This… is something I've been mulling over for a bit. It's been on the back of my mind for at least the past few months since the topic has kind of surged in the national conversation, but it's also just been something I've been thinking about for a good portion of my life.
So, I'm here today to talk about: What has being Asian (Chinese) American been like for me? How has it affected my life, and what does it mean for me?
(A brief disclaimer: This is a very personal take. While I do occasionally cite statistics and reddit historians (I do not use that term disparagingly), this is through the specific lens of my own life, filled with personal biases and anecdotal discussion. I obviously can’t and don’t intend to speak for all Asian Americans - my experience is not necessarily shared among all Asian Americans (or even all Chinese Americans or whatever), nor is any particular sentiment necessarily exclusive to Asian Americans.
With that out of the way…)
Primarily… it means I don't belong anywhere.
To be fair, there's plenty of reason I feel I don't belong in society. I've mentioned in previous posts that I don't fit neatly into society's gender and sexuality expectations, and I'm also arguably just weird. Still though, it would be remiss to ignore the effect of being Asian American. After all, I don’t even really have a home…
It's hard to call a place home when its leader, an individual elected by its people, openly promoted anti-Chinese hate.
And sure, we can nit at little details: he didn't win a majority (he only won 46%, and she didn't win a majority either); not everyone who voted for him believes in his racist statements (they were merely okay with the racism); is it really racist to simply remind people the virus originated in China by calling it the Kung Flu? (yes. yes it is)
But in the end, it's obviously not just him. It’s Hollywood, it’s the dating market, the Bamboo Ceiling-
It’s… even history itself.
As far as I recall from high school history classes, U.S. history was full of white and black men and women, from George Washington to Harriet Tubman, Susan B. Anthony to Martin Luther King, Jr. - but Asian Americans? I personally draw a complete blank. And well, Asian Americans were barely present: until sometime around 1970, Asian Americans made up less than 1% of the population. So, it’s not exactly a surprise that we don’t show up in the events that have defined American history.
American history is not my history. My earliest ancestors in the states are literally my parents, who moved here together from China; they didn’t even meet here. On a visceral level, I can’t picture myself in American history: it’s so devoid of people who simply look like me. I can’t see myself in America during the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, either of the World Wars. I have only a cursory understanding of what it would be like for me in Jim Crow era America. We Asian Americans didn’t even fight for our civil rights here: by the time the civil rights movement came to an end, as noted earlier we were still less than 1% of the population.
Okay but, who cares what history has to say, right? Maybe Asian Americans were absent before, but whatever - history was my least favorite subject, and it’s not like I live in the past, so who gives a fuck. Let’s focus on the present:
How are Asian Americans portrayed and viewed presently?
To borrow a tactic from Zootopia, let me ask a different question: Let’s take a superhero that’s a stand-in for America, such as (the obvious) Captain America, or perhaps Superman - could they look like me? Could they be (East) Asian?
Maybe that’s asking for too much - what about Tony Stark, or Bruce Wayne?
How about just a main romantic lead (of a generic film, i.e. not one specifically about Asians, crazy rich or otherwise)?
Now, as a disclaimer: Asian representation has been growing more recently. Henry Golding is gorgeous alongside Blake Lively and Anna Kendrick in A Simple Favor; speaking of Golding, it’s not quite fair to discount Crazy Rich Asians. And technically, there is a Chinese Superman - but he’s the Superman of China, complete with Chinese flag outfit, and not American. But still, Chinese superhero, that’s cool - and Shang Chi’s coming out in a couple days, and he is Asian American if I understand correctly.
For another disclaimer, it’s not like I’ve actually run numbers or anything - I haven’t surveyed America and found that X% wouldn’t be able to accept an Asian American Superman, or reviewed a list of American rom coms and found that only Y% have an Asian lead when Asian Americans make up Z% of the population. The feeling that these individuals couldn’t be East Asian isn’t necessarily based in fact.
No, it’s a feeling that comes from consistently seeing East Asian men be emasculated and desexualized en masse.
Because American men are always real men - while mostly white, they can be Black (e.g. Sam Wilson), but East Asian? We’re nerds, small and weak, academically successful perhaps but lacking the communication skills to be an actual competitive threat sexually or in the career ladder. My mother told me to be more romantic, like white boys; she cited other Asian mothers, who were in turn citing their daughters’ preferences for charming American boys over us nerdy Asian boys. In one high school summer camp, we got on the topic of ‘what is your ideal partner like? what about least ideal?’ and I listened to this girl describe her least ideal romantic partner as a short, nerdy East Asian boy (yes, race was specified) - and you know that felt amazing for me. And finally, lest we ignore what every topic on masculinity is secretly about - well, everyone knows the stereotype about East Asian penises.
And for me… it’s not like I could rage and proclaim that these are unfair stereotypes or find some sick pride in being ‘better’ than the stereotypes - I am short, and weak - and while I’m fine socializing with friends, I am terribly awkward in most career settings. What response did I have when society reminded me, incessantly, how worthless East Asian men are, how worthless I am?
Alright, I think it’s time to pack it up here boo hoo, toxic masculinity sucks. Besides:
Maybe it’s simply that I don’t belong in ‘white’ America.
That must be it, right? I have this deep sense of being ‘othered’ because I don’t belong to the majority, normative ethnicity in America - but nearly 40% of America isn’t white. Surely, I must fit in with them?
But political discourse on race in the U.S. has always treated the topic rather… black and white, literally and figuratively. Where do we fit in as Asian Americans? We’d like to not be discriminated against, like other minorities. On the other hand, the biggest political topic for Asian Americans recently has been affirmative action, where Asian Americans are in direct opposition to other minorities: anecdotally, I’ve heard of a number of Chinese Americans who voted for Trump solely to get a conservative Supreme Court justice who would remove affirmative action, and it’s not like I haven’t felt the negative effects of affirmative action, as an Asian American applying for a position at MIT and then a job in the tech industry. I’ve seen Twitter tear apart an Asian American writer for not being a ‘real’ minority, and I’ve seen vitriolic anti-Black hate in Asian communities.
And this has always been the case: Asian Americans have always been this ‘third group in a biracial society’ (to quote this fascinating reddit answer about Asian Americans in the Jim Crow South). (As for why, this other reddit answer discusses some of the motivations behind the white Americans who alternately treated (and even labeled) Asian Americans as white in some scenarios yet excluded them in others: spoiler, it was to ensure that opportunities didn’t leak to the Blacks).
So, in a political discourse that only really has room for black and white… there’s no space for us. We don’t belong in the conversation.
Fine then - What about China?
Yes, of course, my home must be China.
Where people look like me.
Where everyone in my extended family lives.
A place I’ve only been to once, after I had already matured to adulthood, with beliefs that run completely counter to those prevalent there.
A place where I can only use the barest of communication, just enough to ask “where’s the bathroom?” with a laughably atrocious American accent.
So yeah, there’re a couple of issues: mismatched value sets, a communication barrier. But really, the biggest issue for me… is actually the shame. And it’s not even the obvious, really terrible stuff like the awful authoritarian government and the rampant corruption… what honestly hits me the hardest is that the entire country has produced nearly nothing of cultural interest while I’ve been alive.
To be fair, how do you even create anything worthwhile with all the censorship? Right off the bat, homosexuality and fantasy (essentially) are banned (so I’d be completely fucked, given my two primary writing interests). And of course, you can’t complain about the government, or even insinuate that society might not be some sort of flourishing paradise. Top it off with a culture that focuses on STEM studies over creative ones, that values the collective over individuals - and it’s impossible to create art.
That’s not strictly true of course. Stephen Chow (Kung Fu Hustle) is objectively hilarious. The Departed won Best Picture for straight up copying a Chinese movie, Infernal Affairs (though that’s technically a Hong Kong movie). Genshin Impact is beautiful (though it’s worth noting that the developers are self-proclaimed otakus); the animation in Black Myth: Wukong looks incredible. And I loved The Dark Forest by Liu Cixin.
But it still feels like so, so little. Korea has had an extensive music industry, and Japanese anime has been beautiful, producing many of my all-time favorite films and series. My favorite series, Avatar:TLA and TLoK, was animated primarily by Korean studios (Korra was partly animated by a Japanese studio). Ragnarok Online and Dragon Nest, two MMORPGs I played, were both created by Korean developers, as was Maple Story; Pokemon is a Japanese game.
My friends and I consumed so much Korean and Japanese content - but if I wanted something Chinese, so I could feel some semblance of pride in my ethnicity… there was nothing. Just a giant fucking desert - complete with two oases next door to taunt and shame me.
And there does exist a rich culture. There’s the martial arts, interesting mythologies, a long and rich history. Hell - I don’t love Chinese food, but I will add dumpings ‘cause they’re fucking delicious. But, even though all of this exists… it’s not my culture: I wasn’t really brought up Chinese. A lot of families will bond over food, especially the making thereof (e.g. the ending of the Pixar short, Bao), but my parents… weren’t about that. I didn’t do Chinese dance (unlike my sister) or kung fu; we barely celebrated holidays; as I mentioned, I don’t even speak the language.
And I don’t mean to blame my parents too much for all of this. After all, there are costs to not assimilating - I actually only spoke Chinese at a young age and was bullied for it, there’s a reason we switched to English only as a family. But the blame doesn’t matter - the result is, well-
I am culturally orphaned. China is not my home.
But obviously - I belong with other Asian Americans.
Maybe I don’t really belong with the rest of the U.S., or in China - but surely, surely, you might say, I cannot possibly argue that my ethnicity as an Asian American somehow distances me from others with that exact same ethnicity.
And you’re right. I am Chinese American - complete with the Tiger Mom, the STEM focus, playing piano and violin, interest in video games, anime, even the faux rebellious splash of dyed hair, the fucking glasses - of the six people in my recent office cubicle, four were East Asian men with glasses.
And whatever, sue me for being hypocritical. After whining for so long about not belonging - I hate fitting in. I am drowning in a sea of people who look like me - straight black hair, dark brown / black eyes, yellow skin, the fucking glasses - in orchestra, in AP classes, at MIT, in tech.
I think the moment I felt this pain the sharpest was fall of high school senior year, when I was applying to college. I needed to convince MIT and other elite universities that I was worth admitting, that I would provide something of value, something different from the bajillion other East Asian American (male) applicants. And when I looked back on my seventeen years on this rock… I couldn’t. I wasn’t a person, I was a stereotype. Yeah maybe I was good in my role - I outshone my classmates in the maths and sciences - but I had one dimension. And I hated it, I hated myself, I felt like I didn’t exist - no one would care if some faceless Asian American kid with no other defining features were to just… disappear.
And well - there’s also how society perceives East Asian men. how I perceive(d?) us. And I didn’t want to associate myself with… that.
So I began to distance myself - to define myself, in little ways, by how I didn’t fit the Asian American stereotype. And of course other Asians have done the same, so much so that it’s a stereotype of its own (yes I’m referring to the dyed hair). But, unhealthy as it may be, it worked - I feel like a person now. I am depressed and nihilistic, I love movies and animation, I love being creative and talking about sex, I’ve embraced the more feminine aspects of myself. I’m not just the Asian American stereotype - I’m me.
Alright, but who is ‘me’? Well, to understand that, let’s talk about:
What does a ‘normal’ family look like anyway? We’re taught from a young age that a family unit has a mother and a father. And so far, my family fits.
But then there’s the siblings, the extended family. Visiting Grannie with sweets, having built-in peers in the form of siblings and cousins. I… didn’t really have that. With a 9 year age gap, my sister and I weren’t really ‘peers’ in any meaningful sense until fairly recently. While I do technically have extended family, they’re all in China and, besides one grandparent, I’ve only met them once, not to mention the language barrier. Speaking of grandparents, three of mine died before I was born (two of them essentially to Chinese communism). The concept of visiting grandparents and getting spoiled was… simultaneously ubiquitous as a trope yet alien to me - my grandpa was only ever in China or in my home, not someplace we could visit - and when he was home… let’s just say I was very similar to David in the Minari trailer.
Combine that with moving three times before middle school and well… I was a lonely child. All I ‘had’ were my parents. But, after a brief time, in which I conveyed and they understood my needs for food, sleep, and potty - our communication broke, around when I was 7. Something about me wanting to have fun and make friends conflicted with their belief that I should dedicate my time solely to my studies, that play was ruinous poison for my soul.
When I was a sophomore in high school, in early 2011, the Tiger Mom entered the national conversation. I was, of course, intimately familiar with the phenomenon - not only was my mother such a figure, but many of my Asian American peers had similar parents (which naturally compounded with my mother’s own tendencies and beliefs by encouraging her). Contrary to many Tiger parent situations, it wasn’t the high parental expectations that I struggled with - my own expectations for myself were fairly high and not altogether unachievable - it was the way that, beyond academic achievement (and, on some level, physical health - can’t go to MIT if I’m dead!), nothing else mattered. Socialization was discouraged, play was practically outlawed, as was dating. Meanwhile, western media and peers with more Americanized parents lived much freer lives, taunting me while I languished behind prison bars
I needed more freedom than that parenting style allowed. I was raised in a country whose central tenet is ~Liberty~; meanwhile, I was only permitted to use the internet in full view of my mother, and basically only to do homework. I did eventually stage my own revolution and gain some semblance of freedom, but the friction between my need to be free and their paternalistic beliefs led to near-constant conflict. I grew up with a lot of anger, and while it doesn’t necessarily show often, a lot of it persists within me and I can be a deeply bitter person.
I think the most damaging effect though of my Tiger parenting was actually the way it stunted my sense of agency, control, identity. The whole idea is that the parents know best: the best thing for children is to get into a good college, and the best way to do so is to focus on academics and a set of standard extracurriculars (i.e. piano and violin). And there’s some wiggle room within that track - you can play clarinet instead, it’s up to you if you want to take AP World History - but choosing to stray from (or, heaven forbid, leave) the path? Having the freedom to choose how to spend my free time, how to live my life - to take a college class outside my major / graduation requirements because I loved bio and chem and missed it? It wasn’t my life I was living, it was the life my parents had chosen for me. That was a big part of why, as I described earlier, at 17 I felt like I wasn’t a person - after all, what are we if not our choices? The little sense of identity I had was defined in rebellion, not just against the confines of the stereotypes of Asian Americans but also the confines of my parents.
That’s… a big part of why I feel so alone, even now as an adult. I socialize often, I have friends - but, as described earlier, I don’t have family. I couldn’t rely on my parents for emotional support - how could I talk to them about the shame of trying to date as an East Asian American male when they didn’t even think I should be dating in the first place? We weren’t even in the same textbook, let alone on the same page. When I’m at my most generous, I don’t necessarily blame them - when you boil it all down, we simply have different worldviews, having been brought up in two vastly different settings. But still - even at my most generous - I have to recognize that they just cannot provide what I need, and they will never understand me.
Whew. Alright, that was… long. Props to you for making it this far (and no shame if you skimmed). But well…
Why did I bother writing this?
Like I said in the beginning - this is something I’ve been mulling over for a bit. With the Atlanta shooting earlier this year, discussion of the Asian American experience began to circulate prominently in the national discourse and was continued in AAPI Heritage Month in May, and I naturally compared my experience with what I was reading. Even earlier though, a couple years ago, I wrote a post on The Farewell in which I talked about bringing one’s experience as an Asian American into art and well, that’s really what I want to talk about.
We talk a lot about diversity in art. One aspect is stuff like… having an Asian superhero, or having Asian characters. And there is certainly value in that - in being able to see myself in these roles, in reminding people that we are more than just shallow stereotypes - even in the simple acknowledgment that we exist.
But on a deeper level, there’s the diversity of experience: my life simply isn’t well-reflected by stories told by white people in America. One of the most tilting movie experiences for me was the opening of Love, Simon: the main character opens with “I’m just like you. For the most part, my life is totally normal” before describing his perfect little family, completely free for example from the strife of having parents of a different culture. I have never related less to a character - which would be completely fine if the movie didn’t open with such a presumptuous assessment of my life and a completely alienating assertion of what normalcy is.
Meanwhile, stories like Bao resonated with me, not just because of superficial things like skin tone or even things like the Chinese supermarket calendar, the pork bao itself, or the buns from the bakery - rather, it was the mother’s overprotectiveness, a trait that defined my own relationship with my mother. Likewise, I related to Sanjay’s Super Team because, even though the characters weren’t Chinese, it was one of the best depictions of the inter-generational divide Sanjay and I both experienced as children of immigrants.
So yes - it’s nice (and valuable) to see things like Henry Golding being hot, and Simu Liu being a superhero. But what I really want is to see these other themes explored - the lack of a loving home country, the cultural orphaning, the shame of association, the generational culture clash - that’s why, in Fireflower, I’ve written my main protagonist as a mixed race orphan, because I wanted to write about that feeling of not belonging to two opposing cultures and the disconnect from one’s family history. While there are plenty of stories that address discrimination (e.g. Mudbloods in Harry Potter, Dr. Seuss’s Sneetches), it’s only a small fraction of my Asian American experience - and sure, there are reasons it shows up: it’s important, and actually addressable (we can stop discriminating, but no one’s going to ‘solve’ the culture clash), and it’s the only part of the minority experience that the majority ethnicity is really involved in…
But the rest is still complex and interesting and a part of the broader human experience. It’s worth exploring… and that’s what I hope to do in my writing.
