June 23
2007
Today the Summer Blog Blast Tour concludes with the wonderful Justina Chen Headley at Finding Wonderland. Here's a bit:
Some wonderful women at Swirl, a mixed race organization, warned me that there would be people who would not take kindly to my use of the word “hapa.� So, yes, one Hawaiian has expressed—shall we say, displeasure over my use of that word. The nice thing is that 99.9% of readers have agreed that in the case of this novel, hapa was the right word to use.
See, what Patty learns is that labels are just that: labels. They’re just manufactured syllables, no different from the words she creates. Or the ones that naming company creates for a huge paycheck.
We all have the power to define ourselves, using whatever words—real, made-up, co-opted—that feel right and good to us.
