Thoughts on Asian Pacific Islander American Heritage Month
Rethinking how I engage with the month of May as a Korean Adoptee
I have some thoughts as Asian-Pacific Islander (and Native Hawaiian) Heritage Month 2024 comes to a close. For most of my life since becoming conscious of race as a teen I've celebrated this month with hopes and aspirations for the future of people of Asian ancestry in America. However, my thoughts on it have completely changed as I've come of age and have experienced more of the world.
As a Korean adoptee who grew up in a racially hostile place I was pressured into being deeply internally racist and to laugh off the racism I was subjected to, lest I be seen as not being able to "take a joke." It was toward the end of middle school that I realized this was not sustainable for my sanity, and I began to seek out Asian American resources on the internet. This shift came after attending a summer camp for Korean American children, and I cultivated close relationships with immediate understandings without the burden of being racialized for the first time. Around the same time, I started reading Asian American blogs like "Angry Asian Man," posting on forums like theFighting44s, and consuming art from Asian American creatives (shout out to Better Luck Tomorrow). These all informed my aspirations for what I hoped to experience as I got older, and the sort of climate I hoped Asian American kids younger than me would experience in the future: a vibrant community of people proud of who they are and where they came from in a country of immigrants. With everything I'd been told my whole life about this country, I don't think it was too naïve to think in this manner, and there was no historical precedent for the sort of positive visibility Asian Americans were starting to attain.
I went on to college and had a deeply enriching experience where I no longer experienced explicit and hostile racism on an everyday basis, and it made me think it was reflective of a larger changing world. After all, Obama had been elected on a campaign of "hope" as the disastrous war efforts in the Middle East began to wind down. Youtubers like Kevjumba and Wong Fu productions were showing Asian Americans were making headway in media. Shit was changing! During my time at the University of Michigan, I took several courses in Asian American history, joined Asian American student orgs, and socialized mostly with other Asian students, both American and international. It was humbling in revealing to me how little I knew about the world coming from a dumb, backwards suburb of Metro Detroit full of people who couldn't point out Canada on a map. This gave me a deeper sense of clear purpose: recognizing where I came from and wanting to connect with the larger Asian community to feel grounded as a human being when I'd previously felt disconnected from any sort of continuity, tradition, and genealogy as an adoptee displaced from my ancestral home.
This desire to connect with "my culture" and "my people" only became deeper when I studied abroad in Japan for a year: I had the experience of not just being a mundane sight like in Ann Arbor, but also being able to roam the world completely unburdened by race and its associated anxieties and stressors—it was the first time I truly felt free, liberated in mind and spirit. I met people from all around the world, and became even more familiar with Asian students than I had in Michigan. Some of my closest friends were Korean-Koreans, and I was fortunate enough to date a Korean girl who didn't know English, and we communicated through Japanese as a lingua franca. I went to Korea for the first time with her, and she helped me to get into contact with my adoption agency and my birth parent search. My experiences studying abroad served as a model for what I hoped for Asian Americans in our little spaces and enclaves.
While I had some reverse culture shock after coming back to the States in 2011, I was encouraged by things I'd seen develop culturally while I was gone, especially online. K-pop started to get bigger in the West with acts like The Wonder Girls, anime was becoming less of a nerds-only thing and more mainstream, and Asian food bloggers were making once-obscure things like Korean BBQ much more widely recognized. I thought this was all indicative of a larger acceptance of Asian people and Asian culture, and it informed a certain sense of optimism that I carried with me for a good number of years after that. In the interim, I moved to Texas and experienced living in or near Asian enclaves in the United States for the first time where there were entire plazas of Asian businesses with almost no English-language signage. I was in my own comfortable cultural bubble, the world continued to turn, and I dug deeper into studying social and cultural issues.
I read Malcolm X's autobiography in 2014, and it opened up the floodgates to other revolutionary black figures such as W.E.B. DuBois, Frantz Fanon, and James Baldwin. They all spoke so clearly about the nature of racism and colonialism, and what it does to the colonized materially, physically, and psychologically, and they all very much articulated things I'd felt my entire life, but didn't quite have the intellectual bravery or emotional support to think myself. I was shocked specifically by how timely their observations about racism were in spite of being written upwards of 50 to 100 years previous, and also in spite of lofty talk about how much progress had been made because of the Civil Rights Movement. Coincidentally, my reading ofthese thinkers came at the same time as notable murders of young black men committed or facilitated by the state; Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Freddie Gray immediately come to mind. Critically reflecting on my reading and these events at the time really helped to connect the dots between power, history, and the notable gaps between what we hear about America's values versus its more complicated and ugly realities. Connecting these dots helped me to see a certain kinship with Black Americans: while my own pain as an Asian adoptee does not compare to that of chattel slavery, there are notable parallels in our histories as people who were brought here without any agency in that decision. I realized black art spoke to me so much more deeply than white or "non-racial" art did because it was brutally honest in its evaluation of reality because these creators had nothing to lose being from the group most historically looked down upon. They named and shamed the forces that caused the despair that black Americans continue to face to this day: unfettered capitalism, imperialism, and an uninterrupted continuity of white supremacists in positions of power, and this gave me even more permission to speak about my experiences honestly.
While I continued to explore social justice issues, I still held on to having some notion of hope for an "Asian American Renaissance," and I was excited that a show like "Fresh Off the Boat" attained some measure of mainstream success. The turning point for my thoughts was the release of Crazy Rich Asians in 2018. Initially, I was very excited about its release, and even wrote a positive review of the movie that I am now deeply embarrassed of. At the time, I thought an incredibly successful movie centering Asian people as "normal" that made over $200 million would be a watershed moment in humanizing Asian people at-large. However, my opinion of the movie began to change as I discussed the movie with respected friends. What kind of perceptions did this movie reinforce with its uncritical portrayal of class? Why no questions about the divide between the rich protagonists and their servants? Why were the stars of the movie well-known names, but also not long-time Asian American actors and actresses we'd seen in other notable Asian American productions? While these questions didn't sit well with me, I continued to live my life, but then 2 things appeared in contemporary discourse that made my own doubts about Asian American identity pop up: Donald Trump's trade war with China and COVID.
Racialized tensions with China and COVID immediately brought me back to the early 2000s after 9/11. I was reminded of the kind of egregious racial profiling and hostility Arab American Muslims and anyone who could be plausibly perceived as such, including people as ethnically and culturally different as Sikhs, were subjected to. After all, American racists don't give a shit if someone is Persian, Arab, or Brahmin; they simply care about being able to distinguish the "good guys" from the othered who represent "the bad guys." Violent, racist attacks of Asian people blamed for COVID made me note the contradiction between increased visibility, the rise of K-pop, the recent popularity of Asian food and widely negative perceptions of Asian people at-large. What I had mistaken for "racial progress" was simply a trend of increasing popularity of Asian-associated commodities: K-pop, trendy street food, anime… these things exist in Western reality discretely separate from the human dignity of Asian people. Asian products, art, and even people are simply commodities appreciated by the West for their ability to be consumed and profited from. This is when I began to more deeply interrogate my lifelong thoughts on notions of "Asian America" and "progress."
I realized that racism toward Asian Americans was not simply a lack of knowledge and exposure, but rather the result of a sustained history of racist, extractive foreign policy. Foreign governments that do not go along with the demands of American corporations and the federal government get labeled as foreign adversaries, and are invaded, sanctioned, and otherwise destabilized, and we as Americans are told stories about how malicious these foreign governments are to foment popular support for hurting these countries. I see this sort of hostility toward China, North Korea, Burkina Faso, Mali, Bolivia, Haiti, Niger, Brazil, and Mexico to name just a few. Geopolitical rivalries are blunt instruments of foreign policy that inevitably create collateral damage and hostility toward the immigrants from places the United States has conflicts with. While rhetoric of stopping hate and separating people from government regimes is circulated, it cannot achieve these things at-scale if the overarching foreign policy is informed by a racialized hostility based on geopolitical interests. I cannot support this, and I don't see the sort of racism encapsulated by the term "Asian hate" ending until the United States no longer pursues an antagonistic foreign policy. And with the way things are going, I don't see this ending any time soon.
Concurrently, I look at the state of Asian American art and voices in American popular consciousness, and I'm disgusted. Despite a history of Asian American movements engaging in radical protest starting from the 1960s, none of these voices are elevated, because messages of fighting for justice is not profitable or too subversive. Discourse about Asian American activism that engages in solidarity with other groups and identities is isolated to college campuses and in the writings of academic eggheads. Instead, the only visible Asian voices in Western media are people who engage in racial minstrelsy (Ken Jeong, Jimmy Ouyang, every Asian Tiktoker), dissidents who engage in egging on racism in the name of extolling the superiority of "Western Values" (Gordon Chang, Selina Wong, Nimrata Randhawa), and those who are several degrees detached from political issues such as game streamers, IG influencers, and porn stars. There are many Asian American perspectives that do engage with issues and work in communities on the ground, but they deal with sticky issues related to class and multipolar politics that ensure their perspectives will never be featured on any "Top Asian American Voices" lists.
As a result of my experiences and the span of time they've taken place over, I no longer celebrate or talk about "Asian Pacific Islander (Native Hawaiian) American Heritage Month" beyond laughing at the embarrassing efforts of American corporations and the federal government to performatively show they care about Asian Americans without substantively addressing the root causes of the racism that affects them. The continued targeting of black Americans by the carceral system, economic inequality, the genocide in Gaza, and the dehumanization and hatred of Asian people are all interconnected by the weight of this country's history, its lack of effort in reconciling for atrocities like slavery, and a status quo that sees people in power with the same ideology and systemic backing as those who created these problems in the first place.
While this may sound pessimistic, and it might be in a smaller domestic context, I am very optimistic in an international context over the long-term. American foreign policy in regard to interventions and sanctions are consistent across both major parties, but more countries are standing up to the world's sole hegemon, even those who are former and fellow colonizers in regard to policies that are damaging to their regular everyday citizens' well-being. Additionally, other countries are finding alternative paths to development outside of the West's traditional model of imperialist extraction of resources that people can be proud of with no guilt or reservations. I am also optimistic about the sorts of models that available to people of Asian descent in their respective motherlands. They are not nearly as burdened by a fraught history with race and racial hierarchies that present dignified, innovative, and interesting perspectives that lie outside of what is profitable in the American media landscape. As for myself, I look to the long cultural continuities of countries in Asia to present something more earnestly meaningful and fulfilling than what aspiring to go viral and get sponsorships can accomplish.
For now, I deeply believe that none of us are free until all of us are free, and the United States is too fraught with contradictions for me to believe anything that gains any sort of mainstream popularity is constructive for Asian Americans collectively at-scale, but there are plenty of smaller voices in Asian American diasporas and forces internationally that inform a dignified consciousness that can contribute to a better world for everyone of any race and identity.
(I'm not here to debate so if you have an issue with what I've said, just keep it moving)