2025

Asians have long been in America. In the mid-1800s, Asians – primarily Chinese men – were sucked in by the thousands into the vortex of the American imperial capitalist machine, its voracious appetite for cheap and exploitable labor insatiable. Underpaid, underfed, overworked and then some, these workers laid the track bridging sea to shining sea, making destiny manifest.​

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Asians have long been in America, but America has long wanted them out. The Page Act, the Chinese Exclusion Act, Japanese internment. Imperialism in Vietnam, Korea, the Philippines. The 1871 Chinese Massacre, the Rock Springs Massacre, Vincent Chin, the Atlanta spa shootings, the pandemic hate crimes.​

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The term “Asian American” is unstable, contextually contingent, and ever-changing. It wasn’t coined until 1968, emerging out of fervent student activism at San Francisco State University and UC Berkeley, the radical nucleus of the pioneering Black Power, Chicano, and anti-war movements. “Asian American” originated as a political construction to unite a pan-Asian diaspora in a common anti-imperialist struggle. An assertion of self-defined identity in defiance of a white supremacist society that dubbed them "orientals" and "mongoloids." An invitation to join forces against oppression, to build solidarity and collective power, to articulate shared aspects of lived experience.

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“Asian American” is powerful, but limitations and contradictions lie embedded within it. The monolithic label can swallow salient differences in ethnicity, language, culture, class, and histories. It can obscure hegemonies within the larger demographic entity: when people hear “Asian,” they often think Chinese or Japanese or Korean, not Sri Lankan or Cambodian or Nepalese. Asian Americans have the greatest wealth disparity of any racial group in the US – nail techs and line cooks are homogenized with software engineers and cardiothoracic surgeons.

In the mainstream, much of the initial revolutionary power of the Asian American movement has been diluted into a pallid, superficial representation politics. The success of a Hollywood blockbuster featuring an all-Asian cast...which also glorified egregious elitism and material accumulation. The global takeover of cookie-cutter Korean pop stars...whose appearance and comportment are under such suffocating industry surveillance that eating disorders and plastic surgery are practically prerequisites for the job. The candidacy of an Asian American woman for president of America...who actively supported a genocide in West Asia. These have been touted as monumental victories, lauded as evidence of racial progress. 

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So what does it mean to be Asian American?

Maybe it’s receiving an Instagram comment saying “fuck ching chong people,” and realizing “ching chong people” is you. Maybe it’s the fact that your fingertips retain the skill of dumpling folding in their muscle memory, that your lungs recall the acrid miasma of cigarette fumes blanketing Chinatown sidewalks. Maybe it's the shoes removed at doorsteps, the troves of plastic grocery bags amassed beneath kitchen sinks, the ineffable love emanating from plates of freshly cut fruit. Maybe it’s just meeting someone who looks like you and feeling at home.

Maybe it’s none of it, and all of it.​​