What’s in it for me? Learn about the reality of being Asian in the US today.
What does it mean to be Asian American?
Despite a vast recent literature on race and racism, there has been relatively little written on this subject – a fact that perhaps tells its own story.
So often, Asian Americans are held up as a model for immigrants to follow – hard-working, polite, almost invisible.
But that sort of stereotyping does damage.
The poet Cathy Park Hong, whose family is from Korea, has lived this reality.
In these blinks, you’ll learn about her experiences, as well as her powerful insights into the wider Asian American condition.
In these blinks, you’ll discover what the author learned from comedian Richard Pryor; why she couldn’t get on with The Catcher in the Rye; and what she thinks when people say Asians are “everywhere.
Asian Americans exist in a purgatorial state, neither Black nor white; their own identity is poorly defined.
While experiencing a depressive episode, the author, Cathy Park Hong, had to go to Wyoming to give a poetry reading.
She is a poet, but these are not events she enjoys, even in happier times.
Reading her work to the audience, she felt newly conscious of her lack of stage presence.
Asians in general, she thought, just don’t make a strong enough impression for this sort of thing.
They don’t even make a strong enough impression, in fact, to be thought of as a minority in the same way as Black people.
Asian people are sometimes thought of as post-racial – but often that just means they’re ignored.
The reading was not a success.
When she finished, everyone hurried to leave, including Hong.
The key message here is: Asian Americans exist in a purgatorial state, neither Black nor white; their own identity is poorly defined.
On her way back to New York, Hong received a call from her therapist.
Hong had sought out a Korean American, like her, and they’d had one session.
She was keen to carry on.
But she was disappointed.
The therapist was cutting her off.
The only explanation given?
They weren’t right for each other.
Her mind flashed back to a visit to a busy Vietnamese nail bar at an Iowa mall.
She was given a pedicure by the owner’s unenthusiastic teenage son, who grimaced at her, squatted down, and scalded her feet with hot water.
He dug the nippers in sharply.
She told him to be softer; he dug in harder.
It was agony.
Despite their dissimilar family backgrounds and levels of privilege, Hong and the scowling pedicurist shared a sense of self-hate and shame.
They were like two equal forces pushing against each other.
Being Asian in the United States is complex.
In 2017, a video went viral of David Dao, a 69-year-old Vietnamese American, screaming in pain as he was violently forced out of an overbooked plane.
The media portrayed Dao as an everyman, as if his Asianness were irrelevant.
But what memories did the incident spark in Dao’s mind?
He’d fled Saigon in 1975, at the end of the Vietnam War.
Some people claim Asians are doing so well in America, they’re “next in line to be white.
” But aren’t they more likely to disappear – to lose their sense of identity?
Perhaps they really are quietly assimilating into American society.
But isn’t that the same society that ripped their homelands apart and uprooted their families?
As Richard Pryor’s stand-up routines show, race colors every aspect of a person’s life.
Later in her experience with depression, the author discovered the Black comedian Richard Pryor, and in particular his 1979 film Live in Concert.
His daring performances helped Hong recover.
Pryor was a revolutionary for how frankly he talked about race.
He made fun of the white people in his audience.
He joked that, until he was about eight years old, people considered him merely a child; after that, he was labelled a “Negro.
” He describes having a heart attack, and likens his angry heart to the police beating him.
Early in his career, Pryor had tried to be friendly, and ignored racial issues.
His epiphany came one night in Las Vegas.
Looking out at the wealthy white crowd, he realized his grandmother, who raised him, wouldn’t have been welcome there.
Thunderstruck, he asked, “What the fuck am I doing here?
” and walked off.
Here’s the key message: As Richard Pryor’s stand-up routines show, race colors every aspect of a person’s life.
Hong shares with Pryor a concern for what she calls minor feelings – negative thoughts about oneself, colored by race, that build up gradually, day by day.
When someone expects you to have a white person’s optimism about the world – which doesn’t chime with your own experiences – that can trigger minor feelings, and a sense of bitterness and shame.
Sometimes, Pryor’s comedy strikes a false note with Hong for this reason.
When he talks about the differences between Black and white women, where is she meant to place herself?
Pryor’s binary excludes her.
Being Asian is not like being Black.
That fact was underscored by the LA race riots of 1992.
Hong and her family lived in the wealthy Westside by then, far away from danger.
But many businesses and families in the Koreatown area had their livelihoods destroyed by rioting.
Many complained the police did little to help them, focusing their support on more affluent areas.
On the other hand, Korean immigrants weren’t simply caught in the crossfire.
One of the causes behind the riots, in fact, was the shooting of 15-year-old Latasha Harlins by a Korean American store owner.
There are two sides to writing about race, Hong suggests.
It’s polemical, of course, but it’s also lyrical, as it’s filled with complexity and contradictions.
But there’s no doubt of one thing: the impact of race is huge.
Growing up in an Asian immigrant family is a particular, complex experience.
In the ninth grade, Hong’s English teacher was excited to introduce the class to J.
D.
Salinger’s novel, The Catcher in the Rye.
The teacher thought they would all identify with the main character, Holden Caulfield, and his obsession with his lost childhood.
But Hong could only see an entitled prep-school teenager – and didn’t understand his idealized image of childhood.
She had only ever wanted to grow up.
Hong suggests that it’s a peculiarly Anglo-American thing to connect childhood with innocence.
For non-white families, childhood is more likely to be measured by its opposite, shame.
The key message is this: Growing up in an Asian immigrant family is a particular, complex experience.
Hong’s father decided to move to the US in 1965.
He had grown up in poverty in Korea, eating sparrows he caught himself.
Through talent and hard work, he made it to university, but he still had to lie to get his US visa, claiming he was a trained mechanic.
He eventually found success as a businessman in LA, and earned enough money to pay for Hong’s college education.
But what sounds like a model immigrant journey masks the harshness of reality.
Hong remembers when her father dropped her off at college in Oberlin.
They met her new roommate’s dad, who happily told them he’d fought in the Korean War.
Hong’s father just smiled politely.
Hong’s maternal grandmother, meanwhile, escaped North Korea during the war, carrying a child on her back while wading through the low tide on her way to the south.
She moved to the US years later, to help her daughter with childcare.
Hong still remembers a walk around the block when she was eight.
Still unfamiliar with life in the US, her grandmother approached some white kids to say hello and shake their hands.
“Herro,” they replied, mocking her.
One of them kicked her, and she fell over.
They laughed.
Hong’s father made it his mission to find the girl who had kicked Hong’s grandmother.
He found her one day while driving, started yelling at her furiously, and leapt out of the car in pursuit.
She escaped easily.
Hong remembers feeling fear for her father – fear of what the neighbors would think of him acting like that.
She remembers often feeling shame, too – like when she was sent to school, aged nine, wearing a Playboy t-shirt, totally unaware of what it meant.
Hong had no chance at an idyllic, innocent childhood like Holden Caulfield’s.
The author found her voice through her friends – as well as an adversarial relationship with the English language.
Hong was slow to learn English at first, because when she was young she was surrounded by bad English.
At the time she was ashamed, but now she claims it as part of her literary identity.
She relishes bad English, and mocks the curious role of English as the neoliberal world’s lingua franca, or common tongue.
She collects pictures of badly translated Asian signs, like the one that says, “Please no conversation, no saliva,” or the menu that advertises “roasted husband.
” She even incorporates bad English into her poetry, challenging the way we hear the language, to shocking effect – not unlike the way she and her college friends upended conventions in art class at Oberlin.
Here’s the key message: The author found her voice through her friends – as well as an adversarial relationship with the English language.
Before studying poetry, Hong studied art alongside Erin, a Taiwanese goth, and Helen, who was Korean but had lived all over the world.
They created fascinating and imaginative art together, helping find each other’s voices.
And Hong found it strange how few stories are out there about female artistic friendships.
The story of Hong’s relationship with Helen, especially, is complex.
She was hugely talented, but mentally troubled.
She also used Hong’s poetry in her art, without asking permission, which caused a rift.
But looking back, what Hong remembers most of all is the confidence the three women shared – their arrogance, even.
Together, they felt like white men – a feeling Hong has never recaptured in adult life.
Ultimately, Hong chose poetry over art, and returned to her fraught relationship with the English language.
Thinking of the difficulties her family faced with their Asian accents, she plays ruthlessly with tone – writing companion pieces to Romantic poetry in the style of a salesman at a pitch meeting; inventing a whole pidgin language for an epic poem.
She uses the example of a famous South Korean film to make her point.
In Oldboy, a man orders a live octopus at a sushi restaurant.
He attempts to eat it whole, but it’s too big, and instead, the octopus wraps itself around the man’s face, suffocating him – eating him, almost.
Hong’s aim when writing is to be that octopus – to “other” English by eating it before it eats her.
Hong isn’t the only Asian American poet who’s experimented like this.
One predecessor in particular has a tragic but telling story – as you’ll hear in the next blink.
The story of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha is a lesson in US attitudes toward Asian women.
One evening in November 1982, artist and writer Theresa Hak Kyung Cha was walking home from the Metropolitan Museum in New York, where she worked.
She was heading home to a building where, by chance, Hong would also live, 25 years later.
Her book Dictee had just been published – a fascinating and complex mixture of poetry and art.
She was 31, at the start of her career.
But she didn’t make it home that evening.
The key message here is: The story of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha is a lesson in US attitudes toward Asian women.
Hong learned about Cha in class, when they were assigned Dictee to read.
But she was curious that her teacher only mentioned in passing that Cha had been raped and murdered by a security guard.
A lot has been written about Cha – Dictee is an influential book – but very little has been said about her death.
It’s strange that people aren’t more interested; think of the poet Sylvia Plath, and the widespread fascination with her tragic life story.
Hong started asking around, about why nobody mentioned her death.
Some people said it was out of respect for Cha’s family, or simply that they preferred to focus on her work.
But the silence is still there, even decades later.
It’s become more like a forgetting than a silence.
Cha’s early life had a few things in common with that of Hong’s father – both had been wartime refugees in Busan, South Korea, having fled the North Korean invasion.
Cha’s family later had to escape again, when a dictatorship took over in South Korea.
So, aged 12, Cha ended up in the US.
Dictee isn’t a straightforward autobiography, but in places it does discuss Cha’s life.
The information about her death is also in the public domain, thanks to court records.
Her murderer was caught and prosecuted.
Yet the strange silence continues.
For a long time, Hong thought that an online photo of Cha’s sister, Bernadette, was actually of Cha herself, because the search engine identified it wrongly – playing into the ridiculous stereotype that all Asian people look alike.
Hong asked the attorney who prosecuted Cha’s murderer why he thought the case hadn’t attracted media attention.
He agreed it was strange – especially because it took place in the Puck, a landmark New York building.
A friend of Cha’s, however, answered the same question straight away: “She was just another Asian woman.
Even after all this time, Asian Americans have a conditional status in the United States.
It’s strange now to imagine that “Asian American” was once a radical term.
It was coined in 1968 by students in California, inspired by the Black Power movement.
Before that, the only collective term for people of Asian descent was “Oriental.
” Yet the term has been flattened by frequent use.
Asian Americans today are often considered models of neoliberalism – committed to lifetimes of hard work to repay the debt of their parents’ sacrifices, and then to outshine them and earn even more.
But Hong feels a certain ingratitude toward America, and resents the work Asian Americans still have to do to gain acceptance.
The key message is this: Even after all this time, Asian Americans have a conditional status in the United States.
It’s startling to run through everything the US has done to Asia and Asian people through the centuries.
In the nineteenth century, Chinese people were brought in to build railroads across the country – three died for every two miles of track built.
Japanese Americans were interned in huge numbers during World War II, even as their family members fought in the US army.
It took the inspirational work of activist and Malcolm X associate Yuri Kochiyama who had herself been interned, to secure an official apology, as late as 1988.
There are also the horrors of the Vietnam War, of course, as well as what the US did to the author’s own country, Korea.
It was two American officers, not particularly senior, who were tasked with marking out the border between North and South Korea back in 1945 – an act that tore millions of families apart.
And then there was the war, with its bombs and napalm.
Hong has heard white Americans comment that Asian people are “everywhere” these days – a typical slur that gives rise to minor feelings.
But white Americans are also the reason why there has been so much Asian migration.
The chaotic effect of American influence around the world caused it.
Lorraine O’Grady, an artist, claimed in 2018 that white people won’t be needed in the future because white supremacy will carry on without them.
In a world defined by whiteness, Asian Americans may not face the same scrutiny that, say, Black people do – but that doesn’t mean they belong.
Final summary
The key message in these blinks: Asian Americans live in a strange, purgatorial state that is rarely discussed.
Though different from the Black experience, Asian Americans face many damaging stereotypes that can cause feelings of self-doubt and shame.
Often forced to emigrate from their homelands because of American military aggression, Asians living in America today are still only conditionally accepted.
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