Spring 2024

Just a few months after the 2014 Isla Vista shooting, an act of misogynist violence perpetrated by a half-Asian, half-white man named Elliot Rodger, a Reddit community called r/hapas was founded by user u/hapa666. From mid-2015 to 2018, however, the subreddit was dominated by a moderator going by the name of u/EurasianTiger, and it’s speculated that u/hapa666 and u/EurasianTiger are the same person. The subreddit, as of December 2023, boasts a little over thirty thousand members, and serves as hub for people of mixed Asian ancestry to discuss their heritage, pop culture, and importantly, how their parents may or may not have messed them up psychologically by creating a child with no distinct cultural identity.

If you were a half-Asian person coming of age on the internet around the mid-2010s, you might have, after trawling internet forums for a sense of belonging, found yourself on r/hapas looking for others who identify as Hapa, “halfie,” “part-Asian,” or any one of the many terms that characterize mixed identities. (It’s important to note that since then, the term Hapa has largely been phased out for “half-Asian” due to having been appropriated from Hawaiian culture, taken from the Hawaiian term “hapa haole” meaning “half-stranger,” with the “stranger” commonly implied to be white). At the time, this community catered, in particular, to half-East Asian and half-white internet users from English-speaking regions, who formed a very vocal presence on the internet in their search for others like them. It’s this specific mix that has engendered much conversation, and many wild theories, at the intersection of Asian-Western race relations, psychology, and sexual and social capital.

Being half-Asian and half-white (in the West) means occupying a strange intersection of racial privilege and historical oppression, where there is a constant tension between the normalized white identity and the hyphenated “Asian-...” which itself comes with a share of complicated feelings. As a half-Asian and half-white person, what you look like, and where you grow up, shapes your identity too, and can often determine how accepted you are by the communities you come from. Whether you’re white-passing, look fully Asian, or fall somewhere in the middle as many do, or whether you speak any foreign language, contributes to the racial confusion and reckoning many of us experience, as do race and ethnicity questionnaires without “multiracial” options (we check “other”). This reckoning, broadly speaking, has to do with the realization that a mixed identity can’t be neatly boxed in yet is still swept by the overpowering current of the racial climate created by white supremacy (Bradt). As mixed Asian/white people grow up, experiences from the benign to the traumatic, like getting to enjoy the food of two or more cultures, being told they’re not “white enough” or “Asian enough” to belong in either culture, or being called a slur that doesn’t align with their self-perception, push them to start thinking critically about their race.

On the day of the Isla Vista shooting, I was a fifteen-year-old sitting in digital media class, Googling news articles about it, after seeing the notification pop up on a news app I had on my phone. At the time, I was interested in researching gun violence and thus found myself wanting to understand why yet another shooting had been perpetrated in the United States. To give some background, on May 23, 2014, Elliot Rodger, a twenty-two-year-old at the time, stabbed two of his roommates, and a friend, to death, drove to the UC Santa Barbara’s Alpha Phi sorority house and shot at three women outside, and then shot at random around the Isla Vista neighborhood before exchanging shots with the police and subsequently ending his life with a shot to the head. He also ran over several people while driving. His rampage took the lives of six UCSB students and wounded fourteen others, and he left behind several documents (his infamous manifesto and several videos) explaining his reasoning behind the attacks.

Though I already felt sick to my stomach, my attention was grabbed by something else: a sort of familiarity radiating from Elliot Rodger’s despicable face. A lot of mixed people like to joke that we have a radar for other mixed people, and mine fired when I saw his photo in an article. A sinking feeling came over me as I knew that his identity must have played a part in the story, too. Over the years, as I’ve carried this hunch, writers and scholars such as Laura Bates and Amia Srinivasan have examined the Isla Vista shooting from a feminist lens, and ushered a nuanced understanding of the noxious influence of the patriarchy on men who turn to misogynist acts of violence to quell their own insecurities, which they blame on women. While they’ve touched upon Elliot Rodger’s heritage to some degree, I’ve always noticed a lack of discussion surrounding the complex dynamics of his identity, both virtual and IRL. I’m here to argue that there’s a connection to be made between the favorable treatment of half-Asian and half-white women by society, the emasculation of Asian and thereby half-Asian men, and the brand of racialized misogyny spewed by the internet-based manosphere that pushed Elliot Rodger to commit his crime and that continues to harm our community. Though undeniably, Rodger was motivated by violent rhetoric against women, his manifesto also displays a pathetic self-hatred stemming from never having built confidence in his Asian side. After people across the online world of half-Asian affinity groups gained awareness of his crime, it validated bogus theories about the psychology of half-Asian and half-white people, that require an intersectional feminist understanding to undo.

R/hapas originally became a part of the manosphere because of the fervor and controlling attitude founder/moderator u/eurasiantiger held toward directing his aggressive vendetta against Asian and mixed-Asian women. Through how he shaped the discourse of r/hapas, he projected what can only be his own issues onto half-Asian internet users everywhere, and with that, his internalized racism, misogyny, and bitterness. He held a lot of the same ideals propagated by various parts of the manosphere, which are extensively described by Laura Bates in “Men Who Hate Women.” Bates’ book distills how the many male-centric groups of the internet, such as incels, pick-up artists, and men’s rights activists, obsess over women, whether it’s controlling them, wanting to subjugate them, or blaming them for their personal failings. She writes, “At the root of manosphere community and white supremacy is a shared belief that the core, sacred purpose of man is to have sex, to procreate and to dominate. (...) The concept of a white man as a heterosexual, stereotypically masculine, utterly omnipotent figure is key, ironically representing both the hopelessly suffocating societal standards that drives many men to join these communities in the first place and the supposed solution they are indoctrinated to pursue with ever more extreme measures” (p. 34). While manosphere movements generally claim that their goal is to uplift and empower disenfranchised or disillusioned men, their failure to identify that their issues stem from the patriarchy leads them to cling on to it and channel their self-hatred into unproductive outlets, such as harassment campaigns against women or rape fantasies. As Jia Tolentino sums up in her article “The Rage of the Incels,” “men, like women, blame women if they feel undesirable. And, as women gain the economic and cultural power that allows them to be choosy about their partners, men have generated ideas about self-improvement that are sometimes inextricable from violent rage.”

Furthermore, these communities uphold many racist hierarchical ideals, such as “sweeping generalizations about the ‘types’ of women in different countries, suggesting that they all conform to dehumanising stereotypes. (Women from a particular European country are sex-crazed, Asian women are submissive to white men, etc.)” (Bates 95). As Amia Srinivasan also wrote in her book, “The Right to Sex,” “consider the supreme fuckability of ‘hot blonde sluts’ and East Asian women, the comparative unfuckability of black women and Asian men, the fetishisation and fear of black male sexuality, the sexual disgust expressed towards disabled, trans and fat bodies” (p. 114). She mentions that those are “political facts” in the current racial hegemony, though u/eurasiantiger would probably frame them more so as supreme, unbendable truths.

It’s not a wild stretch to speculate that u/eurasiantiger, a known frequenter of incel and PUA boards (according to Know Your Meme), would have bought into the beliefs of the incel community when it comes to race, subsequently applied those beliefs to his own life, and then onto the lives of other half-Asians on the internet. By doing just that, and posting so actively each day on the r/hapas subreddit that users wondered how he was able to maintain a full-time job, he let misogynist rhetoric infect the majority of discussions in the r/hapas community. In the same previously referenced post where user u/sarang_sowrong theorizes about how a man “almost 30 years of age is able to spend over 12 hours a day posting to Reddit,” they provide a very thorough overview of what the subreddit was like at its most active during the mid-2010s: “r/hapas is EurasianTiger's subreddit. He's been the head moderator basically since it started and he largely controls the direction of the sub by banning those who want to debate his premise that WMAF (White fathers with Asian mothers, and their half asian-white children) are disproportionately dysfunctional.” As they mention, though r/hapas was meant to be a safe space for those of mixed-Asian heritage, it became a breeding ground for toxic, anti-mixed race ideology, and anti-woman rhetoric.

It’s no surprise that the original r/hapas subreddit, where a large part of the discourse and vocabulary of half-Asian and half-white identities originated, developed a complex lexicon reminiscent of the insider acronyms incels and pick-up artists use in their online communities. The two following terms were popularized (and probably created) by u/eurasiantiger: WMAF, or “white male, asian female,” describing a relationship between a white man and Asian woman; and AMWF, or “asian male, white female,” describing a relationship between an Asian man and white woman. In the time that u/eurasiantiger was active on r/hapas, he paraded around theories that due to the current racial hierarchy of the Western world, specifically the United States, WMAF couples (usually a loser nerdy white guy with a gorgeous, but also potentially gold-digging Asian woman) were a product of yellow fever and Asian self-hatred, doomed to produce depressed children unable to fit in anywhere, rejected by all corners of society, and bound to lash out. On the flip side, he also touted the superiority of AMWF couples (the much less common pairing), which broke the racial stereotype of Asian men as unattractive, and created well-adjusted and successful children. He spent a lot of time hating “WMAF hapas” like himself, and like me: he wrote up a megathread explaining why the r/hapas subreddit was created, and why we’re doomed.

In the megathread, he collected news articles, personal essays, posts from other users of the subreddit, and medical journal articles highlighting the higher prevalence of substance use and psychological disorders among mixed people, and crafted his theory that WMAF hapas suffer from and uphold the racist overtones of their parents’ relationship. He poses questions such as, “Why are there many White Nationalists and racist social outcasts who like Asian women?” or “Do yellow-fever/white-fever fetishes, status-marriages, racial & sexual hierarchies & racism in the home lead to happy children?” but also “If most Half-Asians have White dads and Asian moms, love is NOT COLORBLIND, and Asian men are mocked by society, (even by hypocritical, low-status, anti-feminist white men with ‘Asian fetishes’ and self-loathing, cruel Asian women who seek to assimilate), what is it like ‘looking Asian’, as a biracial?” Supposedly, part of u/eurasiantiger’s motivation in writing out the megathread was also to reconcile with his own heritage (and hatred of his parents’ relationship), and some of these questions are quite valid. In a way, he isn’t wrong in identifying problematic racial dynamics that underlie these relationships (evidently focusing only on heterosexual relationships). It is productive and cathartic for many of us to explore why it is that most half-Asian and half-white people have white dads and East Asian moms, or why our parents, hailing from disparate cultural backgrounds, frequently struggle to explain mixed-ness to their children. It’s also validating to have a community online to discuss these things. Furthermore, I would agree that forces created by systemic racism can encourage East Asian women to marry white men, or problematic white men to find Asian women attractive due to their “exoticism” and adjacency to whiteness (see lots of white supremacists with Asian wives or conservatives like Mitch McConnell). However, where u/eurastiantiger’s theories could have had real impact in unpacking those tendencies, they took a fatal turn when he started applying his own opinions, supported by the countless articles he sourced from the deepest and darkest corners of the internet, to the lives of every other half-Asian person on the internet.

After the Isla Vista shooting, Elliot Rodger became the poster child for u/eurasiantiger’s arguments, proving that his heritage (and not other factors like his personality, potential mental illness, porn addiction, or self-loathing) was the true culprit of his crime. It’s true that Rodger reflects on his race many times in his manifesto. However, the context provided by Rodger’s mixed-ness is no pardon for his crime nor did it forecast it the moment he was born. Matthew Salesses writes, in the Guardian article “‘Good-looking for an Asian': how I shed white ideals of masculinity“, “In his twisted mind, Rodger managed to turn his self-hatred into the beliefs both that he had a right to white women’s bodies because he was white and that he was not attractive to white women because he was Asian. Neither of these inventions, notably, are really about Asian American desire at all. These are problems of the limited male imagination. Rodger’s was especially problematic.” The way I see it, Elliot Rodger took to violence as a result of societal factors telling him his Asian-ness was unattractive and that the only sense of redemption he could gain for his masculinity would be to sleep with a hot white woman. In Jeff Yang’s view in his article “What a close read of the Isla Vista shooter’s horrific manifesto, “My Twisted World,” says about his values—and ours,” the manifesto is a shattered reflection of our culture, which is governed by a racist hierarchy and beliefs about sex and sexual conquests that harm women and men of color. Rodger wrote as much in it, detailing how he felt emasculated and dorky, how he relentlessly pursued the attention of women without so much of a thought about how he might have come across, how he despised men he saw as “inferior” for the sole reason that they weren’t white, and how he despised white women who didn’t choose him. He also asked questions like, “how could an ugly Asian attract the attention of a white girl, while a beautiful Eurasian like myself never had any attention from them?” Doesn’t that sound familiar?

Not much is known about u/eurasiantiger’s personal life, though he was doxxed a few years ago and is presumed to be a man named Tenda Spencer who leads a remarkably normal life as a designer outside of his online presence. Supposedly, he even went to LaGuardia High School (like me) and Columbia University, and has suffered from stalking at the hands of “an insane female stalker.” See a pattern in who he blames for his problems? It’s rumored he had interacted with Elliot Rodger before the Isla Vista shooting, though of course, it’s hard to prove anything concrete when the best source for this type of information is Know Your Meme, which includes the following disclaimer about Spencer: “To this day, it is unknown whether the stories about his family or his childhood were true or made up.” But the connection between them, whether they interacted or not, is uncanny. After all, it shaped far too much of the online landscape regarding who or what mixed-Asian people are supposed to represent, the role of misogyny in understanding the place of mixed-Asian people in the world, and why Asian and mixed-Asian men have a lot of work to do when it comes to undoing the emasculation that has plagued them, and gets turned into violence against women (such as the harassment writer Celeste Ng faced over choosing a husband who’s not Asian, or the appalling behavior of subreddit r/AZNidentity).

I would’ve loved to come of age with a community that accomplished what r/hapas spectacularly failed at. I became more aware than ever of my identity struggles in 2014 after the Isla Vista shooting, and it made me think about my background in ways I found difficult to confront. What did it mean for me to enjoy the privileges of white-adjacency while also embracing my Asian side? How could I feel more connected to that side of myself when I don’t speak Cantonese? In addition, I’m not free from the racial analysis u/eurasiantiger applied to WMAF parents: my parents argued a lot growing up due to their irreconcilable cultural differences (my dad is French while my mom is Hong Konger-American), are now divorced, and my dad has outright admitted to me to being more into Asian women (“they’re more interesting”). I can’t say for certain whether that’s why he cheated on my mom and then got another, much younger Indian woman pregnant, but I’d be a fool not to acknowledge that that has something to do with race, class, and power. As I was growing up, the firmness I hold in my wasian identity now is one that I had to earn, and that sometimes softens when I’m reminded of the ways I’ll never really be a “whole something.” Luckily, I’ve turned to better outlets than rageposting for my identity crisis, whether through the theme of duality that permeates my artwork, which my favorite art teacher noticed in high school, or through joining Asian affinity groups in college where I promised myself I wouldn’t let anyone make me feel like I didn’t belong. Belonging can be hard to find when people like you have historically been described via fractions and percentages, but when you’ve spent years mediating the in-betweens of your race and culture, I’ve found that it becomes easier to foster a greater degree of inclusivity that transcends hard and fast borders.

In her 2016 article, “Who Gets to be ‘Hapa’?” Akemi Johnson describes the term “Hapa” as sort of a secret “handshake,” known to those who also recognize others of mixed heritage. She also details the process of retiring the word from her vocabulary as she’s not part Hawaiian  — which her article also compelled me to do when I read it as a teenager — and the continuous grappling with the “well, what are we?” question. I see another reason to distance half-Asian identities from the word, and it’s the negativity created by u/eurasiantiger/Tenda Spencer on the r/hapas subreddit through his misogynist and racially charged crusades. He could have chosen to create a community where yes, people of mixed-Asian heritage could vent about their cultural struggles, or their parents, but also one where we could uplift each other and bond over shared hardships and joys. He could have orchestrated a project like Kip Fullbeck’s “hapa.me” website celebrating mixed Asian identities through art. Or like Zachary Schwartz hoped for in his article, “Becoming My Own Half-Asian man,” a warmhearted community that could have served as a beacon for people who wanted to become their own role models, and raise the next generation of chronically online mixed-Asian people to embrace their tangled heritage rather than lament over it. To borrow a term from the queer community, we don’t have a whole lot of “mixed-Asian elders.” It’s about time we ditch the toxic world of r/hapas online. We owe it to future halfie kids to be better role models for them.