18 MAR 21

I think it’s weird for us, being the centre of attention.

There’s no such thing as a typical East Asian diaspora story, except that the vast majority of us are either first- or second-generation immigrants. No account one person gives can ever be comprehensive.

Many of us are rich, probably the most beloved data cluster by people who would argue that minorities have it pretty good in America. Some of us are very poor, and generally ignored. What separates these two groups is frequently how rich and educated they or their parents were before being allowed to immigrate.

Many of us grew up in urban ethnic havens in Vancouver or San Francisco or New York, for a long while blissfully unaware that people who look like us are basically unheard of on most of this continent. Some of us grew up the one Asian family for miles and miles around. In either case, some of us embrace our identity to survive, and some of us run from it to survive. I guess all of us do a combination of both.

There’s no such thing as a typical East Asian diaspora story, but I’ll give an account of what I see, because I think I have something to say, and maybe if enough of us do that we can end up with something approaching kaleidoscopic.

We’re not used to rocking the boat. Our public life is mostly applying our work ethic and education to make money for other people while behaving as whitely as possible. Even those of us who see ourselves as agitators are most accustomed to taking up banners for other people’s causes — defending the treasured institutions under attack by social justice warriors, or else advancing the freedoms of minorities who are not us. Even in how we rock the boat, we don’t really rock the boat.

And that’s because there’s not really such a thing as an Asian-American. A lot of us grew up with an understanding of ourselves as Chinese, or Korean, or Filipino, in addition to being American or Canadian, because we understand that the foods and languages and holidays in our home are different from those of our friends, those on TV. “Asian” was a term foisted on us somewhere around adolescence when white people started noticing that there was this new wave of people in their country that shared some physical features, and some of us got good grades, or something. A certain kind of doesn’t-get-it person likes to scoff “Why Asian-American? Why don’t you just call yourself American?” And, believe me, we would if we could.

The result of this is that the Asian-American culture, identity, whatever, is, like, twenty years old. It’s built on the shaky, amorphous foundation of bubble tea and loud cars and finance degrees and breakdancing and technically perfect music and online video games and a hundred other things that will each be rejected by like 80% of us.

Anyway, now some of us are being killed for what we look like, and some of us are left trying to pick up the pieces and defend this people, this culture that barely exists.

Maybe controversially, I’m willing to hear out the possibility that the recent Atlanta murders were not inspired by the recent wave of COVID-based hatred of Asians. It’s possible, and I’m not sure I believe out of hand one way or the other. That said, even the murderer’s own account that he killed eight human beings because of some weird sexual frustration points to his actions being caused by a brand of racism that predates the pandemic: the fetishization and violent exploitation of Asian women, to some degree shared by all women, but also to some degree exacerbated by their race. This is maybe harder to explain to white people. It’s pretty hard even to explain to me. I won’t try to wax poetic on the experiences of women; I’ll tell you to go listen to and read the accounts of Asian women who want to talk about it.

It stretches credulity that racism informed by the pandemic did not play a part in attacks against elderly Asian people in American and Canadian cities, and the infamous 149% increase in anti-Asian hate crimes in America at the same time as an overall 7% drop in hate crimes last year. People seeking to reject the reality of hate crimes benefit from a fuzziness around the definition, from the fact that a hate crime is defined by the perpetrator’s motive, something that exists only in their mind. It is strictly true that we can never really prove that an attack was a hate crime in the way that we can prove a rock falls to the floor if you drop it. If a person wants to wield that problem as an impossible burden against ever saying anything is ever a hate crime, then they are fully able to do that. But, y’know, unless I hear a better explanation for every single one of them, or for the trend as a whole, at some point it’s just hard to believe that crimes are not hate crimes.

For the most part, I have lived a life of enormous privilege. The ways that racism has affected me individually have been extremely limited compared to the suffering it inflicts upon others. I’m here talking because I fear for the more vulnerable people who are being killed because of a shared identity that has been forced upon us.

So here we are, world, the East Asian diaspora: a tempest-tossed huddled mass whom you invited into your countries because we would make you rich, whom you gave an identity because it was convenient for you if we were Somebody Who Is Not You, and, at a more alarming rate and in more visible spaces than before, whom you are killing.

I’d ask that you pay attention. I’d ask that you ask what is wrong with our home that any of this can happen. I’d ask that you ask what you can do to change the world so that it stops, in the minuscule way one person can.

I am a comically lazy person. It is my dearest desire not to have to agitate, to sit at home and live a quiet, comfortable life expending between zero and moderate effort for anything the whole way through, and not saying much of anything about anything important, but I fear for those I have loved and love.

Why don’t we just call ourselves “American”?

Fuck, man. We would if we could.