The Thing About Being Asian
Can we talk about this even though it's not Lunar New Year?
The thing about being Asian is…are you even really a person of color? Like, probably a white person would say yes, but what about everyone else? You never felt totally comfortable with the term "person of color," because you could see those differences in the hardships you faced because of your race, versus the violence, loss, and trauma inflicted on Black and Indigenous communities in the U.S. It never felt quite fair, not acknowledging that difference while still sitting in the People of Color section. For that reason, you are fine with the still-imperfect, admittedly awkward phrase "BIPOC." You're there, but kind of sitting in the back.
The thing about being Asian is that a lot of times people forget you're sitting back there. Maybe during Lunar New Year they might remember, briefly.
The thing about being Asian is that you worry about your dad sometimes, walking around in a world that has a hard time seeing the humanity in an Asian face. In the pandemic, he was a taxi driver, on furlough until they made everyone come back to work. His company didn't provide any PPE. The bigger problem was that there was no PPE that could protect him from a random passenger who decided his Asian face and his imperfect, accented English were to blame for everything bad that had happened in 2020, or maybe even all the bad things before that—the loss of manufacturing to China, the economic supremacy of Japan in the 1980s, the way your Southern California hometown has morphed from a population of middle- and working-class white people in the 1970s to a population that is almost 60 percent Asian today.
The thing about being Asian is your face reminds some people of how many things they hate in this world. That's why you worry.
The thing about being half-Asian is…are you even Asian? Like, probably a white person would say yes, but there was definitely a lot of doubt amongst the Asian kids at your elementary and middle schools. Even more so because you don't speak Thai, your dad's native language. When you visited Thailand with your dad for the first time in high school, all the Thai people called you farang, like you were some sunburned blonde tourist from England. It hurt your feelings, honestly. Because if you didn't belong there, where did you belong?
The thing about being half-Asian is that sometimes it feels like you defy mathematics. One culture plus one culture should equal two cultures, but somehow you end up with zero claim over anything.
The thing about being Asian in the Deep South is that you quickly got used to being called "Oriental" by people who had no idea there was another option. Your former neighbor, a person who had been to your house for dinner, posted a slant-eye joke on Facebook, and when you protested in the comments, he deleted your comment. Another neighbor once asked you, What language are you speaking to him? when you were talking to your son in front of her. English, you said. Once you wrote a series of strongly worded emails to a food hall because their poke vendor had a bowl called Me Love You Long Time, until they finally changed the name. The thing about being Asian in the Deep South is that so many people in your son's preschool mixed him up with the other part-Asian boy in his class, and that is the only thing that ever made you cry over these stupid and relentless microaggressions. Watching two boys call him by the wrong name over and over, and him insisting, No, it's me! I'm me!
The thing about being an Asian woman is you can spot an Asian fetish from a mile away.
With older guys, it's easier—they start talking about 'Nam or telling you how You remind me of someone I knew a long time ago, and that's when you smile and nod and escape as quickly as possible. It's trickier with younger guys sometimes. Are you going to say, Nice to meet you. Can I see some photos of your exes? Complimenting you on random body parts is one clue, especially if the guy uses words like delicate, but when he ascribes subservience to your shyness, or giggling innocence to your laughing incredulity at how fucking clueless he thinks you are about his motives—that's the one that really pisses you off. The thing about being an Asian woman is you know exactly what his motives are. You've been fleeing them your entire life.
The thing about being an Asian woman is Atlanta, March 2021. It is Xiaojie Tan, Daoyou Feng, Yong Ae Yue, Soon Chung Park, Hyun Jung Grant, and Suncha Kim.
Before March 2021, you naively thought maybe it would make you feel better if people had a clearer understanding of the specific racism faced by people who looked like you, maybe it would close the distance between you and the world, but no no no, that was wrong. It was shocking, seeing your news feed fill up with stories explaining how racism, misogyny, and xenophobia are intertwined for Asian women, but you couldn't read any of the articles. You didn't need to; it was your entire life. But also you couldn't, because it felt like this giant chasm had cracked open and was exposing all the things you had stuffed down there so that you could survive for the past four decades. If you looked down into that abyss, you would fall apart. You would remember how much you have had to numb, ignore, and forget in order to make it through this life. It would make you hate yourself a little for your own complicity. The thing about being an Asian woman is that everyone acts like it's some kind of privilege to be fetishized rather than villainized. Or maybe it's not everyone—maybe it's just you who thought that. Anyway, you don't anymore.
The thing about being Asian American is where are you really from.
Your name is not a California name; where are you really from. No matter where you are or what you are doing, your Asianness obscures your Americanness. You understand why some people try to escape it by getting into the good school, getting the good job, buying a house in the good neighborhood, sending their kids to the good sports camp, burying themselves in whiteness till it closes over their heads, a suffocating disguise. It doesn't work. You can't hide in a hole forever. Or maybe it's not just hiding; maybe it is also waiting for the right time to emerge, the safe time. The thing about being Asian American is there is no safe time. From the moment the first people with faces like ours landed on these shores, we have been defending our right to be here, to call ourselves Americans. There is no right time. There is only now. Get up. Feel the sun on your beautiful face. This is where you're from.
Notes on the photos
Tule Lake was the “largest and most conflict-ridden” of the country’s ten internment camps for Japanese Americans during World War II. You can read more here about the history of resistance, segregation, and conflict at the camp, which had a peak population of 18,700 prisoners.
Tatsuro Masuda, who owned Wanto Co. grocery store, was born and raised in the Bay Area and was a graduate of UC Berkeley. He put up the “I AM AN AMERICAN” sign the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and Dorothea Lange shot this photo a few months later. Later that year, he and his wife, Hatsue, were incarcerated at Gila River War Relocation Center in Arizona. She was in her second trimester of pregnancy. Both of their children were born in the internment camp. You can read more about the history of this photo here.
Thank you for this. The half Asian thing really hit home for me, so much. I grew up half in Asia (but China, not Japan where my heritage is from), half in Australia, I don't look Asian and couldn't speak properly with my grandparents even though I feel so close to them. It's a huge identity struggle.