I am super proud that in my recently published novel, Amphibious, the main character is Blasian. I make no secret of this fact in my marketing of the book, although within the narrative, the character’s heritages remain hidden for the first six to eight chapters. I love a slow reveal. 😉

Anyway, there’s a lot that is particularly fun about having a Blasian main character. The low-hanging fruit would be the pure fact of representation in the literature world. It is simply fun to read a story about “someone like me.” There is also a fair amount of fun in being able to share with the world what a Blasian experience in America can be like. Lastly, the way that I decide to convey Blasian experience is fun because it is mainly colored by the main character’s internal logic.

“No, duh, Naomi,” you might be thinking. “Isn’t every novel that tells the story from the main character’s point of view colored by the main character’s internal logic?”

Actually, no. This issue is rooted in the fact that minorities must constantly translate ourselves in everyday life. We learn to anticipate what others may be thinking about us, and we adapt to act and react in a way that makes sense to them. I think this kind of translation––sometimes unfortunately accompanied by exoticization––comes through in all kinds of art. I understand there to be a legitimate tension between helping others to understand us by building complete bridges and providing them with the materials to take some ownership in the building process.

When I was working on Amphibious, I wanted to write it from a Blasian woman’s perspective that could begin building a bridge but also gave the reader building blocks to construct the remaining part. I did not want to write a story about a Blasian woman doing things Blasianly and feeling Blasian feelings about the Blasian things that she is Blasianly doing. It is true that Valencia Chang, my main character, walks around in a world that is not made for her. She is affected by her history and current social location as well as by the people who try to label her and act upon her in different ways due to their perception of her. But these are only pieces of her reality. The story, unlike much biracial literature, is not about Valencia’s mixedness. Her mixedness certainly colors her experience of and response to the world in which she lives, but the novel as a whole is a story about fear, survival, and love that is worth reading and appreciating as such.

That said, some translation in the narrative was unavoidable, like the explanation of the class designation system. My biracial test reader understood with minimal explanation or world-building what it meant for someone with a Class 4 mother and a Class 2 father to be a member of the Subclass, but my uniracial readers had a harder time understanding. I compromised by including more world-building in the narration to give uniracial readers a few hints about how the class system works. More about that in a moment. Additionally, I really struggled with whether to italicize words that were in a different language––specifically words like har gao and char siu bao (given my heritage) or tamales and saree (given the diverse communities in which I grew up). These words are a part of my common speech, and I resented the idea that I should mark them as “other.” I ended up caving completely on the italics for the sake of readers who might obsess over my lack of adherence to convention. When it comes down to it, I want to be thought-provoking, not distracting.

I hope I still hit the mark with regard to writing from a minority perspective, at least in some areas. For instance, a part of being a minority and of being a woman is the constant sense that someone may act upon you at any moment. I soften the blow of the horror that accompanies this fact by making my main character incredibly capable in a physical fight, but the reality still exists in the text. The instances of prejudice and harassment that the main character encounters, sometimes due to being confused for a member of an ethnic group with which she has no genetic connection, cast a difficult truth of Blasian experience in a (usually) humorous light. Also, despite the fact that I explain how the class system came to be, I leave much of the workings of the world and the things that happen in it to be learned through observation. There are other Easter eggs in the text, too. You’ll know them when you see them because they’ll either resonate with you or raise your eyebrows.

Minorities walk around in a world that is not made for us. We translate ourselves for others, but we also translate and interpret everything around us so that we can orient ourselves and know how to react. I hoped to capture this aspect of minority life by flipping the roles and allowing my Blasian character’s internal logic to operate as it would unbothered by the need to explain every detail. This may put the reader in the position of needing to play catch-up in order to understand, but that’s not so bad, right? After all, that’s what many folks have to do on a daily basis.