(The following post is an assignment for my class, Imagining Asian Americans, but that doesn’t make it any less real talk.)
I used to be one of you. Yeah, two years ago I would have skipped out of this post like you’re tempted to right now just after reading the title.
What happened?
Early on, I was taught without words that if I didn’t think I was a minority maybe they won’t treat me like one. That I was better than those minorities. So like a camel sticking its head into the sand, I disavowed that I was different and loudly questioned why we spent so much time studying race at schools. I argued against affirmative action because I thought we should be postracial and colorblind. Whenever minority issues came up, the knee-jerk reaction was to shrug it off, to prove that I wasn’t like those militant-for-no-reason minorities.
In this way I isolated myself from the other minorities. And then I left the Asian-Americans behind, too. I traded in my model minority mandates for new-to-me white rebellion (as much as I could, anyway) because sex, drugs, and rock and roll were way more appealing than the only agenda pop culture ever laid out for me. I avoided other Asians like the plague, worried that people would think I was one of those Asians. I fought to be included in that edge case of “cool” Asians as if my lives depended on it–my throat hoarse from proving that I can be just as loud as anyone else, my purity score plundered by (occasionally reckless) experimentation. Fighting the expectations with increasing intensity, I broke free of the gravitational pulls of the communities I grew up with–to find myself eating moon cakes alone.
It wasn’t really until I went to Jamaica that I started questioning all of this. First, I learned that despite answering “China” for the last 12 years when asked where I came from, I actually identified more as an American at a third point because it explained much more about who I was. Second, I learned that I was pretty happy with my perch outside of the racial binary in Jamaica, which made me realize that I was on a similar perch here. Finally, despite the racialized (racist?) catcalls (“Pssssst Ms. Chin” and “Chinese Japanese!”) that hurricaned on me, I found myself happier about being Asian than I had been in a long time. Why? Because despite the frequent politically-incorrect statement from black Jamaicans, Asians in Jamaica didn’t seem as constrained as Asian-Americans in terms of expectations and stereotypes. They were accepted as just as Jamaican as everyone else. All of a sudden, I felt freed from having to constantly distancing myself from The Stereotype (because it didn’t exist on the island!), an activity that occupied far more of my time and energy than I realized. And then I started wondering why things were so different in America.
With eyes now open to the processes of racialization, at least in the cases where the US differed from Jamaica, I became increasingly interested in understanding why Asian-Americans were framed as continuously foreign, why the myth of a homogeneous(ly successful) Asian-American experience was so entrenched, why Asian-Americans were treated so differently from other minorities, why the outrage I thought was missing from the Asian-American community was, in fact, alive and well, just marginalized as rare exceptions not worth mentioning.
It was these questions, in addition to many more that I had not thought to ask, that Asian-American studies has helped to answer. It is a study of history: understanding how two centuries of codified discrimination, old misunderstandings, uprisings and struggles for rights and equality and events the government would rather forget shape how we are perceived, classified, and treated today, a study of Angel Island, Sa-I-Gu, Vincent Chin, the Hays Code, Manilamen, Executive Order 9066, Yellow Peril, the Third World Liberation Front, the Chinese and Asian Exclusion Acts. It is also a study of representations: how the media has controlled and shaped the image of what an Asian-American is supposed to be over the years, broadcasting constraints and bamboo ceilings into our self-perceptions. It is a study that understands its internal conflicts: the problems with a pan-Asian identity, the problematic intersection between queer and Asian-American.
For me, it has been a study of a culture I barely realized I was a part of for most of my life, of problems I didn’t know I was struggling against, of a community and a movement I didn’t know about and didn’t think I would be willing to join. Maybe more than it has been about figuring out how to stop them from looking at us as a nameless, souless Mongol horde, it has been about figuring out how to make me shed years of alienation and discomfort and, basically, stop doing it myself. That I don’t have to be ashamed when a Cindy Kim somewhere is doing “the Asian thing” and excelling at violin instead of shaving her hair into a mohawk and rioting on the streets because it is her right as an Asian-American and therefore an individual to do whatever the hell she wants and it don’t have to affect me none because I, too, am an individual. That indeed, violin concertos contain movements of their own, and can be just as good of a soundtrack for revolution as anything else.
Hey, does Rob Goins go to Harvard?
Hey, that’s a subtle question!
I come from a world you may not understand…
HAHAHAHAHAHA
-.-
I arrived to your post here from Google and I enjoyed reading your story a lot. I just graduated from college a year and a half ago and these issues you are talking about have been on my mind a lot lately, as a Chinese American. So salient in my mind in fact that I fear my response might be just as long as your post I think I handled it very differently from you.
When I was younger, I was not particularly interested in shaking any boats. My parents should have known better, but they subscribed to the notion that Asians were a model minority and constantly instilled in me that I was expected to be good academically. Although I had a rough start largely due to my own laziness, I did perform pretty well in high school and later in college. I was even good in math apparently as my calculus courses were always some of my better grades in college. But I always felt I was more creatively inclined- I always enjoyed my fine arts courses and writing far more than the natural sciences. In college, I majored in a social science- Psychology. Although my parents never expressed outright disapproval of my academic decisions, it always felt like there was an undercurrent of disagreement whenever the subject would come up. (Let me make it clear that I, in no way, resent them though.)
Like you though, I too often felt like race should not be a big deal. My high school was primary Caucasian and Jewish, but I never really felt like I was classified by my ethnicity. And ideally, nobody else should be either. And Chinese Exclusion Act? Railroad? What did all that have to do with me? Should be water under the bridge. If I had been less naive though, I would’ve realized it was all around me. For example, I should’ve paid more attention to the school shooting years ago and how the news never let us forget that the shooter was Korean from an immigrant family. That China was constantly being sensationalized as a economic threat is actually very calculated propaganda. I look back now and wonder if I was really free of racialized constraints, or was I simply being too apathetic to the issue?
Something I really like to do now is look for movies I would enjoy. I don’t consider myself a film buff, but I have a new appreciation for being an active agent in entertaining myself, rather than just going to see whatever is in theaters. One particular movie some online research led me to is a Thai teen romantic comedy. I loved it, but for a reason I couldn’t understand until I gave it some of the very thoughts I’m posting now. I was watching these people who share a lot of my physical features and, like your experience in Jamaica, “The Stereotype” simply isn’t an issue. It is only with further reading around the internet that I find out that, in Asia, there is actually a lot of popular media that the countries share with each other (for example, the pop culture phenomenon called the “Korean Wave”). Some people even interpreted it as Asian youth’s collective, pan-Asian effort to resist becoming too Westernized. There is something humorously comforting about knowing people in Asia also negotiate between Eastern and Western culture (albeit in a different way from Asians in America).
In a way, I kind of wish America embraced this kind of World Cinema more. I think it would do some people a lot of good to see how people around the world are different, but also similar in experience. I finally figured out that the reason I loved the movie was because there was a character I directly identified with. There was a “Cindy Kim” Asian nerd (though his name was Joe, not Cindy). But he was also kind of cool: he was a film buff, he partied, he had passions, he feel in love and out of love as hard as anybody else. I suppose I could easily be seen as an Asian nerd. But in high school, I was also on the swim team. I loved painting. In college, I was the Chinese Students Association, but I was also in the Outings club where I went on hikes and camped in cabins during the winter. That’s why I sometimes feel ambivalent about others who try to invalidate the Asian nerd archetype. It makes me sometimes feel like others are accusing me of having sold out to an image. Yeah, most Asians aren’t really as nerdy as American Movie XYZ would like us to think. But I do exist and I don’t mind if people see me as a nerd initially. I just want them to know there is more to it than just that 2 or 3 sentence description of a stereotype.
Chinese and korean hate Japanese so much .
Because of WW2.
That’s another stereotype
[catcalls (“Pssssst Ms. Chin” and “Chinese Japanese!”) that hurricaned on me] this part.. yeah! really annoying.
very interesting post, Christina! i feel like i can relate. i finally felt comfortable being asian when i moved to hawai’i for a few years in my mid 20s. there, i saw the full spectrum of what asian-americans can be and delighted that i didn’t need to aspire being a doctor or an engineer. on the hawaiian islands, i delighted at the sight of asian surfers, stoners and burnouts, after getting over the initial “i wonder what their mothers think”. my boss was an older japanese-american local whose nickname used to be “candyman”. on the islands, i finally felt comfortable in my own skin (or my own eyes), accepted as a local and somewhat freed of my own stereotypes of what i was supposed to be. no one could believe i was actually not a local actually, but from michigan. and that’s probably what the problem was, i grew up in the motor city where many chinese and taiwanese engineers immigrated into to the detroit metro area to work for ford, gm or chrysler. it was always, “which car company does your dad work for? ” and “which car company do you want to work for when you graduate from college?” it was during the hey-day of “buy american” and anti-japanese sentiment and the locale of Vincent Chin’s murder that i tried so hard to just be white and felt cursed to have been born asian. it was too bad it took 25 years for me to get over that and to just be me. i have Hawai’i to thank for that, so mahalo nui loa, Hawai’i.
i find that asians suffer from more inferiority complexes than any other race. They seem to never really know where to fit in and are always feeling they should try to be like white people or better than blacks. I think they lose themselves because they are always trying to be something they are not. Why not just love yourself and your culture and spend less time trying not to be a stereotype…
Jamaica. Yeah mon. Irie. Cool Runnings. Jerk Chicken : p
Wow I am speechless,everyone take note of something: The World is Big,we should explore it before we make conclusions,sterotypes &racial crappy comments.Once again Brilliant Post Christina.
[...] was 19 (Tim and Diana were 20) and not yet very hip to race or gender issues (see previous blogpost). Turns out, that’s what happens when you grow up immersed in a heavily white and male part [...]
A pretty interesting subject.
Fantastic. I was starting to believe that I was the only Asian American that has ever open my eyes to this. The color blind society is starting to become more of a hassle since people expect me to be a certain way but is unable to explain why they view me this way. It’s something that has made our society racist and blind to the fact that we are. It’s like we put a large blanket over our eyes and decided to call it a day.
Loved this, thanks for writing it.
As an Asian/Pacific Islander ( I like to think I’m both but I’ll use ‘Asian’ for simplicity’s sake ) that wasn’t raised in an Asian household, I’ve always wondered about the Asian stereotype and how it affects me. I wasn’t exposed to the Asian culture nor could I remember the primary language ever since the adoption. What I got instead was the negative stereotyping from non-Asians and Asians.
What really hurts the most is the stereotyping from other Asians. I find it hard to believe that since a large group of diverse people that originally came from the same hemisphere, we’d go as far as knock each other down as much as we get knocked down by non-Asians. I recall when I experienced that negativity, I changed and started to act more like the white folks. I guess it was a form of appeasement that kinda made it hard for me to truly accept myself and forge my own identity as an individual. Granted, I am still ‘white-washed’ but I am comfortable with myself and I live my life as best as I could without letting anyone telling me what I’m supposed to be (and what I’m supposed to do). Your story is quite interesting and it’s making me see a lot of the things that used to used to bother me in a different light. Thanks for posting this! Honestly, I didn’t expect I’d write this but you can thank Google for bringing me here, =].
Everyone loves what you guys tend to be up too. This kind of clever work and reporting!
Keep up the very good works guys I’ve added you guys to my own blogroll.
I think that America is transitioning from a society that at least pretends to favour assimilation to one that is becomming a ‘salad bowl’ of ethnic groups with particular identities and where everyone is not only allowed but indeed expected to have a hyphen in their identity instead of just ‘American’.
The only group which doesn’t do this is white Americans, but this is because that group is so unilaterally dominant. But as demographics change, this too will change. But then the inevitable question is… has America as a ‘melting pot’ failed? And should we fundamentally strive for racial identities? Maybe it’s human nature. But the implications of this have not yet been discussed thoroughly.