We’re the fastest-growing demographic group in the U.S. But when it comes to the nation’s racial and ethnic divisions, where do we fit in?
During the first days of the Trump administration, when my attention was split between the endless scroll of news on my phone and my infant daughter, who was born five days before the inauguration, I often found myself staring at her eyes, still puffy and swollen from her birth. My wife is half Brooklyn Jew, half Newport WASP, and throughout her pregnancy, I assumed that our child would look more like her than like me.
In December 1979, my mother flew back to Korea from the United States to give birth to me, because she assumed her stay in America would be temporary and I would need Korean citizenship. I have since renounced that Korean citizenship, because it would have required me to serve in the Army, and today my parents live on a farm that sits on five flat acres on an island in Puget Sound.
Act III: I talk about our move to Chapel Hill, N.C., which I suppose I could more vaguely call “the South” — with all its implications. In this telling, I caught the expected amount of harassment in the South. My teachers never seemed to like me. I was kicked out of Social Dance, a genteel weekly event where the white kids in my town dressed up in modest suits and floor-length dresses and learned the fox trot and the waltz.
But the immigrants who came to the United States after Hart-Celler, and who now constitute an overwhelming majority of the 20 million Asian Americans, do not see the country in such binary terms. They — we — are many other things, but we are not all that political, nor are we particularly interested in race per se.
In the spring of 2020, news outlets began publishing stories about attacks on Asian Americans, and my social media feeds were peppered with testimonials from actors, journalists and politicians who had been berated or assaulted.
When my sister and I were growing up, American politics never really entered our household. When, in 2016, my parents came out as rabid Bernie Sanders supporters, I could not figure out what had gotten into them. Their goal had always been to live in some comfort in their new country, regardless of the politics of their neighbors. Ignore race enough, and maybe it would disappear.
These were stirring words, but the grand reckoning that took place after the Georgia massacre cut right to heart of the incoherence of Asian American identity. Black American history is lived, both through the contemporary oppression and violence that Black people face in this country and through a direct lineage to slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow and the civil rights movement. This is not true for a vast majority of Asian Americans.
Around the same time, the New Yorker writer Hilton Als wrote an essay about Springsteen, whose one-man show had been selling out night after night on Broadway.
The first person I ever met who truly believed in Bruce Springsteen was one of my college roommates, a Palestinian American kid named Naseem who had played tennis and basketball at one of Boston’s finest prep schools. His father was a doctor, and he grew up in one of the posher suburbs of Boston. These details seem important now, but at the time, they simply meant he just fell in line with everyone else at school.
We each, in short, made our choice. More vigilant critics might point out that Naseem, more or less, looks white. They might also say that nonengagement is just another word for privilege. There have been times when I’ve thought these things myself, but I don’t think our differing perspectives had much to do with our specific identities. When Als and I listened to Bruce, we could not see ourselves in the songs.
The time I was driving around Brooklyn listening to Springsteen coincided with my daughter’s first birthday. Under the pressure of the milestone, I thought I was realizing something every day, and, in the annoying habit of a new parent, I mistook small insights for epiphanies. I realized, as they say, that nothing would ever be the same. I realized I had saved more money than I had ever thought possible.
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