A profound memoir of coming to terms with a lost racial identity
David Mura was well into his twenties before he began to explore his Asian American identity. His Japanese American parents had been incarcerated in internment camps during World War II, and in response to their traumatic experience, they abandoned their Japanese roots to try to assimilate into white, middle-class America. As a result, Mura was raised to consider himself as a white person, and his journey toward understanding and accepting his Asianness was a fraught road—one that left many fractured relationships in its wake. In Exit, Miss Saigon, Mura writes with frank openness about his personal experiences and the irrevocable ways they are rooted in the internalized, systemic racism that permeates American culture.
Starting out as a young poet in Minneapolis working toward a PhD, Mura avoided reading “minority literature,” yearning instead to be like famed poets in their ivory tower—Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell, John Berryman—artists tortured by their families and personal demons rather than by politics or race. As Mura began to read more widely, his conceptions of race and its societal construction began to broaden. When the Ordway Theater in Saint Paul, Minnesota, staged a presentation of Miss Saigon in 1992, Mura published “Secrets and Anger” in Mother Jones, a scathing critique of the play’s racist undertones and the arguments he’d been having with white artist friends about it. As a result, Mura was ostracized from the local, dominantly white writing community, yet in its place he found a deeper connection with other BIPOC writers, eventually starting an Asian American arts organization in the Twin Cities.
Far more than a personal memoir, Exit, Miss Saigon is a clear-eyed examination of a variety of issues affecting Asian Americans: anti-Asian hate crimes during the pandemic, affirmative action, racial and sexual stereotypes in the media, interracial relationships and raising mixed-race children, the legacy of Japanese American internment, and the shortfalls of therapy in addressing race. Throughout, Mura excavates the deep-seated racist stereotypes thrust upon those perceived as “other” (read: nonwhite people) and works to uncover a more authentic, liberatory path to defining one’s identity.
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