I call epistemic humility, which is just a fancy name for there are things you don't know and things you don't know you don't know. And everybody, in terms of the issues of race in America, has things they don't know and things they don't know they don't know. So you're better off rather than arguing, asking questions, learning. And so that's part of the spirit of the book, is I keep learning from all these people I meet. Awesome. Well, David, thank you so much for taking the time to share your story and for all the knowledge that you've shared throughout this interview and throughout your books, and most importantly, for taking the time to come and chat with me and fellow book lovers out there. We greatly appreciate it. Well, thank you so much, Sid. I really enjoyed this.