Have you ever faced challenges in your career as a Pacific Islander? If so, how did you overcome them?
One of the biggest challenges I’ve faced as a Pacific Islander is being hapa [mixed], Pacific Islander and also Caucasian. Growing up looking the way I do with green eyes, and being the lightest skin of my seven siblings, I was always called haole [foreigner] or not Hawaiian enough. So, that was always a challenge. Being othered already on top of my queerness or my transness, but really being othered as I wasn’t Hawaiian enough. And then when I came to the continental US, I wasn’t really white-looking — it was like, “Oh, there’s some sort of ethnicity in you.” That was always the hard part in expressing, or maybe trying to find camaraderie with people that felt the same as me. But always being hapa, never really belonging to a group… You never really feel like you’re part of any community. So, it’s really kind of full-circle to be able to represent a whole island nation that at one point in time didn’t even consider me as one of theirs, but now is so proud to have me represent.
BuzzFeed: What you’re saying really resonates with me. In Samoan, we say afakasi instead of hapa, but you can probably tell I’m also mixed [laughs]. I’m curious what was the moment that allowed you to be confident in your background then. Just like, “This is who I am.”
The thing that helped me really delve into my culture was probably when I stopped going to church [laughs]. Religion wipes out a lot of culture, a lot of ethnicity and POC groups. So, watching even my family, who are all still very religious, not really have a connection with their Hawaiian side because it’s pagan, or there’s all these gods and goddesses, and that’s not what whatever religion that they’re subscribing to right now agrees with… I think that was the biggest thing for me to be like, “Okay, now I don’t have this religion that is thrusted upon me, and now I can clear that off like an app I don’t need on my phone. But what do I need?” And I really needed to fill that space up with my culture and the things that I was denied because of religion, which was really diving into who I was, where my family came from, and also all the things that I didn’t get to learn because I was told that it wasn’t really necessary for us to continue our culture, which I thought was wildly insane. Because especially right now in all that we’re going through, it’s so important to represent our culture and to show people that we are still here and we’re trying to thrive.
