Japanese American singer-songwriter Mitski Miyawaki says her identity is made up of “a million selves” that defy categorization — and fans are saying they find inspiration in that.
“I don’t have a self,” Mitski said on the website for her record label. “I have a million selves, and they’re all me, and I inhabit them, and they all live inside me.”
“The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We,” Mitski’s newest album, released last week by music label Dead Oceans, explores her multitude of selves, she says. Featuring a choir and orchestral arrangements, the album draws from classic Americana imagery such as freight trains, buffalo stampedes and highway cars.
With this album, Mitski is trying to “reconcile all my various identities with being American,” she said in an interview with NPR. “I’m Asian American. I’m half white, half Asian. And so I don’t really fit into either community very well. I am an other in America, even though I am American.”
Mitski’s oscillation between different identities resonates with fan Sunny Dizon, who feels she’s had to do the same to navigate her identity as a Filipina American transgender woman. Dizon, a 24-year-old from Jerseyville, Illinois, said she was the only Asian kid at school and the only Asian family she knew of. She remembers going to the science fair knowing she was fulfilling a stereotype, or joining theater knowing it wasn’t what people expected of her. Her Asian American identity to her was confusing and isolating.
“We’re not really fully American because we emigrated,” Dizon said. “We’re not really Asian because we left Asia. But we still are Asian, like fundamentally so. It feels like a weird contradiction, an in-between kind of space. Like I’m put in a suit that isn’t really made for me.”
Performing identity — especially racial and gender identity — feels to Dizon like suits she’s had to constantly put on. Listening to Mitski, Dizon identifies with her “struggles…
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