Exerpts from a reflection paper for my digital storytelling class

Since I arrived at university, so many things have focused on identity, and I have had to reexamine some of the identities I have always claimed. I have never been a strong believer in the idea of race, and I would love to see it disappear, yet my racial and ethnic identities have been a big part of me for a good deal of my life. Racism is up there on my list of causes, and I feel like sharing my personal story of an-ever-evolving and fluid concept of such identities will give me direction in a quest against racism.
When I was little I knew that my father was of Japanese descent and my mother, German. I knew that these two types of people looked very different from each other, and I think I even understood that they came from different parts of the world and that there were other people who looked like them but belonged to different groups. I remember asking how to tell the difference between Japanese and Chinese people. I may even have asked what the difference was. I remember telling my first grade class that some people did not like both parts of me when we talked about World War II.
I remember being asked once if I was “Oriental” and having to look at my mother nod and tell me to say yes. I did not really have a concept of race until I moved to Hawaiʻi in fifth grade. There, in the cultural melting pot of the world, where there is less racism in some ways and circles than anywhere else, and more in other ways, I learned to be “Asian.” I still knew I was half-white, but even there where everyone is of mixed heritage, people were still taught to embrace one racial identity. It was an easy choice. I could not pass as a white person, and in some ways, it was cooler to be Asian anyway. People respected that. Oftentimes, if you were a white person, you were just another damn “haole” trying to take over the islands.
Even when “multiracial” boxes started appearing on forms and applications, I would choose “Asian.” No one ever sat down and talked to me about what it meant to be multiracial. If there was a “check all that apply” rule, then I would go ahead and choose two boxes, or an “other” box that allowed you to write stuff in, then I would write “half-Japanese Okinawan, half-white.” Usually there was not though, and I had to choose one. In ninth grade my friends had a party at the end of the year, and most of the kids there were either white, Asian, or both. We took a picture with all the Asians. We did not take a picture with all the white kids or anything else. We were damn proud to be Asian.
I did start calling myself Gerjapokapol or Japagerpol to include all my ethnic identities, but I still represented my Asian-ness to the world. It was not until I came to university and went on the diversity retreat that I really started thinking about identifying as multiracial. In the months since then, I have come to call myself “hapa kepani” or half-Japanese in Hawaiian. I feel that this is the best representation of my cultural identity because it expresses my belonging to two separate backgrounds as well as embracing a third, the culture of the islands I have come to love so much. I also feel that the idea of a cultural identity is more acceptable to me than that of ethnic and especially racial ones.