It’s AAPI Heritage Month, which means political and corporate America has deigned to pay us attention for a strict 31-day period that manifests mostly in toothless tweets, lazy listicles, and the neoliberal method of celebrating anything, that is, discounts. There’s also a flurry of op-eds and essays about the Asian American experience, and I always wonder how we’re supposed to receive them, as Asian Americans, women, young people, liberals, or whatever label we may encompass.

As much as I am critical of the performativity of AAPI Month and other similarly designated celebrations, I’m still grateful for the sliver of recognition and acknowledgement it bestows on Asian Americans. Yet, there remains a collective cultural amnesia and refusal to acknowledge the history and realities of Asian America, as well as a complacency among Asian Americans to remain politically and socially silent. In light of the past few years and changes in my life, I’ve never felt the multicultural superficiality of AAPI Month and my own invisibility and more acutely. So, in search of insight, I turn to art, specifically literature, which has the uncanny power to simultaneously reflect and refract our reality, to shape and be shaped by our culture.

“History has failed us, but no matter.” The opening line of Min Jin Lee’s wondrous Pachinko enchanted if bemused me the first time I read it three years ago. Who is “us”? What counts as history/History, and whose is it? The matter-of-fact tone and succinctness of the sentence initially marks a resignation to the failure of history: “history has let us down, but there’s nothing we can do about it.” Yet on further reflection, it enacts a quiet rage and a stubborn resilience.

History—made up of philosophers, scholars, textbooks, lectures, and memories—erase Asian American history. We do not merit even a mention as the object of others’ discrimination, violence, or neglect. Even taking into account the pragmatism of editing and condensing events for the sake of better clarity and palatability, it’s no coincidence that in every version, Asian Americans are invisible. I attended a private high school and a liberal arts university and didn’t formally learn about the internment of Japanese Americans, the L.A. race riots, or Chinese labor in the west until my junior year of undergrad in a class about Asian American history. What little prior knowledge I had was gathered piecemeal from reading and from an independent study I arranged with a professor. If it’s difficult for someone like me with access to many resources to learn about my history, how can others?

It’s as if what Hegel wrote about Africa applies to Asian Americans and Asians in America as well: “at this point we leave [Asian America,] not to mention it again. For it is no historical part of the World; it has no movement or development to exhibit…[it] had to be presented here only as on the threshold of [America’s] History.” History, like everything else, is not neutral and does not arise from nothing. Like any story, it has a point of view, and that point of view has its own opinions, biases, and passions. These must be acknowledged and taken into account despite any efforts to make a particular narrative appear natural, impartial, and inevitable. Better yet, let us make our own history and tell it to the world.

Fail: as in not succeed, to neglect, to break down, to let down. In the tale of America, failure is anathema to and impossible for the model minority; the 1888 Chinese Exclusion and 1904 Immigration Acts legitimized racial exclusion and vandalized the American Dream; violence broke solidarity across communities of color and killed Vincent Chin; birth on American soil couldn’t save Japanese Americans; and lies from the leader of our country end with the beatings of grandmothers and the shootings of mothers and daughters. Reading and learning about these atrocities is exhausting and saddening, and it is perfectly understandable to feel defeated on an individual and collective level.

Asian Americans have borne the weight of all these kinds of failures to be sure, but we also fail ourselves. We atomize and individualize, abandoning the power and the solidarity of the community, preferring to keep our heads down and strive for the future. It’s certainly easier this way, but by not forming bonds with each other and with other people of color, we fail ourselves.

Us, or is it US? “Us” speaks of solidarity and may hint at sameness, but elides our diversity: Asian Americans account for the largest intergroup income gap in the nation, and being “Asian” is more slippery and fluid than all the maps say. The United States has failed and has been failed by its people and its leaders. Again, the collective is in question: Asians are not all from “East Asia,” and we do not all look the same, but others perceive us as such. Asian Americans are not the same as Asians in America, and recent immigrants have a completely different relationship to the United States and to their motherlands than second and third generations do.

There’s a fine line between collectivity and universality, but there’s a way to form communal bonds while also acknowledging difference. I’m definitely reading “US” into this passage, but it fits well nonetheless. History has failed our country as much as it has failed minorities because of the conventional narrative we tell ourselves about the United States. The idea of freedom and equality and we the people is broken in the wake of George Floyd and Brianna Taylor’s murders, our invasion and destruction of Iraq and Afghanistan, the political anger and ignorance, and the economy of inequity. Our economic, political, and cultural institutions and norms do not, and often actively oppose the realization of the dream of America. We cannot be complacent even as it is tempting to fall in love with the romance of America, or else we allow history to fail us all.

But no matter: this clause simultaneously conveys resignation and anger, defeat and defiance. “Matter” stands in for “importance.” None of the errors of history are unimportant, but this suggests the opposite. Yet, what follows is an attempt to rectify the failures of history in the telling of a people’s story that is overlooked, that is, the Korean zainichi in Japan during the first half of the 20th-century. This is an assertion that yes, history has failed us in the past, but from here we can work to remedy those failures to make—and to tell—our own history.

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Marvel’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, the sequel to the 2016 film Doctor Strange, will release in theaters in just a few days, and the hype is all over social media. The character Doctor Stephen Strange, played by Benedict Cumberbatch, has only grown in popularity among fans due to his appearances in the Avengers and Spider-Man films in recent years. The film will also feature fan-favorite character Scarlet Witch and introduce America Chavez, which is anticipated to draw even more viewers in.

Though I’m a big fan of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), I’m not particularly looking forward to this installment. Doctor Strange, as both a film and comic franchise, has a history of appropriating and misrepresenting Asian cultures, places, and people. In Marvel Studios’ misguided attempts to resolve issues from the original comics as they adapted the story for film, they created more issues that made the cinematic Doctor Strange world problematic in new ways. This new film will likely perpetuate the same issues, in addition to other problems in the casting of the other characters.

The History of Doctor Strange

Doctor Stephen Strange, created by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, made his first comics appearance in Strange Tales #110 in 1963. He was not explicitly stated to be white (or any race) until a few issues in, but his original appearance is made to look like a caricature of an Asian man. 

Strange’s mentor, the Ancient One, portrayed by the white actress Tilda Swinton in the first Doctor Strange film (more on that in a bit), did not look much better.

As shown in the first film, white American surgeon Stephen Strange travels to Asia in search of a miracle after experiencing a career-ending physical injury to his hands. He eventually reaches Kamar-Taj, where the Ancient One agrees to train him in magic that appears to be strongly based on an amalgamation of different Asian folklore. Strange conducts a variety of activities drawing from various Asian cultures and religions: he learns about acupuncture points and chakras from the Ancient One, practices martial arts, reads books written in Sanskrit, and so on. Soon enough, Strange becomes one of the strongest sorcerers, as he saves all his fellow sorcerers from the all-powerful villain Dormammu, who wants to absorb the world into the Dark Dimension.

There are all kinds of issues to unpack in this premise, but most of them stem from one root problem: a distinct lack of Asian representation.  

Orientalism

Strange’s story is yet another example of orientalism, which, in media, refers to using features of Asian cultures in a story as an aesthetic or backdrop, usually for non-Asian characters; this is especially prominent in stories where a white protagonist enters a “foreign” world and rises to become the strongest person in it before saving the people native to that world, thus erasing their agency.

Doctor Strange suggests that the very Asians who first mastered this sorcery, grounded in their own cultural and religious traditions, need white outsiders to come use this sorcery to save them. Considering the real, historical context of predominantly white countries entering Asian countries and causing irreversible harm through colonialism, this narrative is ignorant at best, and outright perpetuating and trying to justify centuries of violence at worst. 

Orientalism also further promotes the stereotype of Asian countries, cultures, and peoples being “exotic” and perpetually foreign to people from Western countries. This is especially apparent in Doctor Strange, when you compare his origin story and supernatural powers to other famous Marvel heroes, argues Indian Canadian writer Sonya Lalli:

Captain America has superhuman strength. Thor’s powers are otherworldly in origin, and Iron Man’s come from a tech-forward fusion arc reactor. Doctor Strange and his new cohorts, however, are sorcerers – and their fantastical powers are rooted in the western world’s cherry-picked perception of eastern spirituality…So the question is: Did Strange really have to go all the way to Nepal to realize that he was an egoist? No.

Could Kamar-Taj not have been a nondescript temple somewhere in the United States, and the sorcery books written in English, or perhaps a fictional ancient language? Yes.

Could their magical powers not have come from non-denominational spirituality or mindfulness? Yes.

These issues are exacerbated by the fact that there is a noticeable lack of Asian representation in the cast, especially South Asians, despite the story taking place in Nepal. This completely disconnects the practices Strange engages in from the Asian people who originally created them. The only Asian character present is Wong, who is East Asian (despite the South Asian setting) and portrayed by Benedict Wong; Wong is repeatedly portrayed as weaker than Strange throughout their appearances in the MCU. Besides Wong and the antagonist Mordo, who is portrayed by Chiwetel Ejiofor, the rest of the main cast is white.

As mentioned earlier, in the comics, the Ancient One was originally a Tibetan man. Director Scott Derrickson and Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige both believed that casting Tilda Swinton and creating a whitewashed, “Celtic” Ancient One was the only way to avoid perpetuating the stereotypes the original Ancient One embodied: he was the sage, old Asian man mentoring and supporting the protagonist, possessing mystic Fu-Manchu-like abilities. 

However, the film’s screenwriter C. Robert Cargill also attributed their decision to the political relationship between Tibet and China: “The Ancient One was a racist stereotype who comes from a region of the world that is in a very weird political place. He originates from Tibet, so if you acknowledge that Tibet is a place and that he’s Tibetan, you risk alienating one billion people [because the Chinese government would consider the film too political].”

That same reasoning is likely why another major aspect of Doctor Strange’s origin was changed in the film: the location of Kamar-Taj, where Strange trains under the Ancient One, was changed from Tibet to Nepal. Between the location change and whitewashing the Ancient One, the film completely erased Tibet from Strange’s story, which several Tibetans protested. 

In 2021, Feige admitted that casting a white person for the role was a mistake while doing press for Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, a film praised for its Asian representation: “It was a wake up call to say, ‘Well, wait a minute, is there any other way to figure it out? Is there any other way to both not fall into the cliché and cast an Asian actor?’ And the answer to that, of course, is yes.” Marvel Studios “heard the criticisms” and “processed the feedback as a major lesson,” according to the 2021 book The Story of Marvel Studios. 

However, the damage inflicted by these decisions has continued to impact MCU projects since 2016; for example, Swinton reprised her role in Avengers: Endgame in 2019. Though Feige and the studio claim to have learned “a major lesson” about casting BIPOC, the Multiverse of Madness castings say otherwise. 

The Multiverse of Whitewashing and “Lightwashing”

Though Multiverse of Madness is far from Scarlet Witch’s first on-screen appearance, the gradual shift of further centering a white, Christian Wanda Maximoff, played by Elizabeth Olsen, in the MCU has exacerbated the issues with this casting and adaptation of her character that began with Avengers: Age of Ultron in 2015.

In Marvel comics canon, Wanda Maximoff and her twin brother Pietro Maximoff—who appeared in both Age of Ultron and the show WandaVision, played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Evan Peters—are both Roma and Jewish. The Maximoff twins’ parentage has a complex history, but they were originally the children of the iconic X-Men villain Magneto, who is Jewish and a Holocaust survivor. They were raised in the Romani community by their mother’s family. The Roma are a historically nomadic people who originated in northern India.

Olsen is neither Jewish nor Roma, and Marvel Studios further committed to their insensitive portrayal of an iconic Jewish and Roma character with their new backstory for Wanda: she voluntarily worked for the infamous Nazi organization Hydra. (Olsen has also used the “g-slur,” a pejorative that specifically refers to the Romani, when talking about Wanda’s wardrobe.) Her bedroom in Captain America: Civil War originally had crucifixes on her wall, a traditional symbol of Catholicism and Christianity depicting Jesus Christ on the cross, though they aren’t visible in the film. 

As Wanda continues to appear in film and TV projects, she moves further away from her canon heritage in the comics, often in a way that instead misrepresents and harms both Roma and Jewish people—and Multiverse of Madness will likely perpetuate this issue by continuing Wanda’s story. For example, though last year’s WandaVision came out six years after Age of Ultron, it added new information to and even changed certain elements of Wanda’s MCU backstory in ways that only compounded the original problems, such as including scenes introducing Wanda’s white parents and showing her working for Hydra. Because Multiverse of Madness is directly continuing Wanda’s story from WandaVision, it feels likely that more and similar problems will arise.

America Chavez, a popular character from the comics, will be making her cinematic debut in the film, but her casting has a glaring issue as well: America Chavez is Afro-Latina, specifically Puerto Rican, and Xochitl Gomez, who will be portraying her, is Mexican and has a lighter complexion than America typically has in her comic appearances.

America’s Blackness is an integral part of her character, and many BIPOC, especially Afro-Latine people, feel represented by her. By bringing her to the big screen in this way, Marvel is alienating the very audience she’s always represented.

“As happy as I am to see someone of Mexican indigenous descent getting a spotlight, it shouldn’t have come at the cost of the representation of darker skin Latinos and Afro-Latinos,” T. Lopez wrote in The Oarsman. “Representation matters, but that doesn’t mean Latinos are interchangeable. American media always portrays Latinos as just one shade of light tan, Mexican, and as something bad. Even though America is a superhero, it feels like her on-screen portrayal is falling back into old tropes.”

Though we aren’t sure what the future for America is in the MCU yet, it will forever be affected by this initial casting decision. Even if Feige turns around in five years and admits that this casting was a mistake, just as he did with the Ancient One over five years after it happened, it won’t change the fact that America was lightwashed in this film and will still be lightwashed in every future project she appears in. 

Representation Behind the Scenes

Though so much of the Doctor Strange franchise takes from Asian cultures, there are no Asians involved in the highest levels of production for the films: the writers, directors, and producers of both films are all white. As important as having Asian and BIPOC representation on-screen is, it’s just as important to have that same representation behind the screen, creating the story, characters, and world. 

For example, if Marvel Studios was so concerned about preventing the Ancient One from being an Asian stereotype, then why did they not turn to Asian writers and directors for this task? Who better to take a character with a racist origin and transform them into a new hero people can root for, than the very people this character’s original story misrepresented? 

Take Shang-Chi for example: Asian creatives were at the helm of this film, such as Destin Daniel Cretton, who directed and co-wrote the film. The original Shang-Chi comics featured racist and stereotypical portrayals of Asians, but the film’s Asian creative team completely transformed the story into an iconic movie with intentional and thoughtful Asian representation. Why wasn’t the same effort put into transforming Doctor Strange? 

Multiverse of Madness is a disappointing step back for the MCU following the amazing Asian representation we saw in their most recent films, such as Ned and his Lola in Spider-Man: No Way Home and Gemma Chan, Kumail Nanjiani, and Don Lee’s leading roles in Eternals. 

Though a lot of the issues in the Doctor Strange franchise originate from the early 2010s (before Marvel Studios seemed to care about BIPOC representation), Multiverse of Madness is, quite literally, about different versions of characters from different universes. If they wanted to, they actually could solve all their casting issues here by the film’s own in-universe rules, such as introducing properly cast versions of these characters to replace the inaccurate ones—but we know they won’t.

Do you think Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness will try to address or resolve any of these issues? How do you think Marvel Studios could’ve “fixed” Doctor Strange? We’d love to hear what you think! Thanks for reading!

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To learn more about the diverse and complex histories of the characters discussed:

The Atlantic | The Problem With 'The Avengers' Casting Scarlet Witch as a Blonde

Twitter | A look back at Doctor Strange's incredibly racist origin story

Time | How Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings Reimagines Its Characters' Racist Comic-Book Origins

The Oarsman | The Problem with America Chavez’s Casting

Medium | Doctor Orientalism: Marvel’s History of Anti-Asian Narratives

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[Spoiler warning for the film Everything Everywhere All At Once.]

Directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (known together as Daniels), A24’s new sci-fi blockbuster Everything Everywhere All At Once is a colorful absurdist trip through the multiverse with equal parts style and substance. The general premise involves Evelyn, played by Michelle Yeoh, a struggling laundromat owner being audited who is launched into a multiversal battle against an all-powerful threat. Utilizing classic science fiction gadgetry, Evelyn is able to collect the skills and experience the lives of alternate versions of herself from other universes. With a runtime of nearly two and a half hours, it’s a densely packed movie discussing existentialism, nihilism, quantum death, butterfly effect, and mathematical probabilities. But it’s not really about any of that. At its core, Everything Everywhere is a movie about navigating relationships: romantic relationships, parental relationships, and most importantly the relationships we have with ourselves.  

Sci-fi novelist Ursula K. Le Guin once said that “Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive.” Following that note, Everything Everywhere does an exceptional job of describing the diasporic Chinese experience with an authenticity rarely seen in science fiction. From the mix of Mandarin, Cantonese, and English spoken by the characters to the wardrobe of quilted sweater vests and fanny packs, the film paints a family that is familiar to many Chinese Americans. Even so, Everything Everywhere may be the first of its kind in Hollywood with an almost all Asian cast in a movie with no inherent relation to “Asian culture.” We’ve seen all Asian casts in mainstream productions before with Crazy Rich Asians, Shang-Chi, and The Farewell, all of which center around Asian culture and identity stories. But Everything Everywhere is a sci-fi blockbuster with a premise that could have been applicable to a multitude of castings. However, by employing a nearly all Asian cast, the film opens the door for Asian actors to take on mainstream roles within a genre that was traditionally white dominated. In doing so, the film also rejects the notion of colorblindness, where the characters' backgrounds are ignored, instead choosing to keep it front and center. It doesn’t ask, “What if we made these characters Chinese?”, but rather, “How would it look if these sci-fi shenanigans happened to a Chinese American family?” As such, Everything Everywhere tells a story that can resonate with everyone but holds a special significance for the immigrant community. 

The film also borrows influence from an unique assortment of inspirations and homages. With a plethora of movie references from The Matrix to Ratatouille, Daniels also loops in cinematic homages from Chinese cinema. When Evelyn lives her alternate life as a movie actress, the cinematography and dialogue takes on a greenish tint and melodramatic tone reminiscent of Wong Kar Wai’s classic In the Mood For Love. The action sequences in the movie also pulls inspiration from Michelle Yeoh’s own filmography by mixing wuxia classics like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Clan of the White Lotus with Jackie Chan’s trademark slapstick kung fu. But what’s more important in terms of the film’s meta-commentary is the casting of Ke Huy Quan who plays Waymond, the deuteragonist and the emotional heart of the film. Ke Huy Quan, a former child actor once known in Hollywood for starring in Indiana Jones as Short Round and The Goonies as Data, drifted away from the public eye when he got older and realized there were no roles in Hollywood for Asian men. Inspired by the success of Crazy Rich Asians, Quan decided to return to acting after a decades long hiatus. 

“Those two characters are not your typical stereotypical Asian characters. Short Round is courageous, he saves Indy’s life. Data is one of the gang. But as I got older, there were not a lot of offers, and even when there was one, it was very stereotypical. It wasn’t fun to audition for those.” - Ke Huy Quan, CinemaBlend

Despite his long departure from acting, Quan steals the spotlight in a cast of heavyweights by playing different versions of Waymond, Evelyn’s mild-mannered and good natured husband. Quan’s performance is impressive, jumping from different personalities and body languages within an instant. In one of film’s most beautiful scenes, Evelyn breaks down and gives in to all her self-destructive tendencies: she destroys her own laundromat and is subsequently arrested. Waymond then calmly asks the officers to release Evelyn and slowly starts sweeping up the glass shards caused by Evelyn’s tirade, a silent but profound gesture of love. This ability to portray such nuance as he switches from action hero to comedic relief to loving husband all came from Quan’s dedication for the role.  

“I also hired a dialogue and a voice coach to help each version of Waymond sounding a little different. And emotionally, I poured my life into the 3 different Waymond” - Ke Huy Quan, Reddit

Seeing Ke Huy Quan’s triumphant return to the screen begs the question of what could’ve been in a universe with a less racist Hollywood where actors like Quan received instrumental roles in mainstream movies. It’s important to note that amidst this momentum of Asian castings, this success didn’t derive from some sort of natural progression in equitability in Hollywood. Instead, it’s the culmination of Asian talents vying for positions like directors, producers, and screenwriters that allowed for films like Everything Everywhere to be made. Without Crazy Rich Asians, Ke Huy Quan may not have returned to acting. Without Parasite, forcing audiences to read extensive subtitles for certain scenes would have been unfathomable. Without decades of international Asian cinema, the film wouldn’t have its unique charm and homages. Meanwhile, it was also Quan’s own seemingly small roles as a child that may have created a butterfly effect for his own return. 

“Over the years, I’ve met a lot of Asian talent now working in Hollywood. They always thank me and say, ‘Man, it was so great to see you up there on the screen, because I was able to see myself. Thank you for paving the way for us to be here.’ And, of course, it’s really interesting because they’ve paved the way for my return. My return to acting is the direct result of the progress made by them.” - Ke Huy Quan 

Beyond Quan’s character, we also receive an emotional performance from rising actress Stephanie Hsu who plays Eveyln’s daughter Joy. A main conflict of the film focuses on the tension and struggle that Evelyn has with Joy being a lesbian. It’s a trope that’s made more vivid and specific when intersecting that struggle with common problems for the Asian diaspora like language barriers, generational trauma, and an indirect love language. When Evelyn attempts to apologize for hiding Joy’s sexuality from her father, she struggles to find the right words and eventually settles on the awkward “you're getting fat, you should eat healthier.” Although the exact situation may be foreign to some audiences, it perfectly captures the brutal struggle of communicating with immigrant parents raised in environments where emotional engagement was never the norm. Evelyn’s pained relationship is also a two way street when she admits not only her mistakes but also airs out her grievances such as her daughter only calling when she needs something. As Evelyn’s argument with her daughter culminates in the finale, Michelle Yeoh utters words that may have been catharsis for an entire generation telling her daughter: “No matter what, I still want to be here with you. I will always, always want to be here with you.” While not fully engaging this tension to its full extent, Everything Everywhere does open the door in asking the audience to confront and evaluate their own relationships and trauma. 

“Everything Everywhere All At Once, was a dream about reconciling all of the contradictions, making sense of the largest questions, and imbuing meaning onto the dumbest, most profane parts of humanity. We wanted to stretch ourselves in every direction to bridge the generational gap that often crumbles into generational trauma.” - Directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert

Everything Everywhere All At Once tells us that our choices have consequences. Maybe if you never put down that trumpet in high school, you could’ve been the next Mile Davis. Maybe if you scored slightly higher on the SAT, you would be graduating from your dream school right now. But none of that really matters because none of those possibilities are real. The choices we make are not always perfect in hindsight but they are valuable in molding us. To quote Evelyn, “In a universe where we only have hot dogs for fingers, we get really good with our feet.” Everything Everywhere rebukes the fatalistic nihilism associated with our regrets and urges the audience to make peace with the opportunities that pass us in favor of the choices we can make in the present. And the most important choice we can make moving forward can be boiled down to a simple declaration from Ke Huay Kuan’s character: Be kind. Be kind to our loved ones, to our children and parents, even to that antagonistic IRS clerk, but most importantly be kind to yourself. 

For More Insights Into The Movie, Check Out: 

• New York Times | How ‘Everything Everywhere All At Once’ Helps to Heal Generational Trauma

• Vulture | Daniels Unpack the Everything Bagel of Influence Behind Everything Everywhere All At Once

• Slate | Asian Men Needed a Movie Like Everything Everywhere All At Once

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“I wanna bleach it. I wanna go full blonde. I’m ready,” says Awkwafina playing a fictionalized version of herself in Nora from Queens. The hairdresser grimaces as she repeats Awkwafina’s request, incredulous. We can see the her trepidation and attempts to dissuade Awkwafina from bleaching her hair:

Hairdresser: Listen, your hair is the color of space. Bleaching Asian virgin hair this dark is

always unpredictable, and often unfortunate.

Awkwafina: [spluttering] It’s not virgin! Anyway, listen I need this because I’m sick of playing it

safe and I’ve never gotten to rebel!

[Hairdresser steeples her fingers and closes her eyes, as if praying for patience]

Hairdresser: Um, listen, just girl-to-girl: bleaching while angsty—it’s just a very bad situation…

After insisting that the hairdresser go through with it, Awkwafina’s newly bleached hair is carrot orange and weirdly crimped, much to her shock and horror. The hairdresser can’t help but laugh in an I-Told-You-So way; Awkwafina looks like a cross between a hot Cheeto and Merida.

This scene is simultaneously hilarious and entreating for me: as I watched this scene while binging the entirety of seasons one and two of Nora from Queens, I had been in a months-long argument with my mom about dying my own very dark, very virginal Asian hair. Like Awkafina’s character, I, too, have never gone through a rebellious phase and want to do something that will check that box, at least symbolically. I’m not sure if this stems from a conventionally youthful attitude, or from something that’s more specific to me, but either way, I know that I am bored by my constant living up to expectations. I studied hard, played sports, went to college, applied for scholarships, got a 9-to-5 job. I attended a few high school parties and exactly one college party; I drink rarely and can’t stand the smell of weed or tobacco. In short, I am a milk-toast square. Due to my outsize fear of permanence, this leaves only one option: I have to switch up my hair.

I’ve never had any particularly strong desire to dye my hair, nor do I have any strong attachment to it; the only requirement I’ve ever had for my infrequent haircuts is that my hair must always be long enough to pull up into a ponytail. The beauty and influencer world is full of hair masks (what does that even mean?), hydrating shampoos, leave-in conditioners (wouldn’t that make your hair greasy?), hair oils (definite greaseball), and more. The fanciest shampoo and conditioner I buy is always available at any grocery store or Walgreens. Much to my friends’ chagrin, I wash my hair almost daily since I work out fairly regularly and because my hair gets so greasy that oil will drip from my head. This has been the story of my hair for twenty two years.

Enter in my deep dive into K-pop in late 2019. I quickly fell in love with the sounds, aesthetics, and glamor of the K-pop world, including the beauty standards that somehow aspired to a semi-Western standard while remaining distinctly Asian at the same time. Here, I finally found Asian men portrayed as sexy, heartthrob-bish, and desirable, though using different parameters than Western male sexiness and attractiveness. A very striking part of the K-pop aesthetic and the “comeback,” the industry term for an upcoming new album drop or single release, is hair, and specifically hair color.

Googling any idol or simply “K-pop” demonstrates the ubiquity and normalcy of multi-hued hair on both male and female idols. Each comeback or album concept necessitates a different hair color and style suitable for that album’s theme. For example, Tomorrow x Together’s whimsical, dreamy 2020 EP Minisode: Blue Hour featured a bubblegum pink mullet for Yeonjun, a baby blue bowl cut for Soobin, blond locks for Taehyun, and dark curls for Beomgyu and Huening Kai.

In contrast, the alternative, pop rock angst of the group’s second full album, The Chaos Chapter: FREEZE, marked a stark change from not only the Blue Hour era, but also the rest of their previous concepts: Yeonjun has a dark blunt-cut, Soobin’s inky hair is artfully disheveled, Taehyun has straight, silvery gray hair, Huening Kai opts for an icy platinum blond, and Beomgyu sports a shaggy wolf cut with blond highlights.

This kind of frequent hair transformation is the norm in K-pop; the only abnormal thing is that every idol invariably looks super hot regardless of hair color or style. I will admit that part of my desire to dye my hair comes out of an aspirational striving to achieve that kind of airbrushed idol beauty. Fire-red hair will not magically turn me into Yeji of course, but the self-delusion that I will somehow be able to embody or give off Yeji’s charisma and confidence. Regardless of the kind of pretend that dyed hair creates, it still accomplishes its most rudimentary goal: to make me, the hair’s owner, feel good.

Yet whenever I mention that I want to dye my hair, people consistently implore me not to, usually with some variation on “But why? You have such beautiful, dark hair! Why would you ever want to dye it?” At first, this objection was primarily my mother’s, which was obviously biased. Naturally, I started asking many different people in my life in an effort to gather evidence and support for my hair-dyeing crusade. Much to my dismay, everyone from my music teacher to my auntie to my coworkers to the hairdresser in Nora from Queens had similarly discouraging sentiments. 

Expense aside, why do people seem to care so much about my hair health? People don’t seem to bat an eye if they see someone with blond hair go brunette or a brunette add highlights. Don’t even get me started on the politics of concealing gray hair. “But this is different,” everyone seems to say. It doesn’t seem so different to me, but there is something about a dark sheet of Asian hair that makes white Americans want to protect it, preserve it; leave it pure and unsullied. It kind of reminds me of a scene from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel Americanah where the protagonist Ifemelu wonders why her wealthy WASP employer feels the need to always qualify her as beautiful:

Ifemelu would later come to realize that Kimberly used “beautiful” in a peculiar way. “I’m meeting my beautiful friend from graduate school,” Kimberly would say, or “We’re working with this beautiful woman on the inner-city project,” and always, the women she referred to would turn out to be quite ordinary-looking, but always black. One day, late that winter, when she was with Kimberly at the huge kitchen table, drinking tea and waiting for the children to be brought back from an outing with their grandmother, Kimberly said, “Oh, look at this beautiful woman,” and pointed at a plain model in a magazine whose only distinguishing feature was her very dark skin. “Isn’t she just stunning?”

“No, she isn’t.” Ifemelu paused. “You know, you can just say ‘black.’ Not every black person is beautiful.”

Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. Americanah. New York, Anchor Books, 2014.

This uncritical adulation of non-white beauty as somehow untouchable or pristine is insidious for the ways that it dehumanizes the person it describes. It Others and objectifies in the guise of praise. As Ifemelu feels uncomfortable by her boss’s microaggressions, I feel annoyed indignation on behalf of my Asian hair. People object to the idea of an Asian without black hair because it doesn’t align with their idea of what an Asian should look like, what an Asian should be. This is hair Orientalism disguised as admiration. Harientalism?

Amidst the unfavorable reactions to the prospect of dyeing my hair, I’ve also thought about this chasm between my personal saga and the K-pop stars I love so much, and I realized that I myself was guilty of a bizarre inversion of what was happening to me: K-pop has completely changed my view of mullets after seeing almost every male idol managing to smolder with one. However, when I saw a young American tennis player sporting one, I was disgusted. Similarly, the bowl cut, while always an icon of childhood and teenage awkwardness and Asian American upbringing, flatters very few people, excepting said K-pop stars. Why this contradiction? Why am I so attracted to Baekhyun’s mullet and repulsed by JJ Wolf’s?

Fetish is a concept that contains many dimensions. At its surface and in its most common usages, it denotes some kind of sexual desire or preoccupation, which in turn carries social baggage: a fetish is something that is taboo. Prescriptive shame and secrecy is attached to a fetish. However, earlier uses of the term refer to religious or ritual totems, most notably in French sociologist Émile Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. It should be noted that the development of this theory carries racist, colonial sentiments about African religion and non-Western polytheism in general, as demonstrated by German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Though this context is problematic and infantilizing, it does express fetish as something to be admired, worshiped, and revered.

Celebrity and the public masses’ relationship to it contains both of these aspects of fetish along with many other of the myriad contours of this idea (e.g. commodity fetish, for one). Celebrities are more often than not extremely beautiful and highly stylized to conform to cultural and social prescriptions of beauty and thus be highly attractive to the plebeian public. Their physical bodies as well as the glamor of their lifestyles work together to create desire, both sexual and aspirational, and the inevitable gossip that accompanies celebrity works to fuel public speculation and interest in them. Add social media into this and the celebrity—each individual and this phenomenon—become a daily, ever-present object of obsession. This subject-object relationship is also part of fetish: the subject treats the fetish as object by holding it apart, acting upon it, and imposing an otherness to it.

*****

I say all of this because I wonder if my opposing views of the mullet also contain some sort of internalized or unconscious fetish. Is it specifically for these K-pop stars? Perhaps. In keeping with the hair focus, I’ll also admit that I have a mental catalog of blue-haired idols. For some reason, when an idol dyes his hair bright blue, it does something to my brain (as of writing this, Stray Kids’s Bangchan just unveiled electric blue hair for the group’s Maniac comeback). Yet, if I see blue hair on a regular person, my immediate reaction falls into the trap of boomer beauty standards, i.e., that dyed hair equals angst and weirdness, which is completely unfair and judgmental.

This potential fetish of mine, of K-pop hair, is ironic and sort of twistedly humorous. Somehow seeing a blue mullet on an Asian body is much sexier than it is on a white one. On the one hand, this is part of the broader effects of Hallyu, or the Korean Wave, that has spread Korean culture internationally and also reframed the Asian body, specifically the male Asian body, as something desirable. Yet this is also a double-edged sword: in becoming global celebrities, they have transformed from object to another. The Asian man went from the effeminate, nerdy sidekick and butt of jokes to the handsome, famous, main character, but they are still reduced to fetishized objects, only this time with more glamor and dancing.

There remains an Othering that is inherent between celebrity and fan, idol and stan. The added layer of race complicates and problematizes this for me personally. Much of my undergrad research and interests focused on popular culture, media, art, and accompanying ideas of Asianness. I think about Asian representation and cultural theory often and am an avid consumer of Asian and Asian American media. As an Asian American woman, I’m also accustomed to negative and objectifying portrayals of Asian and Asian American women, and like many, have been the subject of degrading slurs and insults. I’m also very aware of the cringey and problematic Koreaboos that make me want to disassociate from K-pop fandom forever. All of the tensions of these dynamics matter deeply to me, and I worry that I have fallen into the trap of some pseudo-Western gaze that has so often distorted me.

I wouldn’t classify this cultural allure as Orientalism since K-pop was and is constructed very consciously by Korean—but also increasingly non-Korean—actors. Rather, this is an inversion of Orientalism: the West doesn’t use K-pop as a way to define its own cultural identity, and it is now Asia that is using pop music, television dramas, food, and other cultural exports by way of South Korea as ways to fortify its own identity. I don’t want to call this Occidentalism, since there isn’t any overt negative representations of the West; it’s more of a PR campaign (if anyone has any ideas for what to call this, please leave it in the comments). This is a move that’s paying off in economic as well as cultural capital seeing as tourism and revenue attributed to BTS alone is about $5 billion as of 2021, which makes up about 0.5% of South Korea’s entire economy. It sounds small, but when considering all the aspects that make up a country’s economy, this is mind-boggling.

Maybe then my viewing isn’t a neoimperialist, Othering gaze and more of a celebration? Is this just further evidence that Hallyu has effectively crested over me? In any case, my gaze is still a fetishizing one, albeit one that contains much less of a power imbalance and more of a kind of conversation and tacit acknowledgment of the sociocultural, political, and historical intricacies that underpin this relationship. Here, the fetish flips his purple hair and gazes back with circle-lens clad eyes.

*****

So, where does this leave the dilemma of my own locks? I’m still not sure to be honest. Some days I really do love its natural black, and others I want to go platinum blond. Regardless of the details of my personal situation, hair, like anything else, can be deeply political and deeply empowering. We should do our best to acknowledge both.

I’d love to hear what you think! Leave a comment below.

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For further reading on the concept of fetish, the politics of hair, and the Korean Wave:

• HBO Max | Awkwafina is Nora From Queens | Nora Bleaches Her Hair (Video)

• Teen Vogue | A Brief History of Black Hair, Politics, and Discrimination by Jameelah Nasheed

• Vox | How K-pop became a global phenomenon by Aja Romano

• Allure | Why It’s Such a Big Deal When a K-Pop Star Dyes Their Hair by Devon Abelman

• Hegel, G.W.F. Lectures on the Philosophy of History. Translated by E.S. Haldane and Frances H. Simson, Routledge, 1955.

• Durkheim, Émile. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, a Study in Religious Sociology. London: Macmillan, 1915.

• Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. New York: International Publishers, 1967.

• Kim, Youna, editor. The Korean Wave: Korean Media Go Global. London, Routledge, 2013.

• Kim, Kyung Hyun, and Youngmin Choe, editors. The Korean Popular Culture Reader. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.

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We are entering our third year of the COVID-19 pandemic, and anti-Asian hate crimes are still occurring at a much higher frequency than before. A recent study by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism found that anti-Asian hate crimes increased by 339% in 2021, surpassing record numbers in 2020. 

Because of this, a lot more people have become aware of anti-Asian racism, especially in the media they’ve consumed. Despite this, however, films and TV shows that feature these problems continue to be praised and awarded, especially when they become hits in Hollywood.

In December 2021, I sat down to watch Licorice Pizza, expecting an indie film about middle class white people. What I got was an indie film not only about middle class white people, but also very random, unprompted anti-Asian racism, presumably inserted for comedic purposes; the film was then nominated for over 100 awards! 

So, let’s talk about Licorice Pizza.

Licorice Pizza (2021)

Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, Licorice Pizza is an indie coming-of-age film about 15-year-old Gary Valentine running around the San Fernando Valley in Southern California in the 1970s with his friends and his concerningly older “love interest,” 25-year-old Alana Kane, played by Alana Haim (of the band, HAIM). 

Despite no members of the main cast being Asian (or people of color, for that matter), the film includes two scenes of anti-Asian racism, because how could one tell Licorice Pizza takes place in the 1970s from just the cars, fashion, setting, or political climate, if it didn’t also include some anti-Asian racism “honest to its time” (in the words of Anderson himself)?

In the first of the two scenes, the white side character Jerry Frick (based on the real-life Frick, who opened the first Japanese restaurant in the San Fernando Valley, Mikado, over fifty years ago) meets with Gary’s mother, Anita, a publicist, to discuss promoting the Japanese restaurant Jerry is opening with his wife, a Japanese woman named Mioko. 

As Anita and Jerry discuss Anita’s proposed advertisement, which included comparing the Japanese waitresses to “dolls,” Anita asks Jerry for Mioko’s opinion, as Mioko hasn’t spoken at all in the scene. Jerry turns to Mioko and asks her, in English, spoken in a very exaggerated, mocking Japanese accent, what she thinks. Mioko responds sternly in unsubtitled Japanese, and neither Gary nor his mom seem bothered by the exchange. 

Later in the film, Gary and Alana go to Jerry and Mioko’s restaurant, only to be greeted by another Japanese woman Gary addresses as “Mioko,” until Jerry informs them he divorced Mioko, and that this woman, Kimiko, is his new wife. From here, we get a rinse and repeat of the same joke made previously: Gary and Alana try to make conversation with both Jerry and Kimiko, Jerry speaks to Kimiko in his “Japanese” accent, and Kimiko responds in unsubtitled Japanese. When Alana asks for a translation, Jerry delivers the punchline these two scenes have been building up to: “It’s hard to tell, I don’t speak Japanese.” 

The “Message” of These Scenes

Following this scene, Jerry isn’t confronted about his racism, nor does his character ever face consequences for it. These scenes do nothing to move the stories of Gary and Alana along, and frankly, it’s unclear who or what audiences should be laughing at.

“It’s slightly less clear who is intended to be the butt of the joke, but there’s no doubt that Jerry remains the most buffoonish presence in the room,” wrote Rebecca Sun in The Hollywood Reporter. “Regardless of whether the audience is laughing with or at Jerry (or, as some viewers have reported, sitting in stunned discomfort), Jerry’s accent is identical to the syntax and tone used to mock and demean Japanese, Chinese and other Asian people across the U.S. for the past two centuries.”

In defense of the scenes, Anderson explained to The New York Times that he based Jerry’s actions on times he’s witnessed people speak to his Japanese mother-in-law in a similarly demeaning way. He also argued, “It would be a mistake to tell a period film through the eyes of 2021.” 

In a later interview with IndieWire, Anderson responded more directly to the criticisms of the scenes: “It’s kind of like, ‘Huh?’ I don’t know if it’s a ‘Huh’ with a dot dot dot. It’s funny because it’s hard for me to relate to. I don’t know. I’m lost when it comes to that. To me, I’m not sure what they — you know, what is the problem? The problem is that he was an idiot saying stupid shit? What do you think?” 

When the interviewer clarified that the “problem” is the scenes’ racism granting people “permission to laugh at the stereotype, rather than [Jerry’s] stupidity,” Anderson said, “Right. Well, I don’t know, maybe that’s a possibility. I’m certainly capable of missing the mark, but on the other hand, I guess I’m not sure how to separate what my intentions were from how they landed.”

Given Anderson’s lived experiences as a white person, is he in a place where he can effectively make multi-layered, satirical jokes about anti-Asian racism? 

And for non-Asian viewers who are laughing along to Jerry’s antics—what part of the scenes are they laughing at, exactly? 

Being Intentional with Multilingual Comedy

Some argue that the “joke” of the scene is solely Jerry’s absurdity, and that the film is making fun of racist people. But is this still clear without any characters correcting or confronting Jerry for his behavior? 

Speaking to the Los Angeles Times, sociologist Nancy Wang Yuen pushed back against arguments claiming that people offended by the film are just “not reading [the scenes] right.” She argued: “[T]here’s no context. There’s no repercussions. There’s no discussion…It’s too subtle for people to say, ‘Oh, well, he’s racist and it’s terrible, and that’s what’s happening in this scene.’”

Another longtime issue these scenes perpetuate is characters of color existing in a story purely to advance the plot of or develop a white character; in this case, Mioko and Kimiko exist solely to show who Jerry is.

​​“This scene is classic in terms of having an Asian American character serve as a plot device that is there to develop a white or non-Asian American character, rather than a character who is a full-fledged person in their own right,” said Jenn Fang, founder of the Asian American feminist blog Reappropriate, in the same LA Times article. 

The viewers know next to nothing about Mioko or Kimiko, especially because their dialogue takes place completely in unsubtitled Japanese, which Yuen also pointed out: “You don’t even understand what the women are saying. They might be saying, ‘F— you,’ but we don’t even understand that.”

These scenes are a sharp contrast to another recent and significant example of an Asian language being featured in a major film for a comedic bit: in last year’s Spider-Man: No Way Home, audiences became captivated with Spider-Man’s best friend Ned’s Lola (“grandma” in Tagalog), who speaks to other prominent, non-Asian characters in Tagalog. Though there are no subtitles, Ned translates his Lola’s words for the other characters, who listen with rapt attention and act warmly toward her. 

Like Licorice Pizza, this interaction in No Way Home is intended to be comedic; but unlike Licorice Pizza, the comedy in this multilingual interaction comes not from the miscommunication between the Filipino and non-Filipino characters, but the absurdity of the fact that two different Spider-Men just showed up in Ned’s Lola’s apartment to save the multiverse. The joke centers Ned’s Lola as the main authority figure in the room—over two adult Spider-Men—and through Ned, we are able to understand her commentary on the situation. 

Meanwhile, we get no such insight into Mioko and Kimiko’s commentary on their respective scenes in Licorice Pizza; we remain squarely in the perspective of every white character in the room, especially Jerry. While Ned’s Lola has agency—as her words actually impacted the scene and how the characters behaved—Mioko and Kimiko are nothing but stepping stones for Jerry to pull off his multi-scene joke at their expense. 

“But Jerry Frick was Real!”

Perhaps the most important piece of context we have to consider for these scenes is the fact that Jerry Frick was a real person—did these scenes reflect who Jerry Frick was as a person? Is this how he behaved in his real-life marriages?

Podcaster Molly Lambert conducted her own research on the real Jerry Frick and found several news clippings, which she shared in a Twitter thread. She concluded Frick to be “a classic white guy obsessed with Japan and unaware he is being completely offensive, just like Higgins played him,” as Frick lived and worked in Japan for fifteen years before returning to the U.S. and eventually opening Mikado. 

Whether Frick really spoke to his wives like that in real life remains unknown. Sun’s article for The Hollywood Reporter pointed out that there is very little information on Frick’s marriages to two Japanese women, Yoko and Hiroko, both of which ended in divorce. The only documented information about either marriage appears to be Frick and Hiroko’s “court disputes over division of property and spousal support.”

Regardless of whether the real Frick may have exhibited some racism “honest to its time” (as Anderson would say) toward Japanese people including his own wives, or not, we are still brought back to the main question underlying these scenes: just because they may represent something historically accurate from that time, are they necessary to include in the film when they are not part of the actual plot? 

Period pieces including era-typical racism has been a long time issue in the media, as it’s often dismissed as being “necessary” to accurately portray the historical period. However, this reasoning seems unnecessary for projects like Licorice Pizza that take place within the last fifty years, as they often emphasize and center cultural aspects of these time periods to capitalize on viewers’ nostalgia for these eras (the constant references to the ‘80s in Netflix’s Stranger Things and Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy films come to mind). 

Just the title of Licorice Pizza alone is a prime example of this, as Anderson has stated that it was an intentional reference to the original Licorice Pizza, a chain of record stores across Southern California popularized during the 1960s-80s. When watching the film itself, it’s nearly impossible to miss the time in which the story takes place; the Jerry Frick scenes do little to show this in comparison to other era-specific things that were included that directly influence the characters and plot, such as the popularity of waterbeds and the 1973 oil crisis.

Licorice Pizza vs. Awards Season

Due to these criticisms, media advocacy group Media Action Network for Asian Americans (MANAA) released a statement about the film in December 2021, in which they called for an awards boycott: 

“To shower [Licorice Pizza] with nominations and awards would normalize more egregious mocking of Asians in this country, sending the message that it’s OK to make fun of them, even during a time when Asian Americans are afraid to go out on the streets because of the unprecedented levels of violence from fellow Americans blaming them for COVID-19…In conclusion, MANAA strongly urges voting members of the Academy and other film critic associations not to reward Anderson for the racist portrayals of Asians in his film.”

Despite MANAA’s statement, Licorice Pizza has received countless awards and nominations by prestigious organizations across the world, including the Golden Globe Awards, BAFTA, and last week’s Academy Awards, where it was nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay—all categories that center Anderson’s work on the film.

An anonymous Asian American Oscar voter told the LA Times that though he liked Licorice Pizza and personally connected with the representation of anti-Asian racism, the film dropped lower on his voting list due to Anderson’s responses to the criticisms: “PTA should be more transparent about why he had that character in there.”

Another anonymous Oscar voter, who shared his ballot with The Hollywood Reporter, blasted the film:

“I hated Licorice Pizza…I just can’t believe that in 2022 we’re still rewarding blatant, unnecessarily racist movies, and that people just brush over the stuff with the accent — it didn’t add anything to the movie and no one in the movie commented on it. The excuse that ‘that was of the time’ is bullshit…I cannot reward that film for anything.”

Though Licorice Pizza is still widely critically acclaimed, it’s also becoming clear, through these responses and others across social media, that, overall, the tolerance for these kinds of jokes in films is waning among both audiences and working creatives in Hollywood. Audiences especially have made it clear that they want more diverse films, with projects like Disney’s Encanto and Pixar’s Turning Red having achieved both critical and financial success.

As more BIPOC-produced films succeed, more doors for future BIPOC creatives will open within the industry. Though it’s a slow-moving process, there’s still hope—things are changing. 

As for PTA, he might want to reconsider his implication that “the eyes of 2021” are actually anti-racist. I hope he reads up some on the history of and ongoing violence due to anti-Asian racism before thinking of using it again as a set piece in his next film! 

Did you watch Licorice Pizza? Do you think these scenes were necessary to include? Do you think it’s justified for all period pieces to include scenes depicting racism to be “honest to its time”? We’d love to hear your take on it! Thanks for reading!

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To learn more about how portrayals of Asians and anti-Asian racism in media can affect our community in real life:

The Hollywood Reporter | Shannon Lee: Does Quentin Tarantino Hate Bruce Lee? Or Does It Just Help Sell Books?

The Hollywood Reporter | Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: Bruce Lee Was My Friend, and Tarantino’s Movie Disrespects Him

NBC Asian America | Anti-Asian bias rose after media, officials used 'China virus,' report shows

Nielsen | What You See Isn’t What You Get: The Role of Media in Anti-Asian Racism

The Washington Post | Shang-Chi and the fight against yellow peril

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Recent Olympic wins by Asian-American athletes like Nathan Chen and Chloe Kim renewed attention to Asian athletes on the field. In particular, because the U.S. figure skating team is well-represented by Asian-Americans. However, this was not always the case. It was as recent as the 20th century that Asian athletes began appearing in the mainstream.  

A History of Asian Xenophobia in Figure Skating

Since the 1900s, Asian-Americans have had steady representation in figure skating. In 1985, Tiffany Chin became the first Asian-American champion of the United States Figure Skating Championships. Her victory was rife with commentary on her body and appearance; she was demeaned as the “China doll.” U.S. figure skater Francis “Frank” Carroll, later coach for various high profile skaters including Evan Lysacek and Michelle Kwan, attributed the skating agility of Asian-American women to their thin and slender frame. 

The perpetual foreigner narrative, a mentality that rejects Asians into the American narrative  surrounding Asian-Americans has never left the American subconscious and has been a part of a longstanding racist stereotype placed upon the Asian community. While the headline-making victories of these young Asian-American athletes add a diverse spin to the history of Asian-American athletes and amongst everything furthers the positive representation of Asians, the excitement can turn sour for the athletes when one’s race becomes totalizing. 

In various interviews, young snowboarder Chloe Kim recalls receiving dozens, if not more, of demeaning and racist messages on her social media platforms like Instagram where she was told that she was stealing the limelight from white women and others that at one point, she tried to stop speaking Korean with her mother. Many of these messages point to her Asian identity as a reason for their receiving of mean remarks. Her Olympic win did not make those comments disappear. In fact, the pandemic has only increased the hostility of the general public towards the athletes in the Asian community. But at the same time that hate exploded towards her, kind messages also filled up her DMs.

The Asian Achiever

One of the longest standing depictions of Asians is that of the stoic overachiever: quiet, “geeky,” speaking in broken English, robotic, but also hard-working and excelling academically. In the realm of sports, these perceptions have loomed large around Asian-American athletes. Reportage and the common perception has worked to reduce and reinforce the Asian identity and its stereotypes for the athletes. Being called a “doll” or small and noted for having a slender frame reduces the talent and effort of the athlete to deliver world-class performances. It also suggests that there is something inherently different about those Asian athletes. The Asian foreigner is viewed with a distance, with a gaze preserved for something exotic. 

In addition to undermining the success athletes , the narrative surrounding Asian-American families is also strikingly similar. In 1998, The Los Angeles Times ran an article titled “Kwan’s Dad Also Paid His Dues,” exploring the poignant backstory of Michelle Kwan’s family. A few weeks ago, Today ran an article on an emotional moment between Nathan Chen and his mother. Dozens of articles also used the term “emotional” for Vincent Zhou’s regrettable inability to compete. These stories can definitely be seen as an improvement from the stoic, indifferent Asian achiever. 

Yet, this tendency to depict the hard-work of the Asian family is another coin in the stereotypical narrative. While beautiful, these backstories, when told enough times, hardly adds new dimension between one Asian athlete and another. Hard work and dedication most definitely belong to the immigrant narrative, but one cannot help but wonder if that is it. The transnational tale of the Asian-American family is complex, nuanced, full of life. We can be that, and more.  

Evolving Perception

As a diverse collective rich with stories from diaspora and transnational journeys, the evolving athletic landscape in the United States is a reflection of a dynamic group of Asian-American folks putting themselves forward and breaking barriers. But while proud, I also hope that these “barriers” will not exist as a differentiator. Just as we do not look up at a white athlete and gasp, “you perform well,” Asian excellence should be normalized. Not robots or “that,” just a wonderful athlete.   

Have you ever felt like a part of your identity was used to minimize your achievements? Let us know in the comments!

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With the excitement around The Matrix: Resurrections and The Book of Boba Fett earlier this year, I couldn’t help but notice a commonality between the two films: Asian women in starring roles. Indeed, critics have praised Jess Henwick (The Matrix) as Bugs and Ming-Na Wen as Fennec Shand (Boba Fett) for enlivening their widely-beloved respective franchises in their roles. This achievement in representation is a great leap from the American sci-fi that’s landed on screens, both big and small, in the last two decades.

As a long-time Marvel fan, this is not my first time rooting for Henwick and Wen. While I didn’t enjoy Iron Fist for various reasons and was only mildly entertained by The Defenders, Henwick’s performance as Colleen Wing was one of the highlights of Marvel’s Netflix series. Her character was fierce, complex, and arguably deserving of more screen-time (or a spin-off). The same could be said for Elektra, played by Élodie Yung in The Defenders and Daredevil. Not unlike Colleen Wing, Bugs is a strong leader and powerful fighter. Her faith in the legend of Neo and her persistence in gaining freedom are two driving forces in The Matrix.

Most known for her roles in Mulan (1998) and The Joy Luck Club, Wen first appeared in the Star Wars universe in The Mandalorian. She previously played Agent Melinda May in Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. from 2013 to 2020 alongside co-star and fellow Asian woman in sci-fi, Chloe Bennet (Daisy). Wen and Bennet carried the show and were my motivations for tuning in every week even when the plot got lost somewhere between seasons four and five. Wen’s Star Wars character, Fennec Shand, is a cunning and highly skilled bounty hunter and mercenary. Her dedication to her job and her unexpected compassion have made her a multifaceted, fan-favorite character.

However, while the aforementioned characters are multidimensional, not every Asian female character is written as such. In contrast to Fennec Shand’s prominence in Boba Fett, Kelly Marie Tran’s character, Rose Tico, was sidelined in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. She made her first appearance in The Last Jedi as a Resistance maintenance worker. By the end of the film, Tico grew as a Resistance fighter, risking her life to save others. Despite this character development, she was practically invisible in The Rise of Skywalker. 

This practice of sidelining Asian female characters can also be seen in Marvel. Though she played a minor character with few lines, Shiori Kutsuna’s character, Yukio, in Deadpool 2 held little depth. She was cute and queer, yet unremarkable and forgettable. Within Marvel alone, there have been several similar instances of Asian women falling in the shadows of their white counterparts. As an X-men fan, I was thrilled when I learned of the casting of X-men: Apocalypse. However, I left the theater disappointed that Lana Condor (Jubilee) and Olivia Munn (Psylocke) had hardly any lines, compared to Hollywood icons Jennifer Lawrence (Mystique) and Evan Peters (Quicksilver), to name a few. Fan Bingbing (Blink) was given the same treatment in X-men: Days of Future Past. Though dressed to impress in their makeup and futuristic bodysuits, X-men’s Asian characters are rarely the stars of the show. 

Asian women in sci-fi deserve more than a few seconds of screentime. Historically, American sci-fi films seem to favor Asian culture and aesthetics over Asian people. This borrowing of aesthetics can be witnessed in films such as Blade Runner and its sequel, and Cloud Atlas where settings appear inspired by the likes of Tokyo and Hong Kong, and characters dress in traditionally Asian-inspired clothing. Researchers David S. Roh, Betsy Huang, and Greta A. Niu describe this phenomenon as “techno-orientalism.” This concept has been explored in a Politically Invisible Asians piece by Kevin Li, which I encourage you to read. Of course, no one has forgotten the time Scarlett Johnasson played a Japanese cyborg in the live-action adaptation of anime Ghost in the Shell. In fact, this role has cemented her as a meme within the Asian American community, as many of us have dubbed her our “Asian icon.” 

On par with being side-lined as background characters, is the reduction of Asian characters to stereotypes. Women in film/TV, regardless of genre, are continuously objectified. We see this in women running in skin-tight dresses and heels, positioned as damsels in distress instead of heroes. Asian women are indubitably objectified in ways white women are not. The fetishization of Asian women is deeply intertwined with our brutalization, as has been the case as far back as the 19th century. Modern media depiction of hypersexualized Asian women not only ties back to this harmful history, but also perpetuates it.

One stereotypical depiction of Asian women is that of a fierce, but one-dimensional, fighter, often with colorful hair or a blue or purple hair streak. This stereotype is so prominent that Meng’er Zhang, Xialing in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, spoke to the director about removing the red extensions in her character’s hair for the final cut of the film. Zhang shared in an interview that she read a Teen Vogue article about the stereotype and didn’t want her character to fall in line with the unfortunate trend.

In contrast, a character like Mantis of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 is more a depiction of the demure Asian woman stereotype. Mantis, played by Pom Klementieff, is an alien servant to a powerful God-like being. While seemingly self-aware of her subordinate status, she does nothing to fight against her master until the final act of the film. Film critic Anna Cabe likens this depiction of a passive Asian female servant to war brides brought to America from Japan, Korea, and Vietnam.

Being represented on screen also doesn’t protect actors and actresses from racism and harassment. A prime example is Kelly Marie Tran, who played the first prominent Asian woman (and woman of color) in the Star Wars universe. While some fans criticized the new trilogy and The Last Jedi specifically, others were deeply racist and misogynistic to Tran for simply countering their expectations for what a Star Wars protagonist could look like. The vitriol of fans was so intolerable that Tran chose to leave social media altogether for the sake of her mental health.

Sci-fi is a genre that goes beyond entertainment. Historically, sci-fi films use political themes, pulling from current events to shape their stories and worlds. After World War II, for example, the industry experienced a rise in films using nuclear technology as a plot device or central theme. One of the most popular sci-fi franchises, Star Wars, depicts rebels fighting a fascist regime. Since their inception in the early 20th century, these films represent human values, hope, and a future that we, as a society, can either fear or be inspired by. Why, then, is it such a tall ask that this future include multifaceted Asian women? While we are still several steps away from a brighter, more inclusive world of sci-fi cinema, I will continue to root for the Asian female lead. After all, what kind of future would it be without Michelle Yeoh?

To learn more:

• Astria Suparak | Asian Futures Without Asians

• Kevin Li, Politically Invisible Asians | “The Future of the Colonial Gaze”

• Teen Vogue | “Why the Trope of Rebellious Asian Women With Colored Hair Is Problematic”

• Vox | “The History of Fetishizing Asian Women” (content warning: mentions of graphic violence)

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I remember watching Migo's video for Stir Fry back in junior year of high school, and my immediate reaction was something along the lines of:

“Yeah, there's something that isn't right about this.”

Obviously, there were a few elements of the video I found problematic. The title already exhibits an American tendency to associate Chinese culture with the “stir-fry” phenomenon. The recurring images of kung-fu were presented in a manner that could have been more tasteful. Of course, these critiques were self-explanatory. 

But what else? Was it the multitude of Chinese people given background roles to emphasize the presence of the Americans? Perhaps.

But then, Quavo bests the Chinese gangster in his own area of expertise in the field of martial arts. This scene was perhaps the most vital component to what made the video so troublesome. 

I realized that it was the combination of all of the previously stated elements - the commodification of Chinese culture into popularized images -  and how they consolidated into the expression of the overall theme for the video:

America wins, always. 

The video displays the idea that America dominates the cultural landscape - deciding what elements of Asian culture are to be presented - all for them to simply exert their dominance even further, by making themselves the master of these elements. 

Through this video, a sad but true reality presents itself:

The world’s dominant perception of the East is from a Western view, not an Eastern one.

One of the great cultural tragedies of human history has been the centuries-long, ongoing, problem with Orientalism, and the internalization of prejudices that arise from it.

The concept of Orientalism is credited to the Arab-American philosopher Edward Said, who essentially described it as the West’s underlying belief that Eastern cultures, be it the Middle East or Asia, are inferior and therefore must be changed to become more similar to the West. If Western cultures continue to hold this intrinsic belief, all attempts to ‘understand’ and appreciate a foreign culture will be deeply rooted in latent xenophobic assumptions.

What are these assumptions?

The Occident (western culture) prioritizes values of industrialization and material wealth, which leads to a “civilized” society of leisure and refinement.

Any culture that does not share the priorities of The Occident is barbaric and purely exotic. 

Since The Occident boasts their contributions to the advancement of technology and commerce, they believe their ideology that has led to such a complex societal system to be correct - and therefore should be spread to others.

Perhaps originally well-intentioned, the epidemic of colonization began, as Europe began to impose its ideologies onto the rest of the world. 

As a result, perception of the East in Western media reflects this stance towards Eastern cultures. 

The extremely entrenched, and at times extremely subtle, commodification of Asian cultural elements in the West, primarily from Europe and America, has been a cultural genocide for a genuine representation of Asian culture, untainted by Western perception.

In Orientalism, “the Oriental'' becomes an abstracted novelty instead of a representation of the original version of their culture, one of a diverse patchwork of ideas and history that have been developing as long as, if not longer than, their Occidental counterparts.

Cultures with millennia's worth of history have become flattened into recurring images, frozen in time, and can only be characterized by the elements in their culture that are adopted by the West.

The reason for this Asian commodification originates simply from a mercenary standpoint, where selling goods is the priority. 

Marketable to whom? 

Western, primarily white, non-Asians. The soccer mom who does yoga, owning a Buddha statue. The anime-fetishizer, whose perception and understanding of Japan stems solely from selective media consumption. White Westerners are the market — most Asians would not be attracted to a watered-down version of their own culture. 

But why are Western non-Asians in such a rush to consume Asian media and goods? 

To seem different, of course. Almost every colonialist empire has been guilty of such commodification – collecting “the Other” to stand out among other white people. 

Hence, ‘attractive’ Asian cultural elements are abstracted, and their components become objectified, reified into images of exoticism. 

Recurring images appear across various Asian cultures. Ninjas, dragons, pandas, kimonos, martial arts are perhaps the most predominant images that the Occident thinks of when envisioning the Orient. 

The images that prevail in western culture are the most marketable because of how different they are from Western images. 

As a result, any exotic image can become mystified in the eyes of the West, reflecting the West’s desire to commodify everything as a way to express its cultural dominance. However, the standards of beauty and aesthetics of the West define what are the marketable images. In regards to the images that are deemed unmarketable, they are elements of the culture that are viewed as “grotesque” or “ugly.” 

However, the true tragedy lies not in cultural appropriation, but rather cultural revision.

From these examples alone, the West remains culturally dominant — another prime example can be found in the current version of Chinese food in America. When Chinese immigrants arrived in America in the early 20th century, most chefs needed to make an income. As a result, they had to alter their dishes to appeal to the popular taste, which resulted in fried dishes with a sweet syrupy sauce.

The new form of Chinese cuisine continued to increase in popularity as it kept on selling. Eventually, the dishes, originally designed to cater to Americans, found their way into mainland China. Here we are, in postmodernity, where Chinese food is now defined by American consumption and is perceived by the world as the“sweet and sour” flavor of the American palette.

This cultural rewriting is a reflection of Western ideals dominating the market, and as a result, dominating everyone else’s ideas. These ideals are the underlying belief that Western civilization believes itself to be culturally superior to the rest. These assumptions have manifested themselves in media, such as film, advertisements, and artworks for over a century. 

But how do we escape this cultural dominance?

Better yet, what would breaking free from Orientalism even entail?

I believe the escape from Western cultural dominance would require a revolutionary upending of the colonialist ideology that brought about the fetishization of Asian culture. Unfortunately, that would not happen without extreme negative backlash from most of the world, since the dominators of media are from the West.

Additionally, capitalism, a western mode of thought, has entrenched itself in almost every country on the planet; therefore a socioeconomic revision, wherein the industries that commodified Asian images as means for profit are destroyed, is impossible. 

However, I think a solution lies in the original problem I stated in the Migos video…

The concept of beating one at their own game. 

Asian cultures can take advantage of the capitalist media industry, using authentic voices to express genuine content. South Korean cinema has proven this (remember Parasite won Best Picture of 2019). In this case, the Western prioritization of media and entertainment has been adopted by Asian culture and has been executed in an extremely original fashion (and perhaps of greater quality). 

Such is the case for Japan as well, which adopted the American consumerist sentiment but imbued it with their own cultural values to create a far more complex and efficient system of commerce. 

This approach then becomes the new association with the East - exporters of high-quality media and goods, signifying an eventual shift in cultural dominance. 

If this pattern of gradual cultural awareness of Asia’s potential continues to increase, non-Western cultures and values may finally become the cultural dominator, allowing for more authentic voices to be heard without the fear of an omnipresent Orientalist influence.

To further decolonize our minds:

• Asia Society | The Evolution of Chinese Food as a ‘Cultural Ambassador’

• NBC News | White Women Co-Opted Pandemic Yoga. Now, South Asian Instructors Are Taking It Back

• FilipiKnow | A Brief History of Filipino’s Obsession With White Skin

• Medium | Escaping the Spectacle

Do you recognize something from your culture that has been commodified? Or have an idea of how to move past Orientalism? Let us know!

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Spoilers for Spider-Man: No Way Home ahead.

Back in December, Marvel released the final installment of the current Spider-Man trilogy, Spider-Man: No Way Home. The film was met with both critical acclaim and commercial success, becoming one of the top 10 highest grossing films of all time. 

No Way Home follows high school seniors Peter Parker, Michelle “MJ” Jones, and Ned Leeds as they navigate a world complicated by Spider-Man’s secret identity being leaked to the public. Peter tries to use magic to undo this reveal, resulting in characters from the previous Spider-Man film trilogies crossing over into this Peter’s world—including Andrew Garfield and Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Men.

While the film was a significant moment in cinematic history for Spider-Man fans, many Filipino viewers came away from the film with a new hero: Ned’s Lola, played by Mary Rivera.

The two Spider-Men are first introduced when Ned and MJ, sitting in Ned’s Lola’s (Tagalog for “Grandma”) apartment in Queens, discover that Ned can magically open portals. While Ned tries to open a portal to “find Peter Parker,” he finds both Garfield and Maguire’s characters instead, leading to a comedic encounter between them and Ned’s Lola. 

Though the main focus of the scene was the reveal of Garfield and Maguire, the scene included a significant amount of Filipino representation. MJ throws yema rolls, a Filipino food, at Garfield’s Spider-Man when he first appears. While she is on screen, Ned’s Lola mostly speaks in unsubtitled Tagalog, leaving Ned to translate for the others. MJ and the two Spider-Men simply address Ned’s Lola as “Lola” and never ask Ned to explain what it means; they also never ask or expect her to speak in English, and instead “patiently” wait for her to finish speaking and for Ned to translate.

This memorable scene in No Way Home came off the heels of two incredibly diverse projects previously released by Marvel Studios before it: Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings and Eternals. Both films featured prominent Asian characters, such as Shang-Chi (Simu Liu), Sersi (Gemma Chan), and Kingo (Kumail Nanjiani), as well as Asian creatives working both in front of and behind the camera. 

Before all three of those films released in 2021, Asian representation in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) was mostly limited to the TV shows (Daisy Johnson in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Nico Minoru in Marvel’s Runaways, etc.), which hardly crossed over with the films. The few notable Asian characters to appear in the films were always in the supporting cast: Dr. Helen Cho in Avengers: Age of Ultron (and we never saw her again!), Wong in Doctor Strange, and, of course, Ned Leeds in the Spider-Man films. 

Both Shang-Chi and Eternals were met with excitement and praise from audiences around the world, proving to Hollywood that stories featuring Asian characters are long overdue. Though Ned’s Lola’s scene was a smaller moment, her character was met with just as much excitement as the leading characters of the other films, as Filipinos around the world excitedly embraced her.

Filipino artist Benjamin Lee DeGuzman’s fan art of Ned’s Lola quickly went viral on Instagram in early January. Styled like comic book covers and titled “The Further Adventures of Ned’s Lola,” each piece featured Ned’s Lola going up against iconic Spider-Man villains, such as Venom and Green Goblin. 

Talking to The Philippine Star about his fan art, DeGuzman said:

“Knowing Jacob Batalon is a Filipino was already inspiring me to create art. I just assumed the movies would never even address Ned's nationality, or introduce anybody in his family…Immediately when I saw Ned's Lola, I thought I absolutely have to draw her…My Lola was a huge part of my upbringing, like Ned. I've been in so many houses that look like Ned's. I no longer had to question if I could even exist in this fantastic universe, because I already did!"

In addition to visibly representing Asians, this moment in No Way Home continues a meaningful trend of representing non-English languages in recent Marvel movies. Shang-Chi featured many scenes and lines spoken in Mandarin, and Eternals included dialogue in Spanish, ancient Babylonian, and American Sign Language. Ned’s Lola’s dialogue stands out among these examples for its lack of subtitles, which makes it especially meaningful for Filipino viewers fluent in Tagalog, as they could connect even more deeply with the character and film.

“Only those who understand Tagalog would catch some of Mary Rivera’s comedic delivery,” Collider writer Patrick Caoile said. “In both of my screenings, I laughed alongside other Filipinos who were audibly amused by Ned’s Lola while everyone else in the theater was left to wonder what was going on.”

It’s not uncommon for films to “other” non-English speaking characters by treating their native languages or inability to understand English as a joke. (Current Hollywood favorite Licorice Pizza, which includes multiple scenes belittling Japanese women for not speaking English, comes to mind.) No Way Home manages to avoid this, however, as the humor of the scene doesn’t come from Ned’s Lola speaking Tagalog or misunderstanding other characters, but rather her commentary (translated by Ned) on the situation, such as asking two infamous superheroes to clean up the mess they made in her kitchen.

While Ned’s Lola isn’t “othered,” some audience members may feel “othered” by the scene themselves because they can’t understand Tagalog; however, when it comes to hearing non-English languages, is feeling like the confused “other” necessarily a bad thing? I would argue that No Way Home assumes the majority of viewers may feel this way and firmly shows that it’s okay, because Peter, Peter, and MJ are also just as in the dark. Ned, by translating, acts as a bridge between these characters and his Lola—as well as a bridge between his Lola and the audience. 

Though I’m not fluent in Tagalog myself, the scene still resonated deeply with me, both as a Filipino American and as a longtime Marvel fan. I’d grown used to Marvel overlooking the Asian community in their films a long time ago, so I’d cling to small things like Peter Parker’s best friend being Filipino. Shang-Chi and Eternals featuring prominent East and South Asian characters blew me away, but seeing Ned’s Lola represent my own community and family on the big screen was an especially impactful, personal moment for me.

Despite Filipinos being the second largest Asian American group in the U.S., there is a huge lack of representation in the media, not only of Filipino characters, but also in spoken Tagalog. Years ago, I remember seeing a friend share an Instagram clip of Nico Santos’ character on Superstore speaking in Tagalog in one scene—it was the first time they’d ever heard Tagalog in an American TV show. 

Ever since then, I’ve kept an ear out for any spoken Tagalog in the media I consume. When Olivia Rodrigo’s High School Musical: The Musical: The Series character called her grandma “lola” in an episode back in 2019, I felt so excited.

Entertainment media isn’t the only place lacking Tagalog representation. Even the popular language learning app Duolingo doesn’t offer Tagalog (or any other Filipino dialect/language) lessons, but features fictional languages like Klingon and High Valyrian. People have requested Tagalog courses for years. As of 2010, Tagalog is the fourth most spoken non-English language in the U.S., with over 1.5 million speakers.

In my family, Tagalog fluency stalled in my grandparents’ generation, after they immigrated to the U.S. in the 1960s. My mom is able to understand Tagalog, but is unable to speak it, nor can she read or write it. As a result, there is no Tagalog fluency in my entire generation of the family, because none of our parents could pass it down to us.

Despite this, my mom and I still shared a heartfelt moment when my uncle brought up the Tagalog scene to my mom, who hadn't watched it. I quickly found a low quality video of it on YouTube to show her, and like Ned, she started translating his Lola’s dialogue out loud for me as the scene played out.

While the future of this iteration of Spider-Man and its characters is currently unclear, I hope Marvel (and the rest of Hollywood) will pay attention to the widely positive responses to Ned’s Lola. The message from viewers is clear: we want more Lola! And more importantly, we want more Filipino characters on screen who represent our families, and us. 

I think it’s safe to say that Ned’s Lola stole the show for a lot of us in No Way Home; would you agree? What kinds of Asian representation do you hope to see in the future from Marvel? We’d love to hear from you! Thanks for reading!

Leave a comment

To learn more about the prevalence of Asian and Filipino Americans in the U.S. and why creating more representation matters:

Pew Research Center | The Rise of Asian Americans

Inquirer | Filipino population in U.S. now nearly 4.1 million — new Census data

U.S. Census Bureau | 2020 Census Statistics Highlight Local Population Changes and Nation’s Racial and Ethnic Diversity

UCLA | 2021 Hollywood Diversity Report: Audiences showed up for diverse films in theaters, online

NBC Asian America | Almost half of all Asian roles serve as a punchline, study finds

Screen Rant | PTA Responds To Criticisms Of Anti-Asian Character In Licorice Pizza

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In the ongoing debate in academia and politics about the importance or frivolousness of ethnic studies in higher education, there are only a few options for an individual like me (leftist, Asian American, Gen-Z, female, college graduate):

1. Get angry and go on extended rants to whoever will listen about the (neo)imperialist structural racism of higher education and how/what we classify as knowledge.

2. Spiral into hopeless despair that no one cares about why the world is the way it is and the futility of trying to enact institutional change.

3. Read as widely as possible and recommend books to people. After spending a lot of time and energy on the first two options to little avail, I am now a strong proponent of Option 3’s empathetic power and use of interpersonal relationships to spread the gospel of representation.

I wasn’t actively conscious of the racism in academic curricula until college, and even then, wasn’t attuned to the artistic production and representation of people of color, particularly Asian Americans. My awakening came in the form of forcing one of my beloved professors-turned-mentors who introduced me to Asian American literature to supervise my independent study just so I could keep talking to her. This course was a dream: it required only that I read books and write a brief analysis of each; but it revealed how painstakingly ignorant I was of my own place in an Asian American collectivity, and the seamless elision of this collective that had in my education.

For anyone else who finds themselves in a similar position, I present to you my Abridged Beginner’s Guide to Asian American literature:

1. America is in the Heart by Carlos Bulosan, p. 1946 — A semi-autobiographical work about Filipino American relations, immigration, racism, and labor movements in California. Written by the once-forgotten Bulosan, who is now well-regarded as an early labor and ethnic activist

   

2. No No Boy by John Okada, p. 1957 — Follows the hardships experienced by interned Japanese American conscientious objectors during WWII, the psychosis of societal, familial, and self-alienation, and the politics of citizenship in ways that are astonishing considering it was published in 1957

3. Jasmine by Bharati Mukherjee, p. 1989 — A seminal women’s studies text that examines the weight of tradition, the trials of the American immigration process, violence, and a nomadic identity

4. Dogeaters by Jessica Hagedorn, p. 1990 — Following a dozen characters across several decades in the Philippines and the United States, this book is a chaotic rumination on class, gender, politics, sexuality, and religion with the specter of the Marcos government hovering over the story

5. M. Butterfly by David Henry Hwang, p. 2007 — I’m very biased in my adoration for this one because this play was and remains very formative for my own academic and personal journey: a revelatory dissection of Orientalism, intellectualism, history, gender, and politics that packs a punch in its brief length

6. Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen by Marilyn Chin, p. 2009 — An experimental speculative work that takes stereotypical Asian American immigrant narratives and twists them in unexpected ways

7. On Earth, We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong, p. 2019 — A much lauded and publicized epistolary memoir that conveys heartbreak, grief, memory, trauma, and longing with beautiful language from an incredible poet

8. DICTEE by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, p. 1982 — This entry is timely, as The Times recently published a long-overdue obituary for Cha, who was raped and murdered soon after the publication of the book, which is a literary, linguistic, and structural wonder that transcends time to explore womanhood and national belonging

9. The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen, p. 2015 — After much delay and resistance, I finally started this book and finished it in three days: a precise, very incisive and aware narrative that takes shots at Asian representation in art and cultural dialogue

10. Tropic of Orange by Karen Tei Yamashita, p. 1997 — A speculative and magical realist take on a frenzied Los Angeles amidst social and economic collapse that is an inevitable result of history

11. How Much of These Hills is Gold by C Pam Zhang, p. 2020 — A Western for the people who have been erased in John Wayne movies, Zhang combines subtle Chinese symbols with American mythology on a quest to find the meaning of home

12. Go Home! edited by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, p. 2018 — This anthology includes work from incredible writers like Alexander Chee, Chang-rae Lee, and Mia Alvar, all of which focus on Asian diaspora and the dimensions of home

13. Six Crimson Cranes by Elizabeth Lim, p. 2021 — A fantasy tale with East Asian mythological influences and a plucky heroine that I wish I could’ve had when I was younger (also the cover 😍)

14. Wicked Fox by Kat Cho, p. 2019 — Going along with the rise of all things K, this story is a modern fantasy in which gumiho—nine-tailed foxes—and other magical creatures must survive amongst humans in Seoul

This list is by no means exhaustive (and there are plenty of other lists out there), and I have left off several books that have been the longest-established as part of the Asian American canon (The Woman Warrior, The Joy Luck Club, etc), but for me, these are the stories that have helped me inhabit and expand my Asian American selfhood.

Of course, there is the lazy argument of “Once you’ve read one, you’ve read them all,” but that is an extremely limited, biased, and quite frankly, stupid tack, for there is no paucity of the same English bildungsroman or tragic heroes written by Caucasian American and European writers. Moreover, this restricted view denies the personal identity as much as the collective experience of Asian artists and perpetuates the myth of an Asian monolith.

There is also an increasing preoccupation and consternation over the “identity writer” that writes only about her particular racial/ethnic/social background; Cathy Park Hong has written extensively on this. Without sounding like a contrarian, I find this idea that minority artists are “trapped into an identity niche” a non-issue and something that is self-imposed as much as imposed by others. Being Asian or Black or queer or Latinx or trans is intimately and inextricably connected to one’s lived experience, and it necessarily informs them in ways that cannot be divorced from one’s selfhood. If anything, I believe that this repeated narrative blurbs about the immigrant struggle, the model minority, and social belonging, which, while all important, are products of publishing and marketing. It is easy (and becoming easier) to market and therefore sell stories that adhere to the renewed attention on diversity and the desire from publishing houses to realize or appear diverse and liberal.

Indeed, much of what I love about Asian American and Asian diasporic literature is its sheer diversity; while there are certainly connected themes of identity and belonging, every story is different and told in all different ways that are valuable. I love reading about the Narrator’s inner turmoil, philosophical overthinking, and unending political preoccupations in The Sympathizer as much as the romance of Chloe Gong’s brilliant Romeo and Juliet retelling, These Violent Delights. 

If we are now finally seeing some literary recognition, then maybe the next step will be the Asian American character that simply is: that has the violent urges of Judge Holden, the interiority of Mrs. Dalloway, the gothic tragedy of Miss Emily, and the futile obsession of Captain Ahab—while just being Asian.

Additional sources for intermediate to advanced courses:

• Radcliffe Institute | Viet Thanh Nguyen on Narrative Representation (Video)

• Literary Hub | Writing the “Eastern Western”

• New York Times | The Myth of Asian American Identity

• AAWW | Interview and Q&A with Min Jin Lee

What stories have shaped your life or would you recommend?

Leave a comment

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It’s been eight years since Edward Blum and the Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) first began their attack on affirmative action.

In the latest development, the Supreme Court agreed in late January to hear the group’s challenge to the admission process at Harvard and the University of North Carolina. NBC News calls it “the most serious threat in decades” to affirmative action in universities and colleges, given the court’s conservative majority.

I remember this debate surfacing when I was in high school, I was baffled to hear that Blum’s argument rested on purported discrimination against Asian students at Harvard. And, even more shockingly, Asian parents, particularly Chinese parents, were mobilizing in the street to back this lawsuit. I’d never seen Asians or Asian Americans so politically fervent within the U.S. in my lifetime. College admissions seemed to be the issue that won this particular group over.

I understand their desire to fight on this. Many of our immigrant parents labor tirelessly and even swallow discrimination, all so we can go to good schools and prosper. Any threat to their child’s prospects of future success is of paramount importance. 

However, I still see Blum’s lawsuits as nothing more than a ploy to wholly reinstate the historical advantages of white students. SFFA claims to act in the interest of Asian students by removing race-conscious admissions; and indeed, there are some Asian Americans who back the organization. But a majority do not sympathize with its aims. The 2020 Asian American Voter Survey found that 70% of Asian Americans supported affirmative action.

Asian Americans are once again being used as a pawn in conservative efforts to deny race-based inequality in this country. This time, to tear down efforts to make academia a more equitable space. Harvard’s admissions data shows that its class of 2025 is nearly 26% Asian American. Hispanic or Latinx students make up just 12.5%, and Black students account for nearly 16%. Native Hawaiian students are 0.5% of the student population, but no other data is available for Pacific Islander students of different backgrounds.

Fair admissions for Asian college students does not mean treating Asians as a racial bloc, but acknowledging the vast disparities in income and college attainment within our group. Instead, we see the concerns of college-educated East Asians, or those with the means to send their children to college, dominating in SFFA’s messaging. 

In purporting to align with the interests of Asian Americans, Blum is making a play to dismiss claims that anti-affirmative action is racist – after all, he’s helping Asians! Blum previously sought to challenge affirmative action through Fisher v. University of Texas. In this case, the plaintiff was a white woman, Abigail Fisher, who contended that affirmative action was the reason she did not get admitted. This time around, Blum strategized that he “needed Asian plaintiffs” instead to make his case.

It’s simply a new way to weaponize the model minority myth in favor of white advantage. Indeed, the model minority myth is the driving ideology behind SFFA. The organization and its allies rely on stereotypes of Asians as hard-working academic overachievers to argue Asian students are more deserving of a spot at, say, Harvard. Critically, this is in contrast to other racial minorities who may benefit from affirmative action.

Several prominent Asian American scholars submitted an amicus brief to SFFA v. Harvard, which stated: “By arguing that Asian Americans are disadvantaged by policies designed to increase racial diversity within student bodies, SFFA seeks to fuel intra-minority and within-group conflicts, while also presenting disinformation regarding Asian American educational experiences.”

In its legal arguments, SFFA has focused on Harvard’s “personal rating score” as evidence of discrimination against Asian applicants. This score takes into account the applicant's admissions essay, recommendations, accomplishments and alumni interviews, according to the brief. It does not take into account race, but SFFA’s sleight of hand may make you believe so. 

The organization incorrectly referred to the score as a “personality score” and claimed that Harvard determined Asian applicants “did not have good personalities.” The term “personality score” was widely picked up by the media, though it was an invention by the SFFA. In reality, there was only a 0.05 difference between Asian and white applicants.

To see a white man claim to take up the mantle of Asian American rights by undoing affirmative action is deeply infuriating. Once again, we are being used as a prop of white supremacy to deny Black, Latinx and other racially minoritized groups access to resources and power. This is especially confounding to me, as much of my high school and college experience was supported by programs specifically for students of color. Many, if not all, of these programs were spearheaded by Black administrators, teachers and activists. 

That is not to say racial solidarity should be a quid-pro-quo interaction. Instead, us college-educated Asians in particular must reflect on the foundations we stand upon and decide who we want to fight for.  For the longest time, who has been denied what our parents want so badly for us? Who has been shut out, time and time again, before our parents even reached American soil? Whose rights are truly at risk? Are we content with conservatives buttressing their arguments with our identities, claiming to speak in our interest? 

So long as organizations like SFFA have the resources, the crusade continues. And for white students accessing prestigious schools, there’s a bottomless supply of money. The question for our community is not how long this lasts, but what role we will play in continuing it.

To further decolonize our minds: 

• Here are TEN reasons NOT to fall for the “Asian American Penalty” trap in admissions!

• Restricted access The Racial Mascot Speaks: A critical race discourse analysis of Asian Americans and Fisher vs. University of Texas

• Mobilizing Social Science Research to Inform Judicial Decision-making: SFFA V. Harvard

What do you make of the affirmative action debate at these elite institutions? Let us know!

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Like many other minorities, I’ve spent a great deal of my life looking for myself in the image of others. In TV shows, movies, books, and social media seeing characters or cultures with any vague relation to myself always impressed me. Although I would recognize the little tokenized aspects of my life such as in a Bollywood fusion dance number or the stereotypical Asian parents with too much academic fervor, that's all that it was, recognition, rarely reflection. Instead of seeing a reflection of myself, my story, and my cultural upbringing, the image spewed at me often resembled a distorted perception of who people perceived South Asians to be; it felt like looking into a broken mirror. 

I felt this distortion once again as 21-year-old Harnaaz Sandhu was crowned Miss Universe 2021 while representing India. Many Indian Americans took their joy to social media to celebrate her win, with many influencers and social media accounts even calling it a recent win for Brown women. While I admire the effort she must’ve put into the competition and her ability to overcome generational barriers, I have to say I don’t see myself represented in a light skin Punjab woman born and raised in India as a dark-skinned Tamilian born in the Midwestern United States, but for those who do, that’s okay. 

When representation is attempted by white creators the result is often cliché traits ascribed to brown skin. Yet the South Asian narratives spotlighted by our community usually consist of generalizations based on North Indian culture or wins by the most socially and politically powered members of our population. No matter who controls the narrative, why does South Asian storytelling often feel lackluster? There may not be just one answer, but the emergence of the South Asian “diaspora” identity poses an explanation to why the portrayal of our lives pales in comparison to the actual intricacy of our cultures. 

The Diaspora Debate 

Diaspora by Merriam Webster dictionary is defined as: people settled far from their ancestral homelands.

The South Asian diaspora refers to people with cultural ties to Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives. Even though these countries collectively include roughly ¼ of the world’s population, they also contain thousands of different ethnic groups, languages, and histories. Even the concept of a South Asian diaspora is not nearly as recognized in these home countries as it is in the United States. The emergence in popularity of the term “South Asian” and similar terms like “Brown” and “Desi” became salient as these groups appeared as a prominent minority in white spaces and needed a common identity to define their relation to whiteness. 

After 9/11, these labels became particularly relevant as the U.S. government launched its “war on terror” which led to the targeting of Brown people both domestically and abroad. The generations growing up in the 2000s built a common identity around “Brownness” to mobilize against hate crimes targeted at those with brown skin. Self-identifying as “South Asian” also helps distinguish South Asians from East Asians as many South Asians do not feel comfortable identifying with the term Asian American. 

On the other hand, terms such as “Desi” have been criticized for primarily denoting North Indians, and the “South Asian” label, in general, has come under scrutiny for centering Indians. Academics and writers often view the diaspora as problematic because it promotes a homogenizing view of South Asians which leads to the further racialization of these communities. Lastly, these labels have been viewed as “opportunistic” and used as an excuse to manipulate representation politics which truly speaks to our current political atmosphere.

How Others Tell Our stories 

Oftentimes it appears we are lumped together into the “South Asian” label for the ease of others, particularly white Americans, who desire to group, oppress, and stereotype South Asian people. This desire can be seen through the way in which white creators reduce South Asians to a conglomeration of monocultural stereotypes such as Ravi from Jessie, Baljeet from Phineas and Ferb, and Apu Nahasapeemapetilon from The Simpsons. Heavy discourse continues to surround these characters and their conformity to the nerdy, undesirable, and socially awkward image of South Asians. 

But How Do We Tell Our Stories?

While we obviously cannot be held accountable for the stereotypes imposed on us, the way we tell South Asian stories often caters to white audiences, which erases our intercommunity complexity. We perpetuate a monolithic view or the illusion of some universal commonality between the South Asian diaspora. The forced generalization of such a large group of people has forced us to form a community based on artificial connections and causes.

Narratives that conform to the general “Brown” experience usually fare better than more nuanced stories. Although when we’re younger it is harder to identify it because we’re so pleased with receiving any representation at all. Looking back, someone I loved growing up, Lilly Singh often played into the monolithic view of the Brown community; Brown girls who lack social experience and awareness, caricatured strict immigrant parents, and of course the undying love of Kuch Kuch Hota Hai. 

For the record, I grew up watching as much Shah Rukh Khan as the next Bollywood fanatic and can relate to some aspects of her comedy. I think the problem arises when we realize that this is the one type of Brown story that gets amplified when millions exist, likely due to its ability to appease white audiences as well. This narrative fits the image white people have of South Asians and therefore the jokes are easily comprehensible to them in a way that more narrow narratives wouldn't be. Are these bits and fragments used to portray our existence enough? When do these “harmless” jokes and exaggerations become conflated with the stereotypes already imposed on Brown people? 

Aesthetics and Activism 

To some extent over the past decade there has been an increasing awareness of how this portrayal of South Asians does more harm than good, but as South Asian has become an increasingly racialized and therefore political identity, we’ve had to grapple with what actually defined the “South Asian” identity, and the answer recently seems to be aesthetics and “activism.”

The sheer number of people under the diaspora suggests that activism would be an effective means of storytelling, instead, regurgitated narratives plague the South Asian “activist” community. I have heard more stories gaining traction of Brown people being told they “smell like curry” or were made fun of for their arm hair than ones of intracommunity patriarchy, Islamophobia, casteism, colorism, and homophobia. Both are unjust but the latter produces much more serious consequences.  However, the former instances have a relation to whiteness and the audience of scrutiny is white allowing the Brown community to turn a blind eye to issues they may have to be held accountable for. 

A plethora of social media presences who appeal to the broad diaspora through “aesthetics” fail to show up for larger issues. Well-known influencers Sruthi Jayadevan and Hamel Patel whose careers are built upon their infusion of Desi heritage into their image did not speak on the Kashmir crisis. It makes us wonder what the diaspora community is built on besides shallow identity markers. However, aesthetics are easily consumable hence their popularity, and pages that dare to speak on controversial issues rarely receive as much engagement. 

The first two Instagram pages label themselves as “Brown”, but the one appealing to the typical Bollywood aesthetic associated with South Asian identity has received tenfold the number of likes.

But appeasing the diaspora does not stop at chai tea activists. Brown creators who have attempted to connect to their heritage through what some call “mango diaspora poetry ” have been labeled as ingenuine as well. 

Controversial poet, Rupi Kaur, serves as the prime example of this type of poetry. This type of poetry often uses the mango as a symbol to convey a romanticized image of one’s home country. In an effort to convey the story and pain of immigrants, these poets often fall to an ​​"exoticizing gaze" which dismisses the complexity of each country to appeal to the “diaspora.” She draws on the stories from lives she has not experienced causing her to be accused of superficiality.

It would be unfair to completely blame Rupi Kaur for contributing to this type of poetry. White audiences habitually support immigrant stories of trauma above everything else. “Trauma porn” is often the most sought-after commodity in South Asian stories. Hence the portrayal of many South Asian countries as underdeveloped and impoverished in Western media. Bottom line is that aesthetics and trauma porn garner attention in ways that authentic storytelling rarely does.

By attempting to represent all, we often end up representing none. The “diaspora” often hinges on the existence of shallow connections instead of a deep intercultural understanding of different groups and their dynamics. When we force ourselves beyond the diaspora, beyond the “Brown” or “Desi” labels, we may find ourselves tackling more pressing subjects.

Holding Ourselves Accountable

There are undeniable connections between us. Yet ignoring the fact that we speak different languages, practice different religions, have different relationships with our families and cultures, and come from different socio-economic backgrounds doesn’t bring us closer together. Engaging in the diaspora can be fun, it can give us a sense of belonging in a country where we are a minority. However, we must proceed with caution. We must hold ourselves accountable to seeing issues the diaspora does not through intersectional activism which pushes ourselves to defend communities that we are not directly a part of. We should attempt to boost underrepresented South Asian stories and be critical of what narratives we repeatedly pay attention to or we claim as a “win for all.” Aesthetics may be part of but not the forefront of our image; drinking Chai, watching Bollywood, and having strict parents is not what defines South Asianness. What defines us is truly individual, so let's ask ourselves what truly connects us to our heritage and one another?

Existing as an identifiable minority in America means that the diaspora identity will likely always exist, but we as a community should make sure we do not erase the complex interrelationships between us to accommodate our image in white spaces. Attempts to represent the diaspora simply come off as ingenuine because it is near impossible to represent such a large conglomerate of people without relying on artificial aesthetics and stereotypes.

“There is hope that the decade to come will bring more stories not just broadly about an amorphous “us,” but stories truly for us.”

— Kiran Misra

Identity politics and blind nationalism will not liberate us and ironically the only thing that will truly bring us together is acknowledging our differences. Brownness should be the beginning and not the endpoint of our narratives.

Finally, I have to acknowledge that I have primarily focused on the Indian community since as a Tamil American it is the community I have been able to personally encounter and continuously observe, yet much remains to be said on what other identities are continuously left out of the perceived South Asian identity.

So what are your thoughts on the diaspora debate?

Read more: 

• Asia Society | The Desi Diaspora | Asia Society

• NBC | Brown, Desi, South Asian: Diaspora reflects on the terms that represent, erase them

• South Asian Multidisciplinary Academic Journal | The Construction, Mobilization, and Limits of South Asianism in North America 

• The Washington Post | How did 9/11 change South Asian Americans' identities and politics?

• Lit Hub | On the Complexity of Using the Mango as a Symbol in Diaspora Literature

• Kajal Magazine | Consuming Diaspora

This past Election Day, many Asian Americans had cause to celebrate. In cities across the country, Asian Americans saw someone that looked like them rise to political office. Notably, Michelle Wu made national headlines as the first woman of color to be elected Boston mayor.  

The daughter of Taiwanese immigrants, Wu was also the first Asian American woman to serve on the Boston City Council. The Boston Globe reports that she ran on an “unapologetic, progressive agenda.” She is seeking to, among other things, propose a version of the Green New Deal on the municipal level, eliminate transit fares, and reimplement rent control. She has a close relationship with Elizabeth Warren as the senator’s former law student, and Warren endorsed her for mayor.

But Wu is technically not the only woman of color to serve as Boston’s mayor. Kim Janey, a Black woman, stepped in as Acting Mayor for eight months after the incumbent left to work in President Biden’s administration. Janey made history when she became interim mayor; for the past 200 years, only white men have been mayor. She has publicly reflected on her path from a child bused into a white neighborhood in the 1970s to holding the city’s highest office.

After Wu’s win, NPR reported some Black voters expressed disappointment that Janey and other Black candidates, Andrea Campbell and John Barros, didn’t receive more votes, and that they would have yet to see Boston’s first Black mayor. 

“While many are hailing [Wu’s election] as a major turning point, others see it as more of a disappointment that the three Black candidates in the race couldn't even come close,” NPR reporter Tovia Smith wrote. 

Former Massachusetts State Rep. Marie St. Fleur pointed out that Boston still carries the reputation of being a racist city, and Black candidates only won a quarter of the votes in the whitest areas. 

Fleur told NPR: "For those of us born or raised in Boston, and who lived through some of the darker days, the fact that we blinked at this moment is sadness," she says. "At what point in the city of Boston will we be able to vote — and I'm going to be very clear here — for a Black person in that corner office?"

The article’s original headline read “Cheers and some letdown as 1st elected woman and person of color becomes Boston Mayor.” On Twitter, NPR wrote that some Bostonians were disappointed that the three other Black candidates “couldn’t come close” to the number of Wu’s votes.

The headline, and the tweet publicizing the article, drew swift backlash on social media. NPR was accused of stoking racial division between Black and Asian communities, feeding into the trope that the two minority groups are constantly in conflict. There was a sense that NPR marred Wu’s historic win. 

In response, NPR deleted its tweet and changed the headline of the article. The organization issued an apology for both, citing that the tweet caused harm.

Right-wing personalities and similarly aligned news media jumped on NPR’s retraction (and the story generally), accusing the public radio organization of being “race-obsessed.” Andrew Yang even made an appearance on Fox News  to say the story diminished Wu’s victory. 

"The fact is, there's a media fixation on race that ends up dividing people, pitting different groups against different groups," Yang told Fox News.

Concerned Asian Americans saw the story pitting two already-marginalized communities against each other. This fear is understandable at a time when racial solidarity feels fragile, yet is incredibly necessary. 

But what I heard were the voices of people who were hoping their very white city would finally, finally have a mayor that cared about them. To the Black residents NPR interviewed, they were not content to see the mayoral role plugged in by anyone whose skin color wasn’t white. Therein of course lies the issue with a generalizing term like “women of color” or “people of color,” that tidily binds together the diverse experiences of oppression in America. 

As some celebrated a win for representation, these Black residents and political organizers had something different to say. They had diverging hopes for the future of their city, but not once did they attribute Janey and other Black candidates’ loss to Wu or her race; to discredit NPR’s story as perpetuating Black-Asian conflict is to minimize these residents' sadness and concerns. We need to interrogate why we are so quick to dismiss a story that centers Black people’s reactions to a political outcome because it contradicts what makes us feel good.

Full disclosure, I formerly worked as NPR’s “Diversity Intern.” I left the role with mixed feelings about the efficacy and impact of such a position in an organization as massive and slow to change as NPR. I’m not here to say they have a flawless track record on race reporting. But in the hubbub of outrage, the sentiments of these Bostonians are being lost. So is another key point – that these voters intend to hold Wu accountable to the Black community.

At Janey’s farewell address, NPR reported that Wu said: "I have heard and want to continue acknowledging the disappointment of many in our community who wish to see representatives of the Black community. We will continue working to meet this moment to take on systemic racism and the barriers that have been perpetuated for far too long."

Further, NPR’s apology and retraction of the tweet seemed more like damage control than genuine contrition. The maligned tweet was taken from the article nearly word-for-word; if the tweet caused harm, the article must magnify this impact, but it remains without even a correction. It appears that the organization’s objective was to maneuver out of a social media crisis in the most painless way, rather than engaging in good faith with the central criticism of the story’s framing. 

I do have issues with the story, unrelated to whether or not it feeds into the conflict trope. It lacked critical analysis of systemic factors that may have hindered Black candidates; the people NPR interviewed seemed to imply that it was because not enough Black voters backed one candidate. I want to know what kinds of state or city-implemented political hurdles make it harder for Black people to vote. I want to know if anti-Black rhetoric emerged on the campaign trail. Systems of white supremacy – predicated on theft of labor from Black people and land from Indigenous people – continue churning, even in the background of a supposedly racially progressive victory.

It’s true that the Black-Asian conflict trope is an erroneous generalization that continues to affect our communities. Along with the Model Minority Myth, this stereotype obscures America's colonial and imperialist history. The mainstream news media plays a central role in perpetuating it. We observed this in real-time as broadcast news played footage of Asian people being attacked, with the perpetrator always Black or brown, again and again – never mind that three-quarters of offenders in anti-Asian hate crimes and incidents are white, as American Studies professor Janelle Wong found. 

The Black-Asian conflict trope has roots in the 1992 Los Angeles Riots, when residents responded to the acquittal of four police officers who were videotaped brutally beating Rodney King. In Koreatown, rioting resulted in immigrant stores being looted and damaged. You may have seen the infamous photo of the “Rooftop Koreans,” showing Korean men armed with guns to presumably protect their businesses from rioters; these photos were popularly interpreted as a “stand your ground” type action that marked the men as “heroes.”

University of Wisconsin-Madison professors Michael Thornton and Hemant Shah analyzed magazine coverage of Black-Asian relations during the decade before the riots and the year it happened. Their paper, published in 1996, found that 3 out of 4 articles studied “note tension or an unsettling incident between groups.” Over 60% featured fear and violence.

Korean residents in L.A. took up arms during the riots of 1992, after four police officers who brutally beat Rodney King were acquitted of excessive force charges.

The news media portrayed the 1992 riots as a struggle between racial minorities, with Black people framed as violent rioters and Koreans as victims. In addition to being racist, what this narrative leaves out is the culpability of the LAPD in destruction of businesses because the police virtually abandoned their Korean residents. It also omits the shared sense of injustice some Koreans felt with Black residents in L.A.

“Whites and the institutions they influence are rarely mentioned in the coverage of Black-Asian American conflict,” wrote Thornton and Shah. “They are most often characterized as innocent bystanders or victims of minority violence.”

It’s not that conflict within the two communities doesn't exist – it’s that the news relishes in stories of this nature, creating a narrative of never ending animosity and bitterness. The original intention of the Black-Asian conflict trope, and of the Model Minority Myth, is to “prove” that systemic racism against Black people doesn’t exist.

To begin disrupting this practice, “Media needs to redefine the nature of racial news, to go beyond the unusual and to include historical, economic, and social contexts and insight into the immediate situation,” according to Thornton and Shah.

NPR’s article isn’t the ideal example of how news should “redefine” reporting on race. But we did see a rare example of journalism that depicts nuanced relationships between and within communities of color. 

There are very real tensions within the Black-Asian community, stemming from economic competition and prejudices. Asian Americans have seen anti-Blackness rear its ugly heads within our own families, especially after the murder of George Floyd. The backlash to the article shows that, because we lack the language to honestly discuss these tensions, we jump fearfully at anything that appears to expose potential rifts.

In order to forge a path toward sustaining racial solidarity, we can’t pretend these rifts don’t exist. When we as Asian Americans seek to have honest conversations about things like the historic exploitation of Black consumers or displacement of Black businesses, we can tell more nuanced stories about our two communities. We won’t hide or shy away from conflict, we certainly won’t sensationalize it, but we will take the power of narrative back.

For further reading:

The Boston Globe | ‘It’s a shame’: Some Black residents see lost opportunity as Janey, Campbell concede in Boston mayoral race

Thornton & Shah | US news magazine images of black‐Asian American relationships, 1980–1992

Current | How journalists are challenging ideas of objectivity while empowering their communities

What do you think of NPR’s reporting on Michelle Wu’s election? Leave us a comment!

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It’s no longer funny, though, when people apply the same judgement towards food or practices from cultures that are not their own. 

Ethnocentrism—the mistaken view that one’s own culture is the normal or superior culture, and others are evaluated in reference to it—is a term that I first encountered in an introductory anthropology class. Modern anthropologists (are supposed to) try to fight ethnocentrism with cultural relativism—seeking to understand each culture on its terms, rather than applying the terms of their (the anthropologist’s) own culture on the culture they are studying.

Ethnocentrism can start simply as judgement, but can exotify and alienate certain people in a cultural space, which can cause ignorance and hate. At worst, this belief can lead to violence against members of the exoticized community. 

Ethnocentric Views of Asian Foods

For lunch every day up until the third grade, my working single mom used to pack me a Tupperware of leftovers from the previous nights’ dinner, usually something pan-fried on the wok.

Instead, I longed to join my friends who lined up on the side of the cafeteria for twenty minutes for cardboard pizza and boxed chocolate milk. The people on the “Got Milk” posters pasted on the walls stared down at me with their milk mustaches, taunting. 

Every time somebody told me my food or how I ate it was weird, I felt a wall coming between me and my peers. I found myself often burying the ugly feeling that came over me every time a friend told me my food was smelly and gross. I realized quickly that I didn’t want my family’s food to be what people thought about when they saw me, a part of my identity. From my peers, I learned to internalize racism against my own culture. And in the effort to fit in, at school, I started to distance myself from the foods I ate at home.  I’m not alone in this experience either; it even has a name: the lunchbox moment. However trivial these microaggressions might seem, they define what types of food are “acceptable,” and by extension what cultures and people are “acceptable.”

Recently, James Corden’s “Spill Your Guts or Fill Your Guts” segment on his late night television show has come under fire when Kim Saira posted a Tiktok that pointed out its underlying racist tones.

The segment opens with a shot of seemingly “disgusting” foods. Corden and the guest on the show then have to play a game where they answer difficult questions, or eat one of the dishes as a punishment. While the premise is seemingly harmless, Corden presents hot dog juice, shots of mayo and hot sauce alongside elements of Asian dishes.

When I first watched an episode of the show, a lot of what was supposed to strike me as disgusting didn’t evoke its intended effect. I quickly realized I wasn’t the target audience. The show has featured dishes or ingredients that have made appearances at my dinner table at home: 1000 year old egg, jellyfish, chicken feet, fish eyes, bird saliva, etc. 

Corden and most of the guests on the segment are white. One of the first things that many guests immediately comment on is the odor, and the comments are vaguely reminiscent of the “lunchbox moment.” Whether or not the show intends to attack cultural dishes, it succeeds in not only alienating its Asian audience, but also perpetuating the notion that foods—and possibly by extension, people—from certain cultures are “disgusting.”

Due to fishy similarities between Asian dishes and the “disgusting” foods on the show, Corden has said that the segment would no longer be featuring Asian foods. However, it's a far cry from an apology. 

The Dog Meat Comment

A student had asked if she eats dog meat, my high school Mandarin teacher told me when I stopped by her classroom after school.

I wasn’t shocked–and neither was she–at the familiar comment; many diaspora of various Asian groups in the States have gotten some variation of this comment. However, it was shocking that it was said so blatantly to a teacher’s face.

When you get this comment as a small indignant child, you might have protested vehemently: “I have a dog and I would never eat her!”

In your trying-to-fit-in phase, you might have laughed it off or even played into it, wanting so desperately to fit in that you take what you can get.

At some point, it just gets tiring to even acknowledge. As you attempt to divert the topic, just a fleeting thought might pass through your mind: Is this supposed to be funny? 

Generally in Western society, the consumption of certain animals is accepted while the consumption of other kinds of animals is demonized. The application of this Western standard to other cultures is ethnocentric because it judges one culture through the standards of another. I want to preface this discussion by noting that personally, I don’t know a single Asian American (or anyone for that matter) that consumes dog meat. Also, in China, the country that most point to for being the largest consumer of dog meat, most of the population has never eaten it and there is shaky validity behind the reasons behind the existence of a dog meat festival there. 

Despite the fact that the stereotype is largely false, unpacking it reveals the hypocritical and ethnocentric nature of the “dog meat comment.”

In the US and the West, most people will villainize dog meat trade and consumption, but don’t question the ethics of eating other livestock: cows, pigs, chickens, etc. Baby livestock are turned into food too. These animals are also notoriously subject to unhealthy and cruel conditions.

Yet, outside of vegan and vegetarian circles, Americans aren’t cast in an evil light for eating those animals. On the contrary, the consumption of animal products is promoted by the government and agricultural industry.

However, other cultures’ consumption of what Western countries perceive as another category of animals (i.e. pets) is seen as ghastly. This perception is ethnocentric because it places Western standards of which meats are “acceptable” to eat onto communities outside the West. Not only is this perception limiting, it is also harmful because it leads to the dehumanization of people in or adjacent to these communities (Asian diaspora, for instance). As we’ve seen throughout the past year, what is just a stereotype can become dangerous when it’s used to justify violence against Asian diaspora.

Portrayal of Asian Foods as Unhealthy

As discussed in a previous Politically Invisible Asians article, there is a negative stigma surrounding MSG, which is used to add umami flavor to many Asian dishes. This stigma arose from xenophobia rather than science.

The term “Chinese Restaurant Syndrome” falsely described a phenomenon that food seasoned with MSG, and especially from Chinese restaurants, would cause certain symptoms like headaches, dizziness, etc. This term was ethnocentric because it claims that food from Asian and Chinese restaurants was inherently less healthy than food from other restaurants.

Last year, the Merriam-Webster definition has since been updated due to this campaign, but the negative connotation surrounding MSG still remains.

Hot Water

When I’m at dim sum with my family, one of the first things they will ask is what tea to get for the table. Afterwards, they usually turn to me or a family member to ask if I, the only Gen-Z person at the table, if I want a glass of ice water. 

The assumption that I might want to drink something different comes from the fact that most Americans don’t drink hot water, and I look Chinese American (because of my age and the way I’m dressed). I used to feel a certain degree of embarrassment or ostracization at being singled out, and would refuse the ice water.

Similarly, I’ll get weird stares and questions from my non-Asian friends when I drink hot water straight from the Zojirishi water boiler in my kitchen. Unconsciously, I sense slight judgement and feel that I need to defend something as trivial as what temperature the water I’m drinking is at.

These examples seem to be on such a trivial scale, but it points to how everyone is socialized with some degree of ethnocentrism within ourselves. It's important that people actively face and unlearn their own ethnocentric ideas. Even though I’ve felt forms of ethnocentric judgement from both white people and people in the Asian community, more work needs to be done on the former’s side. It ultimately comes down to power: while ethnocentrism from people in the Asian community can simply be judgement, ethnocentrism from white people has the power to put Asian diaspora into danger. Even though we are starting to come out from the pandemic, the racism and violence against Asian people has continued to persist, which makes it that much more necessary to unlearn ethnocentrism. 

I’d love to hear from you all! Leave a comment or question below. Thank you!

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To further decolonize our minds:

Seedtolife | Ethnocentrism and Food

Taft McConkie | Ethnocentrism, or Group Pride

Eater | The Limits of the Lunchbox Moment

Taste Cooking | Do You Eat Dog?

NPR | Asian Americans Feel the Bite of Prejudice During the COVID-19 Pandemic

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If you liked what you read, be sure to subscribe above and follow us on Twitter and Instagram @invisibleasians to stay updated on Politically Invisible Asians!

Growing up in Sacramento, California in a mixed race family, I did not have a lot of exposure to or experience with the Asian American community. Though I attended predominantly white Catholic schools my entire life, I had the privilege of participating in a Filipino cultural club, Pearl of the Orient, at my all-girls’ high school, which introduced me to the most Filipinos I’d ever met in my life at that point and my favorite cultural tradition, the tinikling dance.

(Tinikling is the national dance of the Philippines. Here is an example by my college’s Filipino club, Isang Bansa, from our Pilipino Cultural Night (PCN) in 2018. I’m dancing in the light green dress in the front on the left at the beginning.)

After my high school very generously defunded and disbanded the very Filipino cultural club that made me passionate about my family’s culture and history (okay, maybe I’m still bitter), I immersed myself in the Asian and Pacific Islander (API) community at my college, Loyola Marymount University, during my freshman year. For the first time in my life, the majority of my friends were Asian American. I even went on to minor in Asian-Pacific American studies, hoping to learn more about the history that shaped my family and bring our peoples’ stories to the table in my film classes.

At the beginning of my third year in fall 2018, I started learning more about our community in a format I hadn’t before: memes.

subtle asian traits

Back when Facebook memes were still considered cool and “dank,” my friends introduced me to a growing Asian meme FB group called “subtle asian traits.” (Frequently referred to as “SAT.”) Started by Asian Australians, the group was a platform for Asians from across the world, both in Asia and the diaspora communities, to share memes about their experiences that other Asians could relate to. Memes ranged in topics from food (mostly boba), to language, strict parents, academia (mostly Kumon), and more. 

My friends and I constantly tagged each other in posts to share the laugh, and soon enough, it seemed like everyone in the API community around me in real life was part of the group.

What started out as jokes between friends and community members exploded into one of the largest Asian diasporic community spaces online, with nearly 2 million members ranging widely in age, background, and location. Even non-Asian people began joining to consume and share memes with their Asian friends, partners, and family members. SAT spawned dozens of spin-off groups with more specific focuses, such as topics, industries, and different Asian ethnicities. Some examples include Subtle Filipino Traits, subtle asian mental health, Asian Creative Network, Subtle Curry Traits, and arguably the most popular spin-off, subtle asian dating.

FB Groups that pop up when I search “subtle.” Yes, even “subtle christian traits” is a (more white) spin-off.

Three years later, SAT remains incredibly active, with new memes and the occasional heartfelt post about family or culture gracing my feed. SAT won a Facebook Community Award this past October and stories from the group will even be adapted into a TV show. 

Even major celebrities have participated in SAT and its off-shoots for years, such as comedian Hasan Minhaj, Shang-Chi actor Simu Liu, and singer AJ Rafael. 

SAT has become a cultural hub for Asians across the world to gather, exchange experiences, and support one another. But as with any community, SAT isn’t without its issues, many of which reflect the real-life problems within the API community. 

Not-so Subtle Problems

Though many people view the memes as lighthearted and fun, some Asians believe that they reinforce stereotypes of Asian people. The memes often reference generally surface-level Asian diasporic experiences of drinking boba everyday or having tiger parents—stereotypes that are already circulated and perpetuated by non-Asians. Where is the line drawn between joking about experiences that happen to be common within the community and applying stereotypes onto ourselves for external parties to continue laughing at?

The Asian immigrant and diasporic community is also not a monolith, which others have pointed out as an issue raised by these posts. For example, many memes reference Asian immigrant parents putting their children in extracurricular activities growing up, which requires parents to have disposable income—overshadowing the existence and experiences of Asian families who don’t. This erasure is already a major issue within the Asian American community, where the struggles of working class Asians and Asians living in poverty are hardly acknowledged due to the Model Minority Myth. 

Another major issue is the Asian representation in SAT, which tends to usually be… East Asian. Sometimes Filipino or Indian, but almost always East Asian.

South Asians have especially reported experiencing racism in the group since its inception. In 2018, member Alisha Vavilakolanu witnessed the use of slurs against South Asians in the comment sections on SAT posts. When she looked up the group’s moderator team, she found no South Asians; she worried her community would continue to be overlooked and harmed in SAT. Others shared her concerns, which eventually led to the creation of Subtle Curry Traits.

SAT also tends to stay out of politics as much as it can, especially internationally. I remember a couple years ago, when news about China placing the Uyghur population in concentration camps in Xinjiang gained a lot of traction in Western media, members of SAT tried to post about it to raise awareness, but the moderators wouldn’t approve their posts for publication or would immediately turn the comments off, shortly before deleting the post altogether. I even remember some members trying a Trojan horse tactic, submitting memes for post approval and, once they were published, editing the posts to instead raise awareness of the concentration camps. It didn’t take long for moderators to figure out what was going on and delete them. 

I can’t provide screenshots or links since the posts I personally saw were deleted, but it appears that this avoidance of international politics remains a major issue to this day. 

Any kind of political advocacy that is allowed in the group is generally shallow, usually focusing on softer issues like Asian representation in media. It’s fighting racism against mostly East Asians without questioning the larger government systems at play perpetuating it or showing up for other communities of color. This political approach in the Asian American community is often called “boba liberalism.” Sarah Mae Dizon explains it best:

“It’s viewing Asian-American identity in the exact way that SAT portrays it: merchandise to buy, content to consume, and food to eat. Boba liberalism is reliant on capitalism and fails to interrogate the way our homelands have been ravaged by the Western countries in which we grew up. It’s about being solely focused on representation in media and politics; it’s about viewing our collegiate Asian student organizations as the vanguard of progress for our communities. Boba liberalism gave us Andrew Yang, who used model minority jokes as a campaign strategy.”

The moderators seem to want to avoid rocking the sociopolitical boat as much as they can in the group, considering the diversity of backgrounds and countries represented. But this instead leaves us with half-hearted responses to issues facing Asian communities worldwide, such as the surge in anti-Asian racism in the pandemic and our community’s allyship to the Black community in 2020.

To the moderators’ credit, SAT is a very high-traffic group that was originally run by teenagers for free; content moderation is going to be difficult. SAT’s “about” section states: “While we try our best to monitor posts and comments in the group, we claim no responsibility and do not endorse/dissuade what occurs inside this group.” But as SAT becomes more commercialized, I would expect that the people and resources needed to better moderate the group are much more accessible now. 

The Power of Community (and Memes)

SAT will likely never provide ample space for or celebrate all Asians, but the moderators still need to put in the work to do better by the members. Thankfully, the off-shoot groups provide better spaces for those of us who don’t fit the Western-raised, middle class, East Asian mold. 

But I still can’t completely write off SAT, at least for myself. Between all the meme posts, it’s not hard to find long, heartfelt posts people share about their personal lives. I’ve read moving accounts of people’s complex relationships with their parents, usually written in reflection after losing a parent. I’ve also witnessed people celebrating major milestones in their lives, such as finishing a project or winning a competition, where they felt pride in their ability to represent and uplift our community in their success. 

Over Halloween, my feed was filled with countless photos of SAT members excitedly dressing up as characters from iconic Asian-centric media from the past year, such as Raya and the Last Dragon, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, and Squid Game. 

I’d never seen so many new Asian characters in the span of one year that could become popular Halloween costumes; even outside of SAT, I saw countless Squid Game inspired costumes on other social media. This Halloween truly felt like something special for our community. 

Despite the silliness of the memes and occasionally shallow portrayal of Asian identity, this online community has still impacted countless people’s real-life relationships to their cultures and families. Anne Gu, one of the group’s creators, shared that a post in 2018 reminded her of a traditional Chinese dish her family used to cook for her as a child. After asking her parents to prepare it for her again, she felt a new level of intergenerational connection. I love sharing the memes with my own family, especially Tagalog-related ones with my relatives who actually understand the language; it always gets a laugh out of them! Tagalog wasn’t passed down in my family, so being able to connect with my family through these jokes feels really special. 

Many of my friends still actively use SAT and its offshoots as well. Since graduating, everyone’s moved far away, leaving us spread out across the world. But the rush of nostalgia I feel when I see my friends tag each other in memes on my feed makes the distance feel just a little shorter, if only for a moment. 

SAT may be the start of one’s foray into online Asian community spaces, but it shouldn’t be the last—especially at a time when we need to unite in our advocacy both for our own community and others. The issues highlighted in the lack of representation in the memes—the treatment of South Asians, the erasure of poor Asians, the avoidance of major political issues—are great places to start for your education and activism.

Do you feel represented by groups like SAT and their memes? Let us know in the comments below! Thank you!

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To further learn about the issues in cultivating online Asian community spaces:

Slate | Men’s Rights Asians Think This is Their Moment

Lithium Magazine | Why I Hate Subtle Asian Traits

The Outline | “Subtle Asian Traits” is Neither Subtle nor Asian

First Monday | Subtle Asian Traits and COVID-19

Paper Magazine | Subtle Asian Traits Launched a Self-Stereotyping Debate

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When Edward Said published his book Orientalism, he coined the term Orientalism to describe how western powers had manufactured a hostile perception towards eastern countries. In order to justify western colonialism and imperialism, Asian nations were painted to be backwards and undeveloped yet contained exotic and untapped resources that were attractive to western powers. Although Said’s book came out in 1978, orientalist media had existed far before his publication with 19th century British paintings fetishizing Asian women and glamorizing the foreignness of Arabic countries through superficial portrayals of such cultures. Similar orientalist tropes continued on in the early 2000s with popular films like The Last Samurai and Lost In Translation featuring white savior protagonists making their way through hyper-aestheticised versions of Japan. However, decades have passed since these portrayals and with Asian nations having undergone rapid technological and economic advancement, it has become increasingly difficult for orientalist media to continue painting Asian countries as “undeveloped.” Despite these developments, Orientalism never died in western media with Techno-Orientalism taking over film and fiction.

Flying cars, mega-corporations, lasers, and robots are all hallmarks of classic science fiction media. However, have you noticed that oftentimes these futuristic worlds feature Japanese or Chinese writing in supposedly American cities? Or perhaps overseas businessmen from Asia whose sole purpose in the plot is to act as a shadowy overlord? Or a scene that takes a detour through a seedy crime ridden Chinatown? These common tropes can be regarded as Techno-Orientalism in which Asian cultures are fetishized and rendered into mere aesthetics. Unlike Orientalism, the east is portrayed as having advanced technologically but remaining culturally inept to handle such gadgetry. The idea behind Techno-Orientalism may contrast with Orientalism, but aims to achieve much of the same results. Rather than vying for colonization and western dominance over the east by portraying them as inferior, it insinuates the dangers of advanced technology being in the hands of Asian countries. 

“Whereas Orientalism as a strategy of representation containment arrests Asia in traditional, and often premodern imagery, techno-Orientalism presents… an “Orient'' undergoing rapid economic and cultural transformations…. Cultures privilege modernity and fear losing their perceived “edge” over others.''

— David S. Roh, Betsy Huang, Greta Niu “Techno‑Orientalism: Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction, History, and Media”

Take for instance, Blade Runner 2049, the contemporary sequel to the classic dystopian movie Blade Runner. The film crafts a futuristic world featuring neon signs filled with kanji, actresses wearing traditional Yukatas and Qipaos, and architecture with clear inspirations from Japanese cities. Despite all these Asian influences, the world of Blade Runner 2049 remains devoid of any Asian actors or actresses in major roles. Instead, Blade Runner’s “Japanese aesthetics” is simply meant to serve an aesthetic function that implants foreignness into a sci-fi setting all the while associating dangerous technologies and authoritarian regimes with eastern cultures. 

"Since the late 1970s, a key idea in Western science fiction has been that Japan represents the future. Japan's 'weird' culture is a figure for an incomprehensible tomorrow…”

— Sarah Emerson “Cyberpunk Cities Fetishize Asian Culture But Have No Asians”

While the new Blade Runner’s aesthetics could be a homage to the fact that Japanese Cyberpunk movies like Akira and Ghost in the Shell were major influences on the sci-fi genre, it fails to transfer over the context behind the aesthetics of these movies. Being a sci-fi sub-genre, Cyberpunk crafts dystopian worlds in which wondrous technologies exist alongside high rates of poverty and inequality. In the case of Japan, Cyberpunk movies became popular during the 1980s to 1990s when the nation underwent a technological revolution with Japanese consumer electronic brands like Sony and Nintendo becoming household brands. The cyberpunk genre was able to serve as a critique on capitalism and government corruption during Japan’s technological boom. However, most of this subtext is dropped in reimaginings or homages of Cyberpunk as in the case of the American remake of Ghost In the Shell, which indulges in all of Cyberpunk’s techno-orientalist tropes without any self-awareness for the genre’s anti-capitalist themes. During the movie’s promotion, heavy focus was placed on a set of creepy mechanical geishas. Despite the androids never appearing in the original movie and playing a small role in the story, they became a core part of trailers and posters perfectly encapsulating the problem with Techno-Orientalism as the director utilized a cosmetic understanding of Japanese culture to draw in audiences all the while plastering “Asian” aesthetics over symbols of technological missteps. Even more objectifying is the fact that the geisha’s were constructed from a face mold of Japanese actress Rila Fukushima whose facial features were turned into a mask for other actresses to wear. 

While Techno-Orientalism is often a symptom of fictional worlds, it can carry over to real life consequences and political agendas. One example being that the Japanese government purposefully played into orientalist perceptions of Japan by releasing a trailer for the 2020 Olympics. Within the commercial, holograms flashed above a futuristic and neon lit Tokyo. Despite intense backlash from locals for the inaccurate portrayal of Tokyo and the Olympics itself, these techno-orientalist tropes served to attract foreign capital at the expense of Japanese citizens. Outside of Japan, techno-orientalist narratives have also surfaced in regards to China’s social credit system where news articles and internet memes paint China as an Orwellian hellscape in which an individual’s every move is tracked by a credit rating system. While criticisms of credit systems are valid, few of these western perceptions on social credit are factual and oftentimes only serves to postulate China as an enemy nation abusing technological advancements. Techno-Orientalist tropes that often target nations like China, Japan, and South Korea also hold many geopolitical implications considering that America has an unpopular military presence in both Japan and Korea alongside frigid relations with China. 

Although science fiction may be defined as speculative media for the future, the genre remains rooted in the fears and understandings of our present. Techno-orientalist media channels our fears and wonders of an increasingly digital world and projects them onto Asian countries and cultures. But the truth is that oppressive technologies aren’t an ocean away and instead already proliferate in America. Police surveillance programs utilizing prejudiced A.I are already being implemented in urban centers and big data companies continue to use private information in a bid to elect preferred candidates into office. When dangerous technologies are depicted to only be in the hands of foreigners or dressed up in surface level stereotypes, not only does it fan xenophobic fears but also blurs our perception towards harmful domestic technologies. So until Orientalism is fully left in the past, our visions of the future remain far from perfect.

To further decolonize our minds:

On Techno-Orientalism | Leo Kim

Revisiting the Racial Fears of Techno-Orientalism and Cyberpunk | Lauren Sung

Orientalism, Cyberpunk 2077, and Yellow Peril in Science Fiction | George Yang

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If you liked what you read, be sure to subscribe above and follow us on Twitter and Instagram @invisibleasians to stay updated on Politically Invisible Asians!

Netflix has announced that Squid Game, its newest Korean thriller, is on its way to dethroning Bridgerton as the most streamed show on their site. And although Squid Game deserves all its hype, many fans are wondering why Alice in Borderland, which became available on December 10th, 2020, didn’t receive the same recognition.

Alice in Borderland (AiB) is a Japanese thriller in which certain people are forced to participate in survival games that are based on different strengths. The show focuses on human nature at its worst, and what choices are made when faced with a life or death situation. The games in both Squid Game and AiB are very dangerous and result in more casualties than survivors. Both use the games as a way to show human cruelty when we are put in survival mode. There are huge plot twists in each, and both are pretty unpredictable. Although the premise is the same, I believe their goals are different;  there are reasons for Squid Game’s success. 

For one thing, Squid Game’s main talking point was its anti-capitalistic stance. All the players had the choice to participate in the games for money, and even after taking a vote to leave, many came back to play again. They realized that their lives outside of the games were just as bad as they were in them. In other words, they had the same chance of survival. Additionally, these games are run by a rich man who essentially got bored and wanted to bet with other elites on the ‘Squid Games,’ whose participants are made up of only the impoverished, in-debt, working class. The goal of this show is to depict how everyone is “equal” within the games and the workforce as a whole, when in reality, no one is equal because we are all controlled by those with money. The elites had the power and money to help these people, but instead, they watched their suffering as entertainment. This is to show the corruptness of those at the top and how the poor are stuck in a cycle of poverty because of the structure of capitalism. In AiB on the other hand, we are unaware of the purpose of the games, and therefore cannot connect them to broader societal issues.  I believe the application of relatable real-world commentary in Squid Game allows for it to appeal to a wider audience. Squid Game had all the aspects that AiB did, but used a larger overarching theme that is the true reason for such cruelty.

Looking strictly at the content and not the marketing and distribution side of things, what made Squid Game more appealing? I believe one reason is that we are exposed to the Game Master, and are able to get the perspective of one of the masked soldiers. This subplot keeps audiences engaged in his mission, and wanting to know the truth behind the game. This same appeal is not in AiB. Although the Gamer Master’s identity is also unknown, there is no information for audiences to be clued in to who truly is in charge or why the games exist in the first place. The lack of knowledge intrigues viewers, but does not keep them as engaged as Squid Game does.

Another reason is that the games within AiB are much more difficult, and many of them seem unrealistic. In one scene, two characters have to run out of a tunnel that is being flushed out by thousands of metric tons of water. Somehow, they end up unscathed despite being hit by the water. In the same episode, the game involves getting past a huge cat-like animal. In this scene, a car door is used to protect the main character, something that the animal could have easily crushed. Furthermore, in the very first episode, the main character was able to piece together so many random clues to avoid death, which just seemed very unlikely. In Squid Game, the games are much more simple. They are childhood games made to reflect how the workforce is “easy” to navigate, like these games, which to the elites, is child play. The games were realistic, and easy to grasp by viewers because they had heavy implications towards the happenings of everyday life in a cruel, capitalistic society. However, in AiB, everyone in Japan seemed to magically disappear with no explanation, making this less hard hitting than Squid Game due to its lack of believability and simplicity. 

AiB has no absolute ending in the way Squid Game does either. At the end of Squid Game we are able to see a clear victor and the perpetrator of the games. Although they left an open ending for a second season, they did not leave as many unanswered questions. AiB ends on the characters having to collect the last few playing cards, in order to potentially escape the dark world they were plunged into. By the last episode, viewers are still unaware of the background and details of the game. 

Squid Game is much more simple than AiB, as it relies on children’s  games, primary colors, and basic shapes throughout the set. This simplicity is attractive to viewers because it juxtaposes the complex idea of how capitalism is behind all of this. The simplicity brings out the main message, making it that much more impactful for viewers. On the other hand, AIB fell short, unable to convey their message to viewers in the same impactful way as Squid Game. Perhaps it is because the Squid Game creator had plenty of time to think through details as he pitched the same idea for Squid Game in 2011. Why do you think the reception between the two varied so drastically?

I’d love to hear from you all! Write your question(s) here. Leave a comment below. Thank you!

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To further decolonize our minds:

Variety | ‘Squid Game’ Review: Netflix’s Global Hit Wants to Condemn Violence While Reveling in It

Epic Stream | Squid Game vs Alice in Borderland: Which Show is Better Overall?

Indie Wire | ‘Squid Game’ Eyes Biggest Netflix Series Title, Shocking the Streamer: ‘We Didn’t See It Coming’

Game Revolution | Squid Game vs Alice in Borderland: Which show is better?

Twitter | Netflix

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The history of racist Halloween costumes extends as far back as Halloween itself. In the United States, dressing up for the holiday has been documented as early as the early 20th century. While most costumes were primarily homemade, depicting classic themes like ghosts and witches, there were also racially insensitive depictions. The most popular of these included donning a turban to imagine oneself as someone from the “Far East” and wearing blackface.

The celebration of Halloween shifted during the Great Depression. Prior to the 1930s, Americans “celebrated” by masking their identity and playing tricks, usually through vandalism. To keep their children safe, parents began organizing activities like trick-or-treating and haunted houses. Department stores began selling costumes, which gradually became more affordable and, consequently, more popular. In the 1950s, one might see children dressed up as princesses, Batman, and cowboys and “Indians.” Halloween continued this path down commercialization and, over the decades, costumes depicting pop culture and political figures grew in popularity.

In the 2010s, with the increased accessibility of information and social media, the narrative around racist costumes shifted. In 2011, Ohio University students launched a poster campaign that sought to “​​make revelers think twice before reducing a culture to a caricature” (CNN). Each poster portrayed a student of color holding an image of a grossly stereotypical costume. “We’re a culture, not a costume,” each poster read, “This is not who I am, and this is not okay.”

The campaign went viral on Tumblr, and was covered by CNN and The Huffington Post. The student leaders gained widely positive reception and full support from the dean of students. However, not everyone understood the value of their message and belittled the students. The posters were mocked and parodied, and users took to the Internet to label these students, and their supporters, as “cry babies” and “snowflakes.” Halloween is meant to be fun, they had said. 

But where’s the fun in reducing one’s identity to cheap makeup and a racist caricature? Especially when the identities being caricatured are often marginalized, these costumes are more than offensive. They contribute to marginalization.

Writer and educator Dr. Jelani Cobb put it best:

“To treat a character like Batman or Superman as a Halloween costume is one thing, but to treat an entire ethnicity as a costume is something else. It suggests that people conflate the actual broad diversity of a culture with caricatures and characters.”

— CNN

Racist costumes can be seen not only on Halloween but also year-round. As a student at my alma mater, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I was disappointed to learn that in 2013, several students at a 1970s themed fraternity party donned rice hats and posed with their hands clasped, a cheap attempt at a “Vietnamese” costume. Just a few months prior to this party, a fraternity at UNC’s rival school, Duke University, held an “Asian-themed” party. The outcome was about as racist and offensive as you would expect. Predictably, the fraternities apologized. Whether these apologies made students of color at their universities feel safer remains to be seen.

While the Ohio University students were not the first to condemn racist costumes, their campaign introduced many Millennials and Gen Z to the term “cultural appropriation.” Cambridge Dictionary defines cultural appropriation as “the act of taking or using things from a culture that is not your own, especially without showing that you understand or respect this culture.” Many young people grew up in a society where this was normalized; non-Japanese people wearing kimonos on Disney Channel and at award shows, non-South Asians wearing bindis as a fashion accessory, and non-Natives wearing feathered headdresses to music festivals and on the runway.

While brands like Victoria’s Secret and influential figures like Katy Perry have publicly apologized for committing cultural appropriation, there are still many who refuse to admit to their wrongdoing. This includes repeat offender Gwen Stefani, who, in response to criticism of her appropriation of Japanese culture, postulated that cultures are meant to be bought, sold, and traded. What Stefani fails to understand is that “buying” a culture without the consent of the traditional practitioners is theft. Furthermore, commodifying a culture that is not yours, like those women who “refreshed” the centuries-old game of Mahjong, exploits the community you’re attempting to emulate.

There are ways to honor and participate in other cultures. In other words, you can engage in cultural appreciation, not appropriation. This, of course, starts with supporting the traditional practitioners. Finally, with Halloween around the corner, I hope to see more costumes using imagination, rather than a narrow mind. After all, on a day when you can be anything, why choose to be a bigot?

How have you honored a culture that isn’t your own?

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Deepen your understanding of cultural appropriation with the following resources:

• i-D: “What Defines Cultural Appropriation?”

• Education Week : “Addressing Cultural Appropriation in the Classroom: Tools and Resources”

• LAist: “Racism 101: At What Point Does Cultural Appreciation Cross Over Into Appropriation?”

• The Beacon: “Opinion Submission: From an unapologetic Hawaiian”

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Growing up, there would sometimes be days where the dishes on the table were devoid of meat. 

“Why are we not eating meat today?” I would ask my mom.

“It’s Lunar New Year,” she might say. “Today, we shouldn’t kill animals for food.”

Other times it’ll be: “It’s grandpa’s birthday. We’re eating Lo Han Jai with him because it’s good luck to eat vegetarian on your birthday.”

Or, “It’s the first day of the month on the lunar calendar.”

Sometimes even,  “It’s the fifteenth day of the month on the lunar calendar.”

Confused, I would shrug my shoulders, but not dwell too long on the topic. Vegetarian or not, the Lo Han Jai that my grandma made on those days was delicious.

Buddha’s Delight

Lo Han Jai, otherwise known as Buddha’s delight, is what we always eat for dinner on those days. It is an assortment of vegetables: firm fried tofu, juicy shiitake mushrooms, chewy wood ear mushrooms, soft baby corn, baby bok choy, thinly sliced carrots and broccoli—all soaked in a savory sauce. Under this mixture are cellophane noodles. They’re not the star of the dish like many other noodle dishes, but interspersed throughout the vegetables: sneaky add-on ingredient that you might not notice until you’re halfway through the dish.

I was always told it was a Buddhist tradition, but that always confused me—we weren’t Buddhist ourselves, and my mom actually used to go to church with her parents. It wasn’t until I went vegan later in life that I remembered this dish I had growing up and started wondering more about why we followed this particular tradition despite not being Buddhist or vegetarian otherwise. It was just tradition, and in our household there wasn’t a huge emphasis on the meaning behind the reasons why we followed it. We weren’t strict about it; we just did it when we remembered and when we could. 

The other days of the year, however, were free game.

Drifting from My Family’s Food

Hailing from Hong Kong, my family loved meat-heavy Cantonese-style dishes, like Cha Siu Bao (Barbeque pork buns), Beef Chow Fun, and Hainanese Chicken Rice. And of course, we were regulars at local dim sum places in Brooklyn. Although I grew up in the states, I didn’t feel very separated from my family’s language and culture and food—not when Chinatown was just a half hour-long subway ride away. 

But when I went vegan during my freshman year of college, I started to feel a newfound distance from my family and culture. In terms of my health and my activism, I was feeling the best I’ve ever felt. Yet I couldn’t help but feel like a part of me had to be traded in exchange. 

Even though there was a lot that I could no longer eat, the one dish that I knew I would still have was Buddha’s delight. Going vegan made me view the dish in a whole new light: it showed me that maybe there could be a balance between the culture I grew up with and my new eating choices. 

Nevertheless, I still didn’t know why we followed the tradition.

“The belief is that there shouldn’t be anything killed on Lunar New Year,” my mom explained when I called her about it. “Eating vegetarian helps in accumulating good karma, purifying the body and enhancing longevity. Eating vegetarian on the first day of the lunar month is one thing, but doing the same on Lunar New Year, the first day of the first lunar month, is said to earn you even more good karma, since many other families would be celebrating with meat and seafood. The same goes for birthdays.”

When I asked her why we still followed the tradition despite not being Buddhist, she paused. “I’m not really sure,” she paused. “We just do.”

My family is not the only one to lose the full reasoning behind following the tradition, and there are historical reasons for it.

The Decline of Buddhism in Hong Kong due to Imperialism and the Cold War

In 1841, Hong Kong became a British colony, and with the exception of four years (1941-1945) under Japanese rule, it remained under British rule until 1997, when it was handed back to China. In 1949, China was proclaimed a communist state by Mao Zedong. In the two decades that followed, there was a lot of unrest in the region, which was exacerbated by the Cold War and the battle between capitalist Western powers and communist states.

Hong Kong is a symbolic backdrop to watch this struggle take place: it was under British rule, which was heavily anti-communist, but culturally tied to nearby China, where the Communist Party of China had a successful Communist Revolution.

The effects of this ideological struggle played out in Hong Kong society, and Hong Kong further diverged from China because of Great Britain’s efforts. Wary of Communist influences, the British-run Board of Education of the Education Department allowed Christian churches to expand their involvement in secondary and primary school education, according to a paper by religion and philosopher professor Shun-hing Chan at Hong Kong Baptist University.

It went on to affect more than just education, but other medical and social services as well, like nursing homes, daycare centers, schools for the deaf, and the list goes on. “Due to the constraints of the colonial situation Chinese religious organizations did not have an equal opportunity to take part in such development,” Chan continues. 

Buddhism, a religion that had a long history in China (which includes Hong Kong before British rule) felt the effects of these constraints in Hong Kong. For one, the British government did not allocate public holidays for the major feasts in Buddhism, but allowed churches to celebrate their festivals, explains Chan. But the effects are also seen on a wider scale, culturally. As the population increased in Hong Kong, people (many of whom were refugees) increasingly became Christian as they received more welfare from church-backed schools and initiatives. As the generations passed, less and less people followed Buddhism as the generations went on.

This certainly was reflected in my family. 

“Your grandma’s older sister, being the oldest, would carry home sacks of flour and other ingredients from school every month, which would help feed the family,” my mother told me. “Her mom, your great-grandmother, followed Buddhist traditions, going to temple, burning incense, and of course followed this food tradition with Lo Han Jai. But your grandmother went to a Catholic school, where she and her sisters got food.”

Even though Buddhism was not passed down to my grandmother, the tradition was. Thus, I am able to enjoy the delicious Lo Han Jai that she makes, even though I have never met the Buddhist family members generations above me from which the tradition came. 

Buddha’s Delight as my Starting Point

I was born on the 12th of February, 2002, just any other day—from a Western perspective. But that day had been Lunar New Year, which meant that my birthday on the lunar calendar was also the first day of the month. Birthday, New Year, the start of the month—it all lined up. It was almost like the universe had been sending me a signal.

I’m not Buddhist, and none of my family members are. The significance behind the tradition has been changed throughout the generations, but Lo Han Jai will always be special to me in more ways than one. The relationship that my family has with the dish and the tradition encapsulates the history of the place we are from. It also gives me a starting point for finding more vegetarian Chinese food. I won’t be able to explain the full meaning behind the tradition to my future kids, but I will pass on the tradition and this story.

I’d love to hear from you all! Are there any dishes that have been passed down in your family, and do they reveal anything about your family history?

Leave a comment down below. Thank you!

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To further decolonize our minds:

gal-dem | Is being vegan killing my culture?

Harvard Political Review | “Vegan” Shouldn’t Be The Last Word in Sustainability

Media Diversified | Giving up the food of my family: life as a vegan in diaspora

Atmos| Reminder: The Roots Of Veganism Aren’t White

The Stanford Daily | White Veganism

thrillist | The Vegan Race Wars: How the Mainstream Ignores Vegans of Color

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If you liked what you read, be sure to subscribe above and follow us on Twitter and Instagram @invisibleasians to stay updated on Politically Invisible Asians!

After the video of former police officer Derek Chauvin pinning George Floyd to the ground went viral, I felt like all I could do was watch. I watched the video of Floyd begging for his life. Then, I watched protesters throng in the streets after months of lockdown, full of grief and rage and a desire for justice. I was glued to my phone as I searched for answers about what I could do in this moment.

Social media was ablaze with recommendations: Uplift BIPOC voices!  Venmo your Black friends! Read this book and be anti-racist! These were all important points on their own; still, I couldn’t help but feel bemused at the way a part of of white America seemed to, overnight, become concerned about racism. My friends and I joked that white people were discovering activism. But I also knew I had to be brutally honest with myself, because being a “person of color” didn’t excuse me from having some similar reckoning. Asian Twitter users were quick to point out the ways that anti-Blackness in the Asian American community and the Model Minority Myth contribute to the marginalization of Black Americans.

I kept seeing colorful graphics encouraging Asian youth to talk to their families about police brutality, social justice, and even abolition. There were countless resources for combating anti-Blackness and engaging in activism. It was incredible to witness this outpouring of political mobilization by Asians in solidarity with Black Americans. And it was a terrifying personal challenge. In my family, any attempts from the younger folks to talk about politics was quickly shut down as a sign of disrespect. My parents, aunts, uncles and grandparents emerged from the aftermath of war and refashioned themselves in the mirror of this new country. What did I know, with my little liberal arts education? My family members kept their heads down. If they ever felt that the powers that be had wronged us, they never said a peep; they were just grateful to be here.

While I was nervously trying to craft my lesson plan on systemic racism for my family, many Asian American activists were publicly and firmly positioning police brutality as an Asian American issue.  The shared experience of being nonwhite in the U.S. is the collective memory of state-sanctioned violence. As the U.S. took its empire-building project to Southeast Asian countries in the 1960s, police were waging war against the country’s Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and low-income residents at home. Just as Asian activists in the Third World Liberation Front united with other marginalized groups against imperialism and colonialism, Asian activists today are picking up the mantle against police brutality.

In Minneapolis, where I live, hopes for substantially changing the police department that murdered George Floyd are riding on a key amendment to the city charter. Despite the (incorrect) rhetoric from out-of-state media about Minneapolis police being defunded and even the promises of many city council members to “abolish” the police, the department remains intact.

The charter amendment, proposed by the organization Yes 4 Minneapolis, seeks to dissolve the Minneapolis Police Department as it is known today and replace it with the Department of Public Safety. This new department, proponents say, would have other professionals besides police respond to crises, such as mental health professionals and social workers. Advocates have not ruled out the possibility that police would still be a part of this department – in fact, they emphasize that the amendment would not get rid of police altogether.

At the core of its messaging, Yes 4 Minneapolis is asking voters to imagine a world without policing. This idea captivated me when it was first launched into the mainstream by the Minneapolis-based Black Visions Collective in the summer of 2020. It was a simple yet world-altering invitation. It felt like standing on the precipice of history. Several local AAPI-led organizations are backing this charter amendment, following the groundwork built by Black abolitionist scholars and leaders.

Abolition and a puppet show

On Saturday the Asian Minnesotan Alliance for Justice hosted an event called “Reimagining Public Safety as Asian Americans,” one of many community conversations hosted by advocates of the charter amendment. AMAJ’s stated purpose is to “mend the social divides and fight the inequities that are both rooted in white supremacy and that are exacerbated by the pandemic.”

Performers and artists took to the stage for two hours before tables broke out into groups. I could only be there for the first half, but the conversation was much different that I imagined. There were no policy wonks lecturing me and no head-spinning jargon. Instead, the event opened with a moving slam poem performance. Then, organizers rolled out what looked like a black booth. Out popped a puppet with black hair, who proceeded to recount to an actor about how she had been told at a dog park, “Go back to your country!” In the next act, a different puppet and the actor witness a Vietnamese woman being attacked by a white person. After they heroically ward off the attacker, the actor tries to offer the woman help. When his friend is puzzled that she won’t accept an escort home, the puppet explains that as an older Asian woman, she likely has learned to move on from a bad experience as quickly as possible and wants to avoid having to repay him for his help – a cultural expectation.

In their last performance, a daughter and father witness their bánh mì restaurant get robbed. The dad wants to call the police, but the daughter exclaims that the robber was another Asian person and the cops “can’t tell us apart and might arrest me instead!” The show proceeds with the daughter trying to convince her stubborn father that sometimes, police aren’t the right people to respond to a crisis. It ends humorously with a musical score, where she sings “Imagine a world with no police!” and her father sings “With some police!” and then acquiesces: “With less police.”

Conversing in community

Police and prison abolition aren’t necessarily new concepts to me. Having reported on the movement to defund the police in Minneapolis, I was familiar with many of Yes 4 Minneapolis’ core talking points. But to see many of the same scenarios I had swirling in my head for the last year acted out – by puppets, no less – felt ingenious in its simplicity and artistry. Since the upsurge of sinophobic rhetoric and anti-Asian violence, popularly conceptualized as interpersonal violence rather than systemic, went mainstream, we have seen some communities turn to increased policing as their idea of protection. This butts up against a growing desire to minimize reliance on the police. The play reflected real questions relevant to the Asian community (and me, specifically) in this time. How do I explain to my mom that she should rethink calling the police if her nail salon was robbed? How do I talk to my grandma about how her Black and Hmong neighbors in Eastside St. Paul have been constantly overcriminalized and surveilled by police? I wasn’t given all the answers, but there were Asian activists willing to help me start that conversation.

The Yes 4 Minneapolis charter amendment has been criticized on several fronts, primarily for its vagueness. Residents want to know how advocates will ensure that the Public Safety Department won’t be MPD under a different name. Some are concerned with entrusting the matter to the City Council, since council members will be the ones to draft the ordinances governing the department. They want to be assured they won’t be left even less safe. And, rightfully, they want to know what exactly this department will look like. Advocates say they don’t have all the answers now, because the future of the department will be shaped by community members participating in events like this one. They’re waiting for voters’ greenlight come November, after which there will presumably be even more listening sessions and community conversations.

For some communities of color, particularly those who live in constant economic and social precariousness, asking them to bank on such an uncertain future can be a lot. My family took a gamble and went all in for the “American Dream.” When I point out the racist structures upholding this dream, perhaps they feel like I’m tearing into their decision to leave all they have ever known. Challenging our elder’s beliefs with compassion for their own lived experiences with war and trauma is a delicate process.

But this burden falls within the community, as the diverse needs of Asians continue to be ignored by the dominant political parties of this country. These conversations are not only political actions; it is a display of care for those that came before us and those that will come after.  

To learn more about police abolition, you can start here:

MPD 150: A People’s Project Evaluating Policing

The Conversation | The racist roots of American policing: From slave patrols to traffic stops

The New York Times Magazine | Is Prison Necessary? Ruth Wilson Gilmore Might Change Your Mind

Abolition MPLS | Abolition 101 (YouTube video)

The End of Policing by Alex Vitale

I’d love to hear your thoughts. What does public safety look like to you? What kind of police reform or abolitionist movements exist where you live? Leave a comment below!

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