MIXED BLESSING
An event for the offspring of mixed-race families shits a chord as the difficult to ‘identify’ find their people
Pop-up events create community for Torontonians of multiracial backgrounds, and a place where they don’t have to answer the question ‘Where are you from?’
I am eating a Singaporean and Peranakan-inspired dinner with people who look like my family more than my actual family.
The night before, I sat down to a proper English roast with my mother’s family that is dominated by blue eyes, blond hair and pale skin, a striking contrast to my Japanese-Canadian father’s side of the family.
But here at Mixed in the Six, a Toronto pop-up dining and social event held at Peter Pan Bistro, the 40 attendees look like variations of me: Strong, dark hair. Skin that doesn’t burn in the sun. And despite vastly different backgrounds spanning from Jamaica and Norway to Finland and Singapore, every guest is well-versed in the Toronto mixed-race experience.
We’ve all felt the invasive gazes and heard tired, othering questions like, “Where are you from?”
When group photos from the first “MIT6” held at an artist loft surfaced on social media, attendee Michael Bray, who is Ukrainian and Chinese, commented, “These are my first family photos where the family all looks like me.”
Although MIT6 has matured into a sleeker community event that includes professional photographers and a DJ and dance party, it is also a safe space for attendees to swap stories about growing up as the only mixed-race kid in school and sometimes in the family, plus conversations about dealing with microaggressions, harassment and bullying as a mixed-race person.
The head of the MIT6 “family” are Gina Oades, an occupational therapist and makeup artist, and Haan Palcu-Chang, a chef, who met on a failed Tinder date.
“At our first coffee date, Haan mentioned that he has wanted to host a dinner bringing together mixed people,” says Oades, who identifies at Filipino and Canadian (her father was adopted), “It wasn’t until we ran into one another with our sisters at a concert that we all became mixed Asian best friends for life and realized that we should do this. It’s a perfect platonic marriage.”
The two got to work on a $25 ticketed event that would showcase live music by local multiracial musicians like Bray and Charlene Dorland, while guests dined over PalcuChang’s fusion-style feasts.
“I think for most people, but particularly those in mixed families, food is a very important element to their stories. It’s a reference point we use to ground us, give us perspective and make us happy,” says PalcuChang, who identifies as ChineseRomanian. “For me, the food element is more than just feeding people. It’s a symbol for what we are trying to do with Mixed in the Six: generosity, community, family, nourishment.”
As the former president of the Mixed Students Association of York, Oades was reunited with members she hadn’t seen in nearly 10 years. And although the 2006 census indicated that 7.1 per cent of GTA marriages were interracial (a number that is expected by Statistics Canada to grow), the sold-out dinner showed Oades that there is still a need for mixed-race spaces in Toronto.
“People have shared with us that they feel a sense of belonging and acceptance at MIT6,” says Oades. “That feeling of not being, for ex- ample, ‘ black enough or white enough’ seems to dissolve when you get to connect with other people who have had similar experiences as you.”
Professor G. Reginald Daniel, who edits the Journal of Critical Mixed Race Studies, both based out of the University of California, Santa Barbara, understands mixed-race events are naturally fun and exciting but he hopes young attendees recognize the legal, physical and psychological struggles and trauma older multiracial generations have gone through. For example, the U.S. law against interracial marriage was only outlawed in 1967. And while MIT6 guests often cheekily gush over one another’s attractiveness (many attendees happen to work as models, actors and performers), Daniel hopes mixedrace millennials don’t get caught up in a strictly superficial multiracial discourse.
He notes how the mainstream media has latched onto the “happy hapa,” “magical mixie,” “happy hybrid,” “racial ambassador,” and “post-racial messiah” stereotypes of multiracial individuals that are dangerous because they portray “overenthusiastic images, including notions that multiracial individuals in the post-Civil rights era no longer experience any racial trauma and conflict about their identity.”
MIT6 attendees know too well that a post-racial world free of racial prejudice and discrimination does not actually exist.
“The key is to ground that enthusiasm and capture it in a way that is meaningful so you can work with other groups. So you aren’t seen as so self-centred and seem solely focused on your ‘mixie’ concerns,” Daniel stresses. “This would mean moving beyond the specific concerns of multiracial individuals and see the link with the concerns of other communities relating to anti-immigrant sentiments, Islamophobia, native American land rights and even the concerns of women or the LGBT community, etcetera.”
MIT6 is going beyond bringing people together for food, taking on an advocacy role with a donation drive for Syrian refugees as well as highlighting the difficulty of those with a mixed-race background to find bone marrow transplants. Oades met 11-year-old Aaryan DinhAli, who is Vietnamese and Afghani and is suffering from aplastic anemia and desperately needs a bone-marrow transplant. MIT6 invited U of T’s Stem Cell Club and Canadian Blood Services to set up a clinic at the dinner, successfully registering 17 new mixed-race donors.
“Being able to raise awareness and potentially save a life is next level and we’re happy that MIT6 can be a part of that,” Oades says. To attend the next MIT6 event, contact Gina Oades at mixedinthesix@gmail.com.
“People . . . feel a sense of belonging and acceptance at MIT6.” GINA OADES MIT6 CO-ORGANIZER