I understand the frustration at the constant whitewashing in Hollywood. (See Scarlett Johanssen playing a Japanese character in Ghost in the Shell, Emma Stone starring as a woman of Hawaiian descent in Aloha, and Matt Damon somehow playing the hero in a movie literally entitled The Great Wall, as if we haven't been defending that shit for centuries.) It's so rampant that a producer even suggested casting a white woman for the lead to Crazy Rich Asians author Kevin Kwan—who, of course, gave it a hard no.
But to impose whitewashing narratives onto biracial people feels like erasure of half of who I am. And, for me, it's not "whitewashing," anyway. It's more like "whatwashing": What are you? What's your background? It's what so many mixed-race people who don't pass as white have to contend with on a daily basis.
Since when does being more than one thing cancel the other out? According to Golding, who's Malaysian and English, some people implied he won the role because he's half-white, as if being biracial comes with special perks. Please. Science, for what it’s worth, backs me up here. (See how Asian I am?) A 2008 study from UC Davis found that Asian Caucasian mixes are twice as likely to suffer from psychological disorders, like depression, anxiety, and substance abuse, than full Asians. Lauren Berger, one of the authors, surmises that a lower or conflicting ethnic identity—that is, the extent to which someone ascribes to one identity over another—may contribute to it.
It's hard to establish any sort of ethnic identity when I keep receiving conflicting messages about what that identity is. I'm too white for my Chinese friends to consider me a "real" Asian, but still Asian enough to catch the occasional slur. And I don’t understand why other people are slicing and dicing my ethnicity in the first place, something both Golding and Mizuno have called out. "If I can’t play that [Asian] part, what can I play?" Mizuno asked in an interview earlier this month. "A part that's half Japanese, a quarter English, and a quarter Argentinean? How many parts are there for that?"
