Growing up as an Asian born in America, I often felt unqualified to talk about race or discrimination—at least as it applied to me. Asians were seen as the “model minority,” which de-legitimized any complaints against white power, because “at least we weren’t black.” So whenever I witnessed micro-aggressions occur against my parents (who received graduate education in the U.S. but still have slight accents when speaking English), I tended to repress any feelings of negativity. When friends raised eyebrows over food I brought to school for lunch or commented on the smell, I always felt apologetic rather than proud of my culinary heritage. Knowing that immigrants were stereotyped as loud, tardy, and lacking self-awareness, I learned to be quiet, punctual, and very friendly-yet-self-conscious around white folks. My personal goal for the longest time was to become more acculturated than other Asian Americans.
And yet I held steadfastly to certain immigrant values. Like many of my Asian friends, I opted to living at home right out of college in order to cut rent costs and save up for the future. This was seen as “something that only losers do” among my white friends—at least in the years before the Wall Street crash. Now I can proudly say that because of lifestyle decisions, I have never had to take out a loan, and my living costs at YDS have come entirely from savings!
I have not been unaware of systemic racial discrimination against Asian Americans—my hometown is the site of a WWII Japanese Internment Camp, and I studied immigration policies against Asians in college—but I can’t say that I became passionate about making changes to the problems of race in America until I started nearing 30. After all, the vestiges of “Yellow Fever” in America made my position as an Asian female somewhat privileged in society, even if twistedly so, and I tended to fare much better than my male counterparts during social interactions with white folks. For example, I grew up watching my brother get bullied and called racial slurs because he was the only Asian kid on his sports team or in his friend group. I, on the other hand, was often complimented on my appearance, even if—or rather because—I looked different from my white female friends. I experienced a strangely flattering sort of “othering” that I only later—when feminist sensibilities took over—began repulse.
Many of my Asian-American female friends longed to marry white men, because that was a way to climb the social ladder—not to mention create “beautiful mixed children.” My Asian-American male friends complained that all the girls were “taken by white guys,” and any Asian male who could date a white girl was seen as competent and a victorious counter-narrative to the typical white-guy-Asian-girl pairing. A college dorm conversation is still seared in my memory: being a tomboy, I was hanging out with a (racially diverse) bunch of guy friends one day, and some of the Caucasians began to talk about how pretty Asian girls were and how they made racial diversity such a good thing. Some of the Asian guys then asked, “What are Asian guys good for?” The reply: “You give us Asian girls”—the only time I have ever heard of men being valued solely for their procreative powers!
Here at YDS, we like to emphasize the importance of not claiming to speak for one’s entire race or gender—we are individualistic to a fault. Out of respect for this social code, I’m not going to speak for all Asians in America, but I will end with two quotes from conversational interviews I’ve had with people of Asian descendent who live in America.
On cultural barriers to performing well in the classroom:
“Asians are trained to respect their elders and to be humble, so it’s very hard to speak on equal terms with a professor and to voluntarily share in class what we know. Even if we did all the reading and have many thoughts, we don’t share it because that feels like boasting.”
On feeling lost and unimportant within a black/white binary:
“It often feels unacceptable to talk about our experiences with race, because supposedly we have it so much better than other people of color in America. This means that Asian Americans perpetually don’t have a voice, and our opinions don’t matter.”
Well, given that Asians have been the fastest growing demographic in America since 2010 [1], I’d say that our opinions do matter, and that we had better start speaking up!
[1] See http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/06/26/u-s-hispanic-and-asian-populations-growing-but-for-different-reasons/.
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