If there is such a thing as the Asian American commentariat, it is starting to get weary of the old frameworks of understanding our identity. The problems seem to be clear: we’re trapped in a cyclical discourse about the same pop culture touchstones (Sixteen Candles, Breakfast at Tiffany’s) and same pop culture grievances (othering, masculinity) with nothing new to say about them.
This is a problem that seems to come from an identity umbrella that is too broad of an to have much unifying the people within it, except for the way whiteness treats them in America. Without the significant population numbers, our historical protest movements are less “universal” to American history, especially compared to Black Americans, who have laid the groundwork for how people of color in the United States protest and activate. Yuri Kochiyama, Grace Lee Boggs, and the Filipinos of the United Farm Workers movement are all things I think of as central to Asian American political history, but I can hardly expect their footprint to resonate with every Asian American ethnicity, let alone mainstream America. The average joe on the street can’t name issues that are important to the Asian American community, and it might be because we haven’t the consensus to center around much. It’s not that the community doesn’t protest or doesn’t care — it’s just been unable to coalesce around much, and so the people drift where they may.
And where it drifts is, evidently, pop culture. Back in the mid 2000s, this was the most interesting battleground for a young twenty-something Asian looking for a political fire with which to be energized. It was much easier back then: I would use my Filipino club meetings to give lessons on Asian stereotypes, the lack of masculine leading Asian men, and the submissive Asian woman trope. It was a topic that easily engaged our group, far more than extrajudicial killings or the history of Gabriela Network. The enthusiasm for representation discourse has been fully borne out in today’s internet discourse, where Asian American politics mostly comes out in regards to whitewashing or casting in TV and film.
Make no mistake: representation in art is a good thing and has benefits that are more than superficial. It is a necessary checkbox in building a more equitable society. But it’s not at the top of the list. As someone who was once fully immersed in this discourse, to make it our _main thing_ feels like a parody of political values.
The box office success of CRAZY RICH ASIANS or the ascent of Awkwafina cannot be the only time American hears from our community and our public figures. It’s a pose that only appeals to a very specific type of liberal that is interested in cultivating a balanced art diet, a sort of collector’s mentality to getting one of everything. It does not in any way generate solidarity — the concept that your struggle is tied into mine. When we fight for each other, we fight for ourselves.
No single individual has the power to shift where the energy in the movement drifts. It’s simply the organic accumulation of everyone’s actions. But if we could direct those energies, what would a more meaningful Asian American politics look like? How would you unify the varying experiences of the different AAPI ethnic groups into an agenda?
In 2016, as the community was seemingly split on an Asian American police officer being held accountable for killing a black man in a stairwell, Jay Caspian Kang diagnosed the unique problem of stunted Asian American politics thusly:
These are selfish, neurotic thoughts, but they are the burden of feeling one’s citizenship may be conditional, and the price of decades of collective silence.
The anxieties of conditional citizenship are certainly something that other immigrant communities know very well. But while the Hispanic community may feel this as a physical threat, of being uprooted and ripped away from the things you love, it seems to manifest in the minds of young Asian Americans as a more existential anxiety; a lack of validation that hangs overhead. I say, it need not be so theoretical. Deportation is a devastating threat to Southeast Asians. Mexico is by far the largest slice of the immigrant pie, but the next three countries on the list are all Asian. In 2017, of the 10.5 million undocumented immigrants, 1.4 of them were from Asia.
Why shouldn’t the Asian American community be a loud voice in this arena? Imagine a world where Asian American issues meant reforming the immigration system and rights for the undocumented. While this work exists and is being done, it does not exist as a universal tenet of our community. It is not a given that this is top of mind in our neighborhood.
Recently, what could be called the Asian American intelligentsia got together to endorse Elizabeth Warren. I’d vote for her. But this, too, can be read as a sign of conditional citizenship anxiety. Warren is the clear “good liberal” candidate — someone that is palatable to the mainstream, but not so centrist so as to seem uninterested in change. But also someone that isn’t so radical that it draws accusations of un-American values. It is telling that our community’s thought leaders (for lack of a better term) are drawn to her over Bernie Sanders, whose candidacy has come to represent bomb-throwing and anti-establishment zeal. Who can afford to be associated with that when you’re constantly trying to validate your Americanness? When you yearn for a seat at the table of power, who wants to be with the folks trying to get rid of the table altogether?
The dual privilege and invisibility of Asian America is a conundrum that makes our potential for political activism malleable. It can be fit into the side of oppressors or the side of the oppressed. Politics is essentially the struggle for power, and we have power in some areas yet less in others. That’s why a meaningful Asian American movement beyond pop culture could be so affirming — it takes our privilege and spends it to protect the more vulnerable among us.
Imagine a world where pandering politicians in order to capture the Asian vote had to commit to a more humane immigration system; one where our celebrities used their voice to not just speak out about their own class interests via Hollywood diversity, but about the interests of the poorest of us, come to these shores as migrant labor.
It may be that it takes a catalyzing event to activate Asian America and elevate our voice on an issue like immigration. This is why the death of Vincent Chin in 1982 is largely thought of as the flashpoint of the Asian American rights movement. Movements aren’t decided by blog posts or signatories on an open letter. People, from all walks of life, have to be animated by something that cannot be ignored. For people wrapped in invisibility, that something may be a long time coming.