"When the second generation “learns their history” — the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the lynchings in Los Angeles’s Chinatown in 1871, the World War II internment of the Japanese — there’s a tendency to rebel against the meek who accept the abuse, seemingly content to squirrel their cash away. I’ve never really understood the intolerance for meekness. What is that forbearance but the solemn acknowledgment that our claims to citizenship are rooted in shallow ground — and the hope that the next generation will find the footing to stand up for itself?"
#StopAAPIHate #AsianLivesMatter
The Myth of Asian American Identity
We're the fastest-growing demographic group in the U.S., but when it comes to the nation's racial and ethnic divisions, where do we fit in?
by Jay Caspian Kang | The New York Magazine | October 10, 2021
During the first days of the Trump administration, when my attention was split between the endless scroll of news on my phone and my infant daughter, who was born five days before the inauguration, I often found myself staring at her eyes, still puffy and swollen from her birth. My wife is half Brooklyn Jew, half Newport WASP, and throughout her pregnancy, I assumed that our child would look more like her than like me. When our daughter was born with a full head of dark hair and almond-shaped eyes, the nurses all commented on how much she looked like her father, which, I admit, felt a bit unsettling, not because of any racial shame but because it has always been difficult for me to see myself in anyone or anything other than myself. But now, while my wife slept at night, I would stand over our daughter’s bassinet, compare her face at one week with photos of myself at that delicate, lumpen age and worry about what it might mean to have an Asian-looking baby in this America rather than one who could either pass or, at the very least, walk around with the confidence of some of the half-Asian kids I had met — tall, beautiful, with strange names and a hard edge to their intelligence.
These pitiful thoughts quickly passed — for better or worse, my talent for cultivating creeping doubts is only surpassed by an even greater talent for chopping them right above the root. The worries were replaced by the normalizing chores of young fatherhood. But sometimes during her naps, I would play the “Goldberg Variations” on our living-room speakers and try to imagine the contours of her life to come.
My daughter spent her first two years in a prewar apartment building with dusty sconces and cracked marble steps in the lobby. The hallways had terrible light because the windows had been painted over with what in a less enlightened time might have been called a “flesh tone” color. Such cosmetic problems will improve with the arrival of more people like us — the shared spaces will begin to look like the building’s gut-renovated apartments, with their soapstone countertops, recessed light fixtures, the Sub-Zero refrigerators bought as an investment for the inevitable sale four to six years down the road.
At the time, it seemed like the other markers of her upper-middle-class life — grape leaves from the Middle Eastern grocery Sahadi’s, the Japanese bridges of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, weekends at her grandparents’ home in Newport — would keep pace with the changes in the building. If she enrolled at St. Ann’s or Dalton or P.S. 321, in nearby Park Slope, she would join other half-Asian and half-white children at New York City’s wealthiest schools.
In December 1979, my mother flew back to Korea from the United States to give birth to me, because she assumed her stay in America would be temporary and I would need Korean citizenship. I have since renounced that Korean citizenship, because it would have required me to serve in the Army, and today my parents live on a farm that sits on five flat acres on an island in Puget Sound. Nearly two acres have been planted with springy, waist-high lavender bushes that bloom in mid-June and are cut down and composted or burned at the end of the summer. There are 20 rows of grapes, a greenhouse filled with tomatoes, squash, cucumbers and Korean herbs, several hundred bulbs of garlic, an overgrown patch of buckwheat and an assortment of potatoes and onions. I met my wife at the farm. She and her best friend had come to pick lavender to sell at a farmers’ market.
A couple of houses down the road, there’s a retreat for female writers. Every summer, the residents stop by the farm to pick lavender for their cabins. Gloria Steinem used to come for many years and got to know my mother. When Steinem gave a talk in Seattle some years back, she acknowledged my mother in the crowd and told everyone that she was happy that her “good friend” had come to see her.
All this, I suppose, is the fruit of assimilation.
I don’t find my family’s narrative to be particularly sympathetic, but for those who might disagree, let’s construct a happy way to tell the story. You could begin with the birth of my mother during Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s liberation of Seoul, amid all the exploding bombs, and some opening like: “On the day my mother was born, the skies over the 38th parallel lit up red.” You could also point out that both sets of grandparents were refugees from North Korea and that dozens of our relatives who stayed behind were very likely killed. We will never know, either way. I suppose that would count as generational trauma.
Or you could start with the moment that my parents stepped off the plane with two suitcases. Then go straight to the Rindge Towers, where we spent our first year in Cambridge, Mass. Those three brick slabs rising up over Fresh Pond are pitch-perfect markers of poverty for someone like me because they are familiar to anyone who went to school “around Boston” — the same people who will be reviewing your books, managing your finances, protecting your legal interests.
From there, you could construct the story of a family on the way up.
Act 1: We open in that Cambridge housing project. Some details of our poverty paired with an anecdote about a friendship with a Black kid down the hall. We close with me coming to some nascent realization about race.
Act II: I tell you about being shoved onto the concrete of the playground at my elementary school by a group of white kids screaming “Chinese, Japanese, dirty knees, look at these.” (My reaction, which I can recall more vividly than the bullying itself, was to bargain with them.)
Act III: I talk about our move to Chapel Hill, N.C., which I suppose I could more vaguely call “the South” — with all its implications. In this telling, I caught the expected amount of harassment in the South. My teachers never seemed to like me. I was kicked out of Social Dance, a genteel weekly event where the white kids in my town dressed up in modest suits and floor-length dresses and learned the fox trot and the waltz. The official reason was that I had worn a pair of white Nike Air Maxes instead of the usual brown or black dress shoes. (This might suggest some slightly hip-hop rebellion, that I was rocking Nikes as my truest form of expression. The reality was that I simply did not have a pair of dress shoes.)
This litany of racial moments would justify the eventual happy ending. The audience would be satisfied that I had suffered for the spoils of assimilation — the prewar apartment with the good bones, the summers at the family farm, the creative networks that could get my child into the Grace Church 2-year-olds and the St. Ann’s 3-year-olds. It might be edifying to hear that the gears of upward mobility in this country can still grind out someone like me.
Artwork by Kensuke Koike. Photograph by Tommy Kha for The New York Times.
What is an Asian American? For decades, the label has been defined by stories like mine, and the politics of the “race” or “group” or whatever you want to call it have reflected the upward mobility of the Asians, largely East Asians, who came to the United States after the passage of the 1965 Immigration Act, often referred to as Hart-Celler, after its congressional sponsors, which lifted restrictive quotas on migration and effectively opened up the country to millions of new Americans. The confusion and the vagaries of “Asian American” result, in part, from necessity: What else could you possibly do with a group that includes everyone from well-educated Brahmin doctors from India to impoverished Hmong refugees? How could you tell a unifying story that makes all those immigrants feel as if they’re part of some racial category, especially those, like my daughter, who will grow up mixed-race?
According to the latest census figures, there are nearly 20 million Asian Americans who come from more than 20 different countries. This constitutes a tripling of the 6.6 million Asians who lived in the United States in 1990. And over the past two decades, they have been the fastest-growing demographic group in America. These recent immigrants are settling not only in New York and California, but all over the country, whether the Dakotas, Indiana or West Virginia. Most have no real connection to the term “Asian American,” which was coined by student activists at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1968. It was meant to be political at a time when consciousness groups like the Black Panthers and the Chicano Movement were emerging on college campuses. Today, “Asian American” is mainly a demographic descriptor that satisfies almost nobody outside the same upwardly mobile professionals who enter mostly white middle-class spaces and need a term to describe themselves and everyone who looks like them. I know many people whose families emigrated from Asia. I know almost no one invested in the idea of an “Asian America.” And yet, while most Asian Americans may not feel any fealty toward the identification, that’s the box they check whenever they’re asked to check a box. And if people who look like them are being attacked in the streets, they understand that the attackers almost certainly don’t care about the differences between, say, a Vietnamese immigrant and a Chinese one.
In the years leading up to the pandemic, Asian American politics tended toward the ornate and insular. An unusual amount of energy seemed to be expended on matters of Hollywood representation, which, when distilled to its essence, is a demand by the already privileged for access into one of the few industries that won’t have them. The more radical version of Asian American politics was ultimately nostalgic — an attempt to reclaim the ’60s and ’70s and genuine civil rights heroes like Grace Lee Boggs, the labor and Black Power activist, and Yuri Kochiyama, who had lived in an internment camp and famously cradled Malcolm X’s head as he lay dying — and called for solidarity with Black and Brown people. These ties are nice and inspirational, but they do not mean anything to a vast majority of Asian Americans who came to this country post Hart-Celler. The Berkeley students who coined the phrase “Asian American” had probably come from families that were in this country for generations and lived as anomalies in a country that was Black and white. Given a choice, those activists identified with Black people and tried to forge solidarity among all those who had suffered under American imperialism and white supremacy.
But the immigrants who came to the United States after Hart-Celler, and who now constitute an overwhelming majority of the 20 million Asian Americans, do not see the country in such binary terms. They — we — are many other things, but we are not all that political, nor are we particularly interested in race per se. According to the Pew Research Center, Asian Americans have the widest internal income disparity of any racial group in America: The median Indian American household in America earns $119,000 a year, while the average Burmese family earns $44,400. Twenty-five percent of Burmese immigrants live below the poverty level. For Filipinos, the rate is a mere 7 percent.
Our politics are also diverse. A summer 2020 survey showed that 65 percent of Indian Americans planned to vote for Joe Biden in the 2020 election, 28 percent for Donald Trump and 6 percent said they didn’t know. For Vietnamese, the numbers were 36 percent for Biden, 48 percent for Trump and 16 percent didn’t know. A full 23 percent of Chinese Americans didn’t know.
We, the 20 million, are either poor or we are assimilation machines. Those are the two outcomes.
Every few months I come across assimilated Asian men venting on social media about the time one of their white neighbors in buildings just like mine in Brooklyn mistook them for delivery men, inevitably followed by a firm statement of their credentials: “I guess he didn’t know, I am a journalist/doctor/lawyer/hedge-fund manager!” It’s embarrassing for both sides when this happens, but the implication has always felt so bizarre to me; the real offense is being mistaken for being poor. What sets modern, assimilated Asian Americans apart, when it comes to these sorts of differentiations made by so many immigrant groups, is that our bonds with our brothers and sisters are mostly superficial markers of identity, whether rituals around boba tea, recipes or support for ethnic-studies programs and the like. Indignation tends to be flimsy — we are mad when white chefs cook food our parents cooked, or we clamor about what roles Scarlett Johansson stole from Asian actors. But the critiques generally stay within those sorts of consumerist concerns that do not really speak to the core of an identity because we know, at least subconsciously, that the identity politics of the modern, assimilated Asian American are focused on getting a seat at the wealthy, white liberal table. Or, if we want to be generous, we fight about food and representation and executive-suite access because we want our children to live without really having to think about any of this — to have the spoils of full whiteness.
We, in other words, want to become as white as white will allow. For the first three decades of my life, this process felt inevitable. I tried on several different selves with wildly contradictory politics: a radical, a revolutionary Marxist in my teens, a Buddhist in my early 20s, followed by a bout of self-destruction and then a more stable period as a professional writer. During those phases, each of which was deeply felt, it never occurred to me that I wouldn’t end up fine. In retrospect, I don’t really know why I believed that — things could certainly have gone wrong, and for a while in my 20s, they did — but because I knew all my middle-class Asian and white friends would be fine, it followed that I would be, too.
On those rare instances when I would think about having a child, I assumed her life would be less complicated than my own. The stubborn optimism of the immigrant dictates that while your own life often shows just how quickly things can get catastrophically worse, American progress remains immutable. The second-generation immigrant envisions progress as an incline: Our immigrant parents push us halfway up the slope, we hike the rest of the way and then gently roll our own kids over the summit.
