“[T]he positioning of Asian Americans as the least oppressed in dominant discourses on race…puts Asian Americans in a position where the only choices we have are to be in collusion with white supremacy against other people of color, or an ally to another community. Whether villains or allies, what both positions have in common is that they are tangential\u2014we are marginalized, we marginalize our own experience and our own communities. It is tremendously important to work in solidarity with other communities. But we are more than allies. More than villains. We need nuanced, even empathetic, critical examination of our people and our experience.” \u2014Bao Phi,\u00a0A Good Time for the Truth:\u00a0Race in Minnesota<\/em><\/a>\u00a0(Ed.\u00a0Sun Yung Shin)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I started walking to and from school by myself when I was in fifth grade, sometimes in the company of other latchkey kids. One of those kids was\u00a0My, a Vietnamese girl who got made fun of occasionally because her last name was Han, so she was “My Hand” at a time when we young children giggled at any word, like \u201cit\u201d and \u201cpen\u201d and \u201cdoing it\u201d. She would occasionally treat me to a Snickers bars or Chico sticks with her food stamps at one of the bodegas we passed on Broadway on the way home.<\/p>\n There were a few teachers who despised me while I was growing up. One was my first grade teacher, an older, steely Irish woman named Ms. Gregory, who forced our parents to shell out for green skirts and pants to perform a traditional Irish jig at a school assembly (none of us were Irish). In junior high, Ms. Tanalski, who\u00a0had my brother in her class and also despised him, \u00a0would shame him by calling him in front of the whole class to point out\u00a0that\u00a0his tender shaved head made his scalp look green. By the time I got to her classroom, she had made up her mind about me, and wanted her pet, a beautiful Croatian and Italian girl named Nadia, to dance the last dance to \u201cLast Dance\u201d at my junior high prom with my dance partner, a handsome Croatian boy named Marino, and separated us during the song.<\/p>\n My classmates were Egyptian, Thai, Vietnamese, Filipina\/o, Polish, Colombian, Ecuadorian, Argentinian, Korean, Chinese, Dominican, Indian, Bengali, Afghani, combinations of these and countless other ethnicities we didn\u2019t know how to\u2014but would, soon enough\u2014categorize into neat racial categories like Asian, black or \u201cSpanish\u201d. Those classrooms in Queens were like the United Nations that adults imagine\u00a0New York City, one of the most segregated<\/a> cities in the United States,\u00a0to be.<\/p>\n We performed our ethnicities for our parents, schoolteachers and administrators once a year at the annual \u201cmulticultural\u201d festival. I was to become\u00a0an anchorwoman, at least according to\u00a02 teachers (thanks, Connie Chung!), while they compared other Korean American\u00a0girls to Kristi Yamaguchi. The role models for us, from my teachers\u2019 perspectives at least, were few and far in between. Flipping the coin, I wonder how many of my classmates might have been great news anchors\u00a0\u00a0or\u00a0ice skaters, but they were dark\u00a0and English wasn\u2019t their first language.<\/p>\n At school, I was a floater, more or less down with\u00a0but never not quite fitting into the inner circle of any of the countless cliques that formed: the first (or 1.5) generation immigrant kids; the \u201cSpanish\u201d girls; the Chinese and Korean Christian kids who played ultimate frisbee and handball; the Guyanese girls from Ozone Park, the activist kids who hung out in the yearbook office; the pinoys who rolled deep wherever they went; the kids from the projects who took a different bus home; the several gangs struggling to stay relevant and under the radar (this was during the Asian Gang Unit<\/a> days); the white girls whose parents picked them up from swim practice in shiny SUVs with Tupperware full of brownies in the backseat, while I schlepped it home in the dark from the school where we practiced (the most \u201cgang-infested\u201d in the 90s) eating my dinner of Cheez Doodles and quarter water on the subway.<\/p>\n Growing up, my brother listened to A Tribe Called Quest, Naughty by Nature, Color Me Badd, KRS-1 and Wu Tang. He called me a Twinkie, white on the inside, yellow on the outside, because my Polish friend had put me onto\u00a0Nine Inch Nails, Greenday, NOFX, Rammstein, Korn, and later on my girl, a pinay raver, introduced me to house, techno and rave a few years later, our pants at least 30 inches at the hems, box braids, glow sticks, the whole nine. I heard the\u00a0Jungle Brothers for the first time and immersed myself in hip\u00a0hop. By my late teens, when I had already learned to speak passable Spanish, was told I “talked like a\u00a0black person”, that I was ghetto, hood, boricoreana, china latina, you name it, with varying tones of admiration, respect, disgust or curiosity. Never Asian, never down by my own\u00a0merit.<\/p>\n I wonder what was like for the boys I grew up with to be called \u201cgay\u201d, fitting into no other racial configuration of what kids knew to be\u00a0masculine<\/a>. Interestingly, my\u00a0earliest understanding\u00a0of\u00a0queerness and gender nonconformity was early on and completely Latino, shooting pool and drinking beer at the local gay bar La Caja Musical or watching the drag shows at Queens Pride on tippy toe since the summer I turned 11, after the 1990 murder of Julio Rivera just a few blocks from our\u00a0house. I always wondered how the kids I grew up with who were both Latino and Asian navigated the multiple boundaries crossed as a perpetual foreigner.<\/p>\n I remember one friend, who was Korean and Argentinian before he was American, was made fun as a chink, chino or spic depending on who was making the joke. I recently saw on Facebook that some of his Asian American friends had assembled a taco themed birthday party for him just a few years ago as a prank and wondered what it\u2019s like to have your identity be a delightful prank for your douchebag friends. It\u2019s frustrating enough speaking Spanish, just a variation of \u201cyou speak English so well!\u201d from immigrants from countries with comparable Asian populations, who, just like in the U.S., are perceived as perpetual encroachers and cunning entrepreneurs, despite their centuries\u2019 long histories in those countries. I am often complimented on my intelligence, that Asians are smart so \u201cI\u2019m sure it was easy for you,\u201d asked if I studied abroad or had built houses somewhere in Latin America.<\/p>\n As an Asian whose assimilation\u2014and experiences of anti-Asian sentiment\u2014in America has been defined more through life among other working class people of color, at least in the political and cultural sense, negotiating race has been a painful, challenging \u00a0and dissociative process at best. And, none of this is meant to undercut\u00a0the gravity, violence and trauma\u00a0of white assimilation\u2014people of color have had to adopt whiteness to literally keep their lives and livelihood, while only sometimes\u00a0succeeding.<\/p>\n Many of us know we are not all doing \u201cbetter than whites.\u201d The 95%<\/a>\u00a0of Asian kids in NYC who are not attending high school at one of the top 3\u00a0specialized schools that have near or majority Asian student populations, or my Asian students at Hunter College<\/a>, a public university in New York, know they are not the kids the media talks about. Many of us know, at least the more politically conscious among us, however much we fear being \u201clike a white person\u201d claiming reverse racism, that our daily experiences as Asians even in majority-minority cities, even within multiracial movement spaces, even within ourselves and how we essentialize ourselves, i.e., \u201cthat\u2019s so Asian\u201d, have serious social, political and psychological consequences.<\/p>\n The conversations on Asian American identity, power, privilege, oppression and resistance that have resonated with me most have been with APIAs who also grew up working class or poor, and have taken place largely outside the bounds of the Asian American social justice community. I attribute part of this to the conflation of class privilege with race privilege in political conversations on Asian racial identity, what\u00a0I feel is yet another manifestation of how Asian America has internalized the model minority myth in public discourse, and how we ourselves often bear the burden of representation despite our own \u201cmyopic lenses\u201d through which we understand race and class in America.<\/p>\n On all fronts, my experience of being Asian\/American<\/a> has not been a product of self-determination. It has been, very much like our collective experience, a fickle placeholder on\u00a0a continuum of whiteness and blackness depending on who holds us in their gaze. The state of racial nonexistence so many Asian Americans experience is the product of another, often minimized binary<\/a> upon which race in the U.S. is fundamentally built: East and West.<\/p>\n Perhaps mine and others\u2019 arrival at racial awareness would have been markedly different had the formation of \u201cAsian America\u201d not been disrupted by Asian exclusion, selective immigration policies and\u00a0the post-internment invention<\/a> of the model minority myth, or if \u201cAsian\u201d were a racial identifier that had some inherent cohesion, i.e., language, phenotype, culture, food, colonial history, religion, music, art, cultural expression.<\/p>\n Sharing unconventional stories, learning American history through an Asian\/American lens, uncovering the intersections, refusing to have our communities aggregated<\/a> into neat racial packages, airing our dirty laundry, diverging from (sometimes self-) prescribed monolithic identities and disrupting the vast\u00a0erasures of our\u00a0history across the diaspora is a start to re\/building Asian America.<\/p>\n This essay\u00a0is part of an ongoing series of original and curated work\u00a0by the author: “My Asian American Identity Demolition Project.“<\/span><\/a><\/em>\u00a0<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n![\"http:\/\/bit.ly\/1ZRNv6H\"](\"https:\/\/objects-us-west-1.dream.io\/racefiles\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/13087279_10207841210221422_5522144821413653293_o-300x300.jpg\")
<\/a>![\"multiculti\"](\"https:\/\/objects-us-west-1.dream.io\/racefiles\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/multiculti-300x217.png\")
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.tonkonow.com\/images\/nl_hispanic25.jpg\")