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Mitchell Kuga grew up thinking as a Japanese-Okinawan American from Hawaii, he had to choose between being gay and being Asian. He rarely saw people who embraced both in the early 2000s.

Today, Kuga is embracing all aspects of his identity and inspiring others to do the same. The Syracuse University alumnus spoke as this year’s Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month’s “Paving the Way” Alumni Speaker on Wednesday night. Since graduating from Newhouse School of Public Communications in 2009, he has published work in GQ, T Magazine, The Village Voice, Vice, The Fader, and Condé Nast Traveler.

In 2019, Kuga won the Excellence in Online Journalism Award from the NLGJA: The Association of LGBTQ Journalists for his award-winning BuzzFeed News piece about how libraries were standing their ground against backlash for hosting LGBTQ programs such as drag queen story times.

Kuga credits an Asian American Studies course he took during his freshman year for helping him fully understand his own identity. During the course, Kuga learned about the history of Asian Americans in the United States, the model minority myth, the murder of Vincent Chin and anti-Blackness in the Asian community during the 1992 Los Angeles riots.

“It really helped me understand that I belong to a lineage and that, by virtue of not living on the continent, I was inheriting this history,” Kuga said. “It also dovetailed with this understanding of what it meant to inhabit a racialized body for the first time because I don’t think I really felt that growing up.”

Kuga categorizes himself as a generalist, writing about everything from spam popping up on the New York City restaurant scene to his own conception of home and identity.

“My short career as a writer has really been about following my curiosities, my interests and my instincts in a media landscape that is perpetually shifting,” Kuga said. “So, part of being a generalist is giving myself permission.”

Permission was the central theme to Kuga’s talk. He encouraged the audience to give themselves permission to write, change and ultimately grow into themselves. Kuga described his career path as anything but linear.

After graduating from Syracuse in 2009, he moved back home to Hawaii, where he juggled working in construction with his father and completing an unpaid internship. Through his internship, he was able to write about the Honolulu nightclub scene, cover press conferences, and write long-form stories.

In the late 2010s, Kuga moved to New York City, where he worked as a waiter in a sushi restaurant in Bushwick, a neighborhood in Brooklyn. He says that waiting on tables helped him to become a better writer.

“It made me pay attention,” Kuga said. “It made me learn how to read people, how to listen better.”

The food service job also gave him the ability to talk about food. He later became an editor for SALT, a zine about the New York City food scene. His work with SALT and other food-related assignments led Kuga down a path of thrilling work about New York City culture beyond the food scene.

Moving forward, Kuga says he is working on a book deal among other stories. He feels that a book is the best way to tell his own story without the pressure of clicks or matching a publication’s voice. After sharing this, Kuga continued to talk about how Asian American stories are often only centered around intergenerational trauma rather than other topics within the community.

“There was kind of a flattening also sometimes of the Asian American experience for white consumption when we only become legible through our suffering,” Kuga said. “I think that’s a very common refrain for writers of color in general, especially in writing for the internet, is that we are only valuable through trauma.”

Published on April 8, 2021 at 1:12 am

Contact Amy: abnakamu@syr.edu