Why Asian America

I.

College is a torrent of sensation. And it is never static. One moment may be of euphoria – another, of frustration and doubt. Most often, however, we find ourselves somewhere in between these extremes: elated and exhausted, cheerful but grave.

College is also a time and place of self-discovery and growth. Through the trials and rigors of balancing an overwhelmed schedule of studies, extracurriculars, work, friendships, life-planning – we come to new insights about both ourselves and the world around us. As a senior soon to embark into post-college existence, I have spent much time reflecting on my past four years and charting my self-development throughout. I remember the gray April chill of my first visit to Ann Arbor and how I hated its dreariness compared to my hometown of Tucson, Arizona. I remember the awkward, vain attempts to redefine myself in this new place, one where the burdens of my past were unknown and unimportant. I remember the haunting hollowness I felt during my initial months, at how strangely detached I was when everyone else seemed to just “get it.” As a matter of personal taste, I am not interested in professional sports or big, raucous parties with drunken bodies milling about – and even if I pretended to care about them I always walked away by the end of the night both empty and dissatisfied. In a way I was a shell of a being, and I still remember the loneliness of coming back to my quiet Mosher Jordan dorm, blinded by the sterile, searing fluorescent lighting, and feeling as if my childish, overblown expectations at a new college self – strong, social, outspoken – were just that. Childish and overblown.

I also remember the early days of sophomore year, when I finally decided to do something about it.

Initially I returned to campus very zealous and ambitious. I felt that my first year was complacent and meek, and I pushed myself very little – at most a halfhearted nudge – to seek new things and experiences. So I went out to a number of organizations, each with different focuses (though they were mostly political and always left). Yet throughout my hunt I never discovered anything which spurred the unique combination of interests I had. With every organization there seemed to exist a gaping hole where my passions would have laid. And when I did muster up the courage to finally attend an Asian American organization – tepidly embracing an identity of mine that for so long had been disparaged and insulted – I faced the greatest disappointment yet. I recall walking out of a United Asian American Organizations mass meeting, talking to my friend who came along and swearing at how angry I was that a group claiming to represent the community was simply social and basically selling out. And this futile search continued until the mass meetings ended, flyers trickled to nothing, and I ended up at the beginning.

This changed one October afternoon. I sat at the computers on the second floor of Hatcher, coming out from a long reading session in the Reference Room. What my eyes stumbled upon this time, however, was an email which described a Daily article that day concerning a hate crime committed against Asian Americans on campus. I immediately felt a surge of both disgust and affirmation – feelings which stemmed from the years of a collective build-up of suspicion and unconscious reflection on an identity that had always been imposed on me. Growing up during my pivotal years of middle and high school in Tucson did not provide a place to foster ethnic identity, especially in the wealthier (and thereby isolated) northern foothills of the city. My Asian-ness – the American name had yet to appear – was always a salient marker of difference that I carried around with me in every situation. Now, we are all different from one another, inside and out, ranging from the clothes we wear to the size of blood cells flowing in our veins. Yet the difference represented by the term Asian was more fundamental and profound than our preferred brands of clothing or the music we enjoy. My experience was and has been prominently defined by this racial difference, whether I like it or not, and as I ran (literally) to the first place I knew would have a copy of the Daily that day, I was taking the first step to embrace this identity of mine.

I came upon a stack of newspapers in the lobby of Hatcher and began reading nervously. My mind traced the incident, its often vague details, the diluted response by the police and University. Through my anger and trembling fingers, however, I felt various threads of my life slowly tying together. I began feeling justified for the awkward and sometimes painful experiences that had burdened my racial identity. The hate crime symbolized to me the nexus of my – and my people’s – inexpressible inabilities at times to fit in, feelings of estrangement from situations local and in the broader American community. Simply put, things began making sense. And as I found myself back in the Yuri Kochiyama lounge, discussing these issues of Asian America which my subconscious obsessed over – but I never had the courage to admit to care about – I finally discovered that splendid, wonderful something I had long been searching for: Community, strong and vibrant.

Yet as Asian Americans and people of color, discovering a community requires intrepid work and courage. It is a burden we face, for our community is not handed to us, especially not by society – in fact, prevailing social discourse actually stigmatizes Asian American and people of color activism and frames it as unnecessary, trouble-making, illegitimate, or silly. But there would be no America had its peoples not agitated and struggled – had women simply stood by as their gender was objectified and exploited, had blacks acquiesced to their dehumanizing state of chattel slavery and institutionalized segregation, had Native Americans or Chicanos let their lands be overrun and accept it as a fact of nature. Only we, as the bearers of our unique identity, have the responsibility to embrace and empower ourselves along these lines. Otherwise no one will.

Identity, however, is complicated, and we sometimes possess ones that overlap, conflict, or flat out contradict one another. One individual may be a Democrat, soccer fan, professor of anthropology, mother of three, Vietnamese American, lesbian, and an avid swimmer. But we cannot mire ourselves in every complexity of the individual self – not only is that task much too daunting, it is also to overlook one important fact of human existence: we after all are not islands. We are social beings operating in a system of prevailing norms, values, and histories. These social spaces then prioritize or highlight various identities over others – and these social identities serve as rigid, definitive categories of our individual selves: race, ethnicity, gender, class, sexuality, nationality, etc. Although basically speaking they are indeed socially constructed to a degree, this does not make them any less real. Money and marriage, for example, are also social constructions, yet they also function as provocative determinants of society and our existence.

So this discussion forces us to invariably ask two fundamental questions: 1) Why do we come together as Asian Americans? 2) What is Asian American identity in the first place? I see these questions as necessary if we are to survive and progress as a community, since they often go unevaluated in much of Asian American activism despite their significance for the existence of such a movement in the first place. In our investigation, however, we are constrained by the nature of racial identity itself – that is, we can never essentialize or proclaim to define what one identity is. This desire to cleanly locate one social group in exclusion of others is wrong on two counts: it not only plays into the discriminatory history of racial discourse, it also seeks to erect barriers where there can be none. Identities are fluid, two-way transactions, and they interact in many interesting ways with one another. For instance, individuals of “mixed” background claim unique racial identities which do not fit the standard American ethno-racial pentagon of black, brown, white, red, and yellow. Some individuals can also “belong” to one race, but pass for another. And race is extremely contingent what about peoples who by definition do not fit cleanly? Filipinos presented unique racial cases for American law, as they did not fit with the standard “Mongolian” designation given to all previous Asian immigrants.

What we can do is to be contingent and critical in our evaluation. To discuss an identity and recognize its ever-changing, amorphous nature are compatible principles, and it requires any rigorous reflection to keep both in mind at all times. Also, to dispel fears of speculation in a project like this, racial identities and their social meaning are in fact quite tangible and definitive, even though they are also muddled and confused. Racial identity is, after all, founded on the solid bedrock of public discourse – and the reason why it “makes sense” when television shows broadcast stereotypes of this or that racial group is because the concept of racial difference is built into American culture itself. Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle presents an accessible symbol of the prevailing nature of racial identities and stereotypes, since we would not understand the film’s motif of toying with racial identity were we not in tune with the social meanings of “Indian,” “Korean,” and “Asian” alike.

This reflection will be continued in the following post.


:exl