100 Years American

“I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.” -James Baldwin 

I am a petty person. And so, I am annoyed by many petty things. One thing that annoys me about Michigan (and probably most of America) is that most non-whites are seen as a single group. One minority’s business is every minority’s business. “I only see whites and non-whites” is just one step up from “I don’t see color.” And even within that, all Asians are also put into the same group. Whether you are Pakistani, Korean, or Taiwanese, “we’re all in this together.” My problem with this is not that I hate unity. My problem with this is not just that “brown” people face vastly different issues from “yellow” people (and by the way, we never refer to ourselves as yellow). Though many of us share the same obstacles as first and second generation immigrants, our cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds are so vastly different that our manner of handling these issues in a way that preserves our cultural dignity will rarely fall along the same lines. It is only when our existences revolve around the eyes of white America that we become one and the same: a minority. 

I know this because I am Asian, but even within that, the conflicts are endless. I have two cultural sides, and each of my two sides has two sides. On one hand is my ChiViet KOI side (aka Chinese [Cantonese-Hakka/Kejia]-Vietnamese kid of immigrant), and on the other is my yonsei JA side (aka 4th gen. [pre-WWII] Japanese American). In other words, half of me is trying to dismantle the model minority myth, and the other half was the one that founded it. 

I am not here to argue against the dismantling of the myth, but I want to make sure you, as my fellow Asian kids of immigrants, understand why we helped build it. Of course, it was not meant to be used as a tool against other minorities; it was merely a tool to keep us safe from white eyes, and I urge you not to be arrogant about where we stand in America without it. 

You probably know about Japanese internment during WWII. And maybe you read a book or passage or two from a Japanese American citizen, but chances are, everything else about it was filtered to you through the lens of white America. Whether it was your teacher, the publishing company, or the cameraman, the voices may have been Japanese, but the permission for that voice was granted by the white man. And that voice probably assured you that everything is fine now, and you have nothing to worry about, because it was all in the past. 

Topaz War Relocation Center, one of ten Japanese internment camps during World War 2- the camp my family went to. (Stock Photo)

When the Japanese Americans were released, it was not because America suddenly realized we were human, but because they nuked our people twice and finally felt they were safe enough to let us roam free, and we were vulnerable enough that we could not turn down their apology. But even then, we were not free to return to our homes. Those of us who lived along the West Coast were “temporarily relocated” to the Midwest, which is how my grandfather, who lived in California and was interned in Utah, ended up in Chicago. We were free from the camps, but not free to return to our homes or jobs. To get jobs and find places to live, we needed white people to sponsor us. 

Lovely, isn’t it? What kind and generous souls there are in America to remind us that “not all white people” will harm us. What is there for us to do other than carry our gratitude deep in our hearts for our saviors who took the time out of their day to pity us? After all, how can you complain about having to live at the compassion of the white man so long as the white man feels like being compassionate? 

And so, I have been raised to live with a thank you on the tip of my tongue for the permission to survive in America that my grandparents earned for me. We upheld, we achieved. We self-censored our culture, threw out our names, our roots, our family. My great- uncles Tomatsu and Noboru somehow became Tom and Norman. I am the only sansei or yonsei American I have ever met with a Japanese name. And any time I wanted to learn something about being Japanese, there were only the voices of white translators ready to explain to me the odd and neurotic social constructs of these island people; the Japanese all held their tongues. We assimilated, became “respectable”, learned white people manners, married some white folk. Striving, always striving to prove our decency—forcing each other to prove our decency. Those who did not died away. 

But the most important thing we did was let it go. My grandparents never talked about the camps unless specifically asked, and even then, the only information my grandfather volunteered was that he tried to enlist, but they did not take him because of his football injury. The only part of the story he cared about was the part that proved that he was loyal and not a coward. And so we succeeded in America. We succeeded because we took the insult to our lives and dignity with silence. I am not supposed to speak of any of this. It makes us sound ungrateful when we need to sound cooperative and easy to work with. The nissei did not ask their children to remember their pain, and so the grandchildren do not feel it, and no one is mad. The reason why I feel it, why I have a Japanese name while all the other yonseis have fully taken on American ones, is because my father did not get to grow up in white America and assimilate. He grew up in Black America and did the opposite (unlike Richard Aoki or Joe Ide). I grew up to stories of him navigating the streets crossed by the Crips and the Bloods. He was bused along with the black kids into the white schools. I watched Straight Outta Compton with him and listened to him go wild, pointing at the screen going, “That’s my street! That’s my street!” as the camera scrolled across Crenshaw Boulevard. Black culture was not yet a hobby for displaced suburban Asian boys. It was a reality he could neither keep out nor let in, because yellow was not a skin color that had been invented in their world yet. 

Crenshaw Boulevard in 2019 (la.curbed.com)

And then he married an immigrant, a refugee who did not come here for a “more” or a “better”, but left Asia only because she could not stay and was told she would be welcome here. And now, here I stand at the intersection of a culture forsaken for peace and privilege, and a culture we will not forsake, even if it costs us peace and privilege, and I do not know who is right. I only know that I will never be allowed to be whole, because one of them has to be wrong, and the choice was never mine. 

I want my fellow Asian Americans to know that the model minority myth was not something the white people gave to us for free, purely to use as a tool of oppression over other minorities. We got it by playing by their rules, doing things their way, making sacrifices to our culture, pride, history, and personal identity. We paid for it with our lives too. My family paid for it. Not just to white people, but to other minorities that turned against us while the country turned away from them. 

A lot of you have come here with the myth already in place, so maybe it does not seem so plausible to you that without it, we as Asian Americans could once again become victims to street beatings and betrayals by our local and federal governments. Maybe you think that internment is a thing of the past and would never happen again. 

I do not have that same confidence. Have you ever stopped to wonder what we are worth to America without the myth? I am not telling you to be afraid, but I do hope you will be prepared. We laid its roots because it protected us from the hatred of white eyes. Maybe you are upset we live a myth, because you think we can be treated as we are in reality. But my grandfather is not dead yet. I am still over here thanking the Shinto gods that the general favor of the white gaze has not left us yet (though even the nonpolitical coronavirus was able to put cracks in that). We did everything right, everything they asked, and they built museums for us, but we did not rise. We dissipated. The only Japaneseness I am allowed to carry is that in my blood which they had been unable to wash away. 

Now I want you to look at Black America. People chant, “Black Lives Matter,” but the truth that I see is that Black lives do not matter to America...at least not until the white people start saying it. Only once they say it does it start to become true to our society, and that is what we call progress: when the white people start to agree. In this, our battles overlap. The freedom and privilege Asians have right now have been because America does not see us as a threat. Right now. Unlike whiteness, our image can be taken away from us. Our privilege is fragile. We are not born with equal rights; they are granted to us when it suits the mood of the white masses. And even when we do win our seat at the table, it is not because they have come to accept us, but because we have learned how to make ourselves acceptable to them. That is what it means to be a minority in the United States. 

(Illustrated by Frankie Huang)

To Black Americans, the consequences of this have gone on much longer, but this existence of living at the mercy of The White People’s Opinions belongs to any non-white passing American. It does not matter if we have been here 100 years, fought in wars against our own. It does not matter if it was on their backs and in chains that this country was built. Our power is just a rental, and at some point, we either must pay more or return it. 

But maybe I am wrong to view things so harshly. Maybe the fear I hold is outdated. Maybe times have changed. Even though this “movement” we are having is the same as we had 5 years ago for Eric Garner, 30 years ago for Rodney King, 60 for Marquette Frye, maybe things are changing. I am not here to take hope away from anyone or to ask anyone to stop fighting whatever battle they have chosen. 

But I am also not here to spend the rest of my life at the receiving end of someone else’s goodwill, trying to prove I am worthy of it. I am done asking for anything from white America. I am not going to stand here and beg you to acknowledge that the lives and voices of non-white people matter. Others will—they still believe in you—but I do not. I am not horrified or disgusted by what I have seen this past month, or by what I have seen throughout America’s history. You have merely met my expectations. 

I do not need your diversity quota or office of inclusion or representation in media to tell me I belong, to show me what I am allowed to be. It’s a joke. I am not new to this game. The intensity of my rage has been shunned both by those above and those beside me across my lifetime, and ultimately, it has only served to further my unbridgeable alienation from everyone around me. I no longer waste my anger on injustice, nor do I rely on the fervor of emotion to motivate my deeds. This does not mean I have succumbed to apathy and despair. It simply means I have burned until the hypoxia threatened to overtake me, and I realized that I spent too much of my life asking for you to hear me. 

Whether the myth stays or goes, it does not matter to me, because the opinion of white America does not matter to me. Ignore us, hate us, beat us, kick us out, put us back in the camps and stables, kill us, I don’t give a damn. I refuse to be a victim, the product of someone else’s cruelty. My narrative will not be a record of the deeds done onto me. To live is the process of transforming myself from a product to a source, and what is it I will create? Quiet rage? Eternal yearning? I spent my childhood fixated on revenge to those who had hurt and silenced me, yet such a path was the only one that would ensure that I would remain tied to them to the end. 

If I say you can hold me down, it is only because I have let you define what it means to stand. I am not going to wait for you to deliver me your standards of justice and I do not wait at the sidelines for you to grant me a life without fear. You cannot take from me the freedom I have found for myself. I will survive, as my parents and those who came before taught me to do. And even if one day I do not, you will not have stopped me from living, as, after 25 years of holding myself down on my knees in gratitude, I have finally taught myself to do. Whether I wish to do so in silence and obscurity or in broken tears screaming ceaselessly into the abyss—the choice is my own, and the shame of it exists only on your lips. 

I do not need you on my side. I will rise so far into the falling sky, you will wish I would grant you the permission to be on my side.