On June 8, 2012,
I delivered a 15-minute monologue on my Asian American identity as my final
presentation for a 10-month program. Not exactly what I was supposed to do, but
anyway, here it is - I hope it can speak to some people out there:
The number of times I have to say Asian/Pacific Islander
American in the course of my day really makes me wish that we had a more
concise name for our community. The name gives away the fact that we are not
really one coherent community, but a synthesis of countless identities. While I
cannot fully understand the breadth of this construct, it is deeply infused
into all that I am. When I’m not working at Asian Americans for Equality, I’m often working on
something else as a board member of OCA-NY or as co-director of the New York chapter of Asian Pacific Americans for
Progress.
Along with these three intersecting roles, I am always analyzing questions of
race, power, and privilege in every day life, and though I
sometimes wish I could choose to stop seeing these things, I can’t.
Before I left for college, however, the concept of an Asian American identity
did not exist for me. I grew up in a largely Korean community of LA where we were bound
together by the personal and extremely specific stories we held in common. We
created an intimate community for ourselves and lived by one another’s needs and hands.
We created our own culture and support systems that were
neither typically Korean nor typically American. All my friends were second
generation Korean Americans who understood much of my identity without me
needing to explain it to them. I had never been to a doctor, dentist, optometrist or hair salon outside of Koreatown, a
world and economy unto itself.
Despite being children of the
LA riots and living
in a place so clearly delineated by ethnic lines, my friends and I were not very
politically aware. We did not have the vocabulary to talk about race relations, and our
immigrant parents, who were often working tirelessly to give us possibilities
they had never dreamed of, could not possibly prepare us for the racialized
world they had brought us into. Nevertheless, we recognized the reality in which we existed. We could feel the backlash against our quickly growing immigrant community. We could see the racist smear
campaigns on TV against Asian Americans running for local office. We could read
in our local papers about how scared white people were getting about all those
foreign language signs in the neighborhood.
When I switched coasts to start school at Columbia, it was like entering a new world.
I began experiencing the clash between my Korean background and an elite
institution that consciously pressured us to identify with upper-class, white
privilege, starting with the posh garden parties for our pre-orientation to the
very essence of our core curriculum, a blatant fetishization of the Western
world. I heard many people, including professors and administrators, joke about
how our core curriculum was really supposed to prepare us for “cocktail
parties,” and though they seemed to state this ironically, they also seemed to
enjoy it. While I was only able to be at
Columbia because I received a full-ride in financial aid, I realized many
people around me hadn’t even considered applying for it. In both subtle and overt ways, I was made to feel ashamed about all
the ways in which I fell short of privilege.
Removed from my Korean American bubble, I realized that people used the word Asian a lot,
even to refer to me. I had only ever heard this term
used to mean harm, to mock the existence of Korean Americans in our community
and brand us with stereotypes that didn’t even bastardize the right country. I
also heard, for the first time, the identifier, “people of color,” which
manifested itself on Columbia’s campus in very bizarre ways. Many people of
color at Columbia seemed to wear their ethnic identities like a badge and talk
about their identities in dogmatic jargon. And if you couldn’t talk the talk, it
seemed you were not welcome in those spaces, despite the fact that the people
most identified with those spaces were often the most privileged people of
color. It was jarring to me that
spaces meant for inclusion and empowerment would do so little to include and
empower those they claimed to represent, who may not have had the same
privileges to arrive at that point in the first place. My Korean identity had
never been an entity to be held apart from me in order to be evaluated and used
at will. It was just who I was, an identity all-consuming, deeper than any jargon could capture.
As I began to learn more about this Asian American identity,
however, I began to understand that it had to exist precisely because of
perception. To most people, it didn’t really matter whether we were born here
or somewhere
else,
whether we spoke English or something else, whether we were here as refugees or postgraduate students. All people needed to know in order to form their conclusions was that we
were yellow.
I began to realize
that the ignorance of others, and their complacence about
their ignorance, had defined my existence in this country in very real and
often institutionalized ways. It disturbed me that our
experiences of the world should be so dramatically shaped by what others decided you were, regardless of what you actually were. This realization began to
make sense of a lifetime of discrimination that I had not really had the
vocabulary to confront before.
I realized my
experiences of discrimination and racism were
not isolated or imaginary but real, historical, and systemically
experienced. I realized that these experiences had nothing to do
with my identity, but the identity others had made for me.
During college, I
only took a few Asian American and ethnic studies
classes, but they had a significant impact on me—not just because of the
content but the experience
of being primary in an academic environment for the first time in my life. In
those classes, my opinions and
experiences, in their unadulterated form, were suddenly relevant to an academic
discussion. I didn’t have to phrase all my comments and present my opinions in
a way that I had learned from the white mainstream rather than from my own
parents and
community in
order to be heard. I didn’t have to preface every
comment with an explanation of why I might have a different perspective. And I
was for once an expert about the world I inhabited.
As I began to tune
into the world of not just Asian America but the
movements and struggles of different communities of color, I realized the deep commonalities in the experiences of such a diverse range of people, who had all been impacted by where they fell in relation to whiteness or histories of
colonization. In finding my place in history for the first time, central parts of my
life finally began to make sense, and it hit me that I had never before felt entitled to a place in the only country that was my own.
After I graduated, I
moved into the Lower East Side, and one day, I noticed a building with a sign
that read, “Asian Americans for Equality.” It was a significant moment to come
upon such a sign, in such an unexpected place, a sign that seemed to point directly to my experience and physically draw out a
space intended for me. I wouldn’t be in this position today if I hadn’t seen
that sign.
A few moments later,
I walked into a bar where my sister was holding her
engagement party. As I tried to make my way back to my
sister’s group, a white woman looked at me and turned to tell her friends, “There’s a group of Asians back there.
You really can’t get away from that these days.” It was a tired moment, a
constant presence in the lives of people who are not white in
this country, a moment in which someone expresses
that your marked body does not have the right to simply
occupy space. The
collision of these two moments illustrated a constant struggle–-the struggle to establish and define myself against the constant
attempts of people to define me as less than themselves. It is a mentality that has been
ingrained into all of us, a story woven around histories of conquest and
occupation, slavery, and the violent demarcation of borders, which has
stealthily bled into the globalized capitalism of today.
The reason why I
chose to reflect on my identity as a final overview of the past 10 months is
that knowing myself and my past gives me the confidence to go on and create
the reality I want to live.
It is a
significant experience in and of itself to work with staff and community
members who look like me, to no longer be constantly subject to the racial power
dynamics that have been normalized in our society. To have a
supervisor and coworkers who respect
my beliefs and my identity and don’t trivialize my work. It has felt like shedding blinders, and the feeling of empowerment that
I’ve gained by doing so has bled into other areas of my life as well.
This sort of
empowerment often scares people. We are made to feel crazy or
paranoid for feeling the way we do, despite the fact that these realizations
are made independently across communities and borders. After we
undergo a long process of unlearning and reclaiming ourselves, we are then told that the power structures we have finally recognized
are nonexistent or unimportant. And when we challenge those structures or
create communities for ourselves in order to forgo the need to submit to them, people call it reverse
racism.
The Mexican American
studies program in Tucson high schools was banned because people were scared
that it was “promot[ing] the overthrow of the U.S. government”. It is pretty unbelievable to hear
the statements made by education administrators and politicians on this issue,
and it is telling that to teach the truth about history, and document the
existence of other cultures and experiences, is considered an overthrow of our
country. What these people can’t recognize is that the every day
privileges they take for granted – to just be normal, relevant and acceptable
in the country that is theirs – are not available for everyone.
Asian American identity is not based on ancient manuscripts or passed down
traditions or really any inherent ties– it is an identity
based on constant choice and invention, an identity with a purpose. It has only
a few decades under its belt and is therefore very young and impressionable, and it is a movement that I have seen myself tangibly affect.
By asserting a collective Asian American identity, we use the power of
our numbers to assert the equal standing of our diverse community and reject the notion that any one of
us is subsidiary, or in
need of assimilation.
By identifying with other ethnicities, nationalities, customs, cultures,
colors, and religions within our shared community, we choose
to not only
accept, but identify
with, difference.
On the flip side, I
think we need to recognize the responsibilities we have when we identify
ourselves and others under a shared umbrella. We cannot ignore the fragile identities at stake and the assumptions we create when we do so. We cannot name our organizations Asian American
without being vigilant about whether or not we are working with and for a community that is meaningfully
so,
and admitting the extreme limitations we have to ever doing this
perfectly.
In 2 weeks it will be
the anniversary of the death of Vincent Chin. Vincent Chin was a Chinese
American who was attacked and ultimately killed because 2 white autoworkers
thought he was Japanese and forced him to bear the cross of the
Japanese auto industry, during a time when American autoworkers were losing
their jobs. This was a time when the people of Detroit were
publicly bashing Japanese cars to express their insatiable, territorial rage.
In Vincent
Chin’s case, it was an entire community and our judicial
system that worked in tandem with 2 murderers, allowing them off with no jail time, no
recognition that to beat an Asian body to death with a baseball bat was wrong. When people are discriminated against, harmed, or even
killed because they are identified as Asian, I think we need to recognize how
our choice to define
ourselves as a shared community may perpetuate the
ignorance leading to those circumstances.
I think we must remain most accountable to the most disenfranchised
among us, especially recent immigrant communities who might not be talking
about politics in the same ways as our organizations, or people like my mother, who don’t identify as Asian Americans, or really even feel entitled to call themselves
Americans.
I also think our Asian American identity is in desperate need of
artistic inspiration. I don’t think we can have a movement that is meaningful and truly
communal without
nurturing our writers, our
artists, our music, and our media. And I leave this experience with a greater
investment in helping to support the art and culture around social change, believing that these
are central to the success of our movements.
Lastly, I believe that we should only identify as Asian American as a strategic
act of resistance against racism. In all other occasions, we should not settle
for less than accurate identifications of ourselves. It gives me hope that one of the
central aspects of Asian American identity is the
deconstruction of the model minority stereotype, an act that denies the myth of
meritocracy and gives a voice to the segments of our population struggling most, whose
very existence is denied by this myth. It is also an act of coalition
building because it undermines the white power
structure and media, which use the apparent successes of one community to deny
the institutionalized oppression and systemic poverty affecting
others.
I believe it is one of the most important acts of resistance in this
country to recognize the ways in which communities of color have been pitted against each other. By doing
so, we dismantle
some of the biggest lies on which inequality and injustice are founded.
I am only at the
beginning of a long journey. But what I treasure most about the last 10 months
is the greater confidence it has given me to assert my beliefs and innovate toward a visionary idea of change and a
more rational reality. It has led me to a place where I, as someone who doesn’t really like to
talk very much, would choose to give a 15-minute monologue as my final
presentation.
I won’t stop questioning why people want to deny
others the simple indication that they are worth physical, mental, and
spiritual space in this country. I hope that
in all I do, I can help others find their place, right where they are.
