Author Description

As an adolescent born to a Hong Kong Chinese father and an American mother growing up in Hong Kong, Los Angeles, and Beijing, I was always asking the same question: who am I? Am I Eurasian? Am I Hapa? Or am I something else entirely? Whenever I questioned my identity, my father would always say to me, "Son, you can be a bridge." I've always wondered about that. Presumably, that meant being some sort of a cultural go-between. While I didn't completely understand what my father was saying at the time, the idea of being a bridge stayed with me. This book arose from my own need for organizing principles. In business and in family life, I am in constant dialogue with both sets of worldviews - one Chinese, one Western. But how do I manage Chinese-Western contradictions? How do I hold two sets of sometimes competing ideas together? The existing "mixed" rubrics weren't particularly useful. "Hapa," while inclusive, offered no meaningful guidance. It was a nice idea and all-the idea of mixed people of all shades united in anti-racism. But Hapa was stuck in the year 2000. Hapa had no specifics. It had no answers for a post-global financial crisis, more polarized world. Hapa was no help in making sense (as a mixed person) of a world witnessing a resurgent China, a world in which the West faces a number of challenges. Hapa didn't ask the tough questions - its "world without walls" philosophy drew blanks. "Eurasian," on the other hand, seemed elitist, often opting to safeguard existing privileges at the expense of acquiring new skills. At the end of the day, I'm both Chinese and Western. I don't want to choose. I don't want to switch. I'm not perfectly "half-half," nor am I "double." I wish I could be "everything" but I can't. I wish I could be friends with everyone but I can't. I had to go beyond Hapa and Eurasian. This book is addressed to a rising millennial generation, for whom an emerging transnational identity has become an urgent, but unaddressed reality. The premise of th