the construction of Asian America: a personal history

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.