David Mura presents Exit, Miss Saigon in conversation with Alexs D. Pate

David Mura was well into his twenties when he began to explore his Asian American identity. His Japanese American parents had been incarcerated in internment camps during World War II, and in response to their traumatic experience, they abandoned their Japanese roots to try to assimilate into white, middle-class America. As a result, Mura was raised to consider himself as a white person, and his journey toward understanding and accepting his Asianness was a fraught road—one that left many fractured relationships in its wake. In Exit, Miss Saigon, Mura writes with frank openness about his personal experiences and the irrevocable ways they are rooted in the internalized, systemic racism that permeates American culture.

Starting out as a young poet in Minneapolis working toward a PhD, Mura avoided reading “minority literature,” yearning instead to be like famed poets in their ivory towers—Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell, John Berryman, artists tortured by their families and personal demons rather than by politics or race. As Mura began to read more widely, his conceptions of race and its societal construction began to broaden. When the Ordway Theater in St. Paul, Minnesota, staged a presentation of Miss Saigon in 1992, Mura published “Secrets and Anger” in Mother Jones, a scathing critique of the play’s racist undertones and the arguments he’d been having with white artist friends about it. As a result, Mura was ostracized from the local, dominantly white writing community, yet in its place he found a deeper connection with other BIPOC writers and eventually started an Asian American arts organization in the Twin Cities.

Far more than a personal memoir, Exit, Miss Saigon is a clear-eyed examination of issues affecting Asian Americans: anti-Asian hate crimes during the pandemic, affirmative action, racial and sexual stereotypes in the media, interracial relationships and raising mixed-race children, the legacy of Japanese American internment, and the shortfalls of therapy in addressing race. Mura excavates the deep-seated racist stereotypes thrust on those perceived as “other” (read: nonwhite people) and works to uncover a more authentic, liberatory path to defining personal identity.

David Mura is a poet, writer of creative nonfiction and fiction, critic, and playwright. He is author of several books, including The Stories Whiteness Tells Itself: Racial Myths and Our American Narratives (Minnesota, 2022) and A Stranger’s Journey: Race, Identity, and Narrative Craft in Writing and the memoirs Turning Japanese: Memoirs of a Sansei and Where the Body Meets Memory: An Odyssey of Race, Sexuality, and Identity. He is coeditor, with Carolyn Holbrook, of We Are Meant to Rise: Voices for Justice from Minneapolis to the World (Minnesota, 2021). He lives in Minneapolis.

Alexs D. Pate is the author of five novels including the New York Times Bestseller , commissioned by Steven Spielberg’s Dreamworks/SKG and based on the screenplay by David Franzoni. Other novels include , , and .Alexs is the President & Founder of Innocent Technologies, LLC, which provides consultative and innovative relationship development solutions that help educational systems, healthcare services corporations and other businesses respond more quickly and more accurately to the needs of their students, patients, clients, and customers.Alexs’s first book of nonfiction, , which investigates the literary history and the quality of rap as a poetic expression, was published by Scarecrow Press in January 2010. Alexs’s poetry collection, , was published in 1998. Alexs is the editor of , published in 2015.

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