Anne Marie Nakagawa’s documentary, Between: Living in the Hyphen, explored the lives of mixed ethnicity individuals.Through the process of interview she portrays the everyday struggle mixed heritage individuals suffer, as they attempt to discern their own identity. During the documentary Chinese-Canadian poet Fred Wah proclaimed that his life as a mixed ethnicity individual taught him that “You get to know yourself by what is resisting you.” Through the social limitations and criticism he endured, Fred Wah gained an understanding of what it meant to be a mixed heritage individual. He further elaborated on the struggle in his 1996 biography Diamond Grill. In his book Wah illustrates what it was like to grow up, a child of both Chinese and Scot-Irish decent, and the racial expectations that strangled him.

Fred Wah, as well as all of the other mixed heritage individuals, expressed a reoccurring theme of how their own personal identities were shaped. For all of those interviewed, childhood represented a time of uncertainty and confusion. Being given a certain hereditary social status and culture, while not quite fitting in, defined their existence as living anomalies. The experience of Always trying to find a place among communities that never fully accepted them, linked those interviewed.

At some point each individual was expected to submit to a superficial racial label, produced by a misinformed conformist culture. Each person experienced some form of social limitation or resistance caused by either their external appearance or legal classification. For Fred Wah it was when his entrance into the United States was delayed because of the fact that he was classified as an Asian. Wah physically appears as a white male, though due to his legal name being of Asian decent he encountered unexpected difficulties throughout life.

For mixed heritage individuals, the cultural barriers and limitations caging them seemed unfair and biased when in comparison to their ‘pure blooded’ peers. The natural human desire to belong and be accepted is overruled by decades of ignorant ethnic classification. The cultivation of our youth is now in crisis as more and more children struggle to find communities and cultures they may identify with. Without awareness being raised and social expectations changed, future generations of mixed ethnicity are doomed to endure the same unnecessary feelings of being lost and alone.