***first published by This Asian American Life on their website, and promoted on their Instagram Stories. I submitted this originally on February 24th of this year.
It always made me feel funny, with the chilliest, dullest distaste, thinking how Asian immigration overseas was based on American politics to form allegiances abroad, post World War II. I am taken by age-old simmering anger, refining itself like fine 白酒 baijiu wine over the years, when I think of the bygone fluctuations of my Asian ancestors to the convenience of Americans... Wanting allies for the Cold War? Wanting real cheap labor without the burnt cost of white bodies? Wanting to set an example out of Vietnam (subtext: out of us)? I forget.
Our collective Asian history is filled with so much genocide, migration and trauma... That it can be difficult to start the healing process, or even begin to know when the right time is to start therapy (internal subtext: is therapy even necessary?). The white savior narrative/colonial mindset is unspoken but is still vehemently prevalent in Asian communities, and I wish it’d be confronted more often within families, especially within Asian American families/communities. It’s long overdue that we recognize: Asian American politics cannot just be seen as sole experiences of Asians living in America now, but within and through a broader, international, geopolitical context, with domestic and non-domestic dimensions, and with respective ethnic representations. How else can you begin to navigate such intricate perspectives built on something so far outside of the white experience? They will never understand the tenuous influences and consequences of Asian politics, of being Asian.
I am conscious that my easy and privileged life is made possible by exploited bodies, faded strangers of historical insignificance, woven away by time. The only homage worth tributing as an immigrant on American soil today, is to show up, and build lasting connections with like-minded folks with overlapping struggles under white supremacy.
Enough pitting Asian Americans with Black Americans, either systematically, or through the differing manifestations of racial neutrality and anti-Blackness/colorist actions granted us by our unique white adjacency that we may or may not help consciously perpetuate.
The shared pain with Black bodies concerning assimilation, of never being able to undeniably be recognized and accepted as American, or how centuries of the enslavement of Black persons and Asian persons can be “overcome by strong family values and hard work”, or American enough only to walk the line of warranting a gun pulled on you, needs to move us to start the tough, internal reflections within our own ethnicities. It needs to move us to want to voice our anger at seeing yet another body deported for being Hmong, and yet another child murdered for being Black; we need to start voicing our frustrations at living in this problematic white-centered reality. Why should the status of white people define our reality and the quality of our realities? Is not every life worth living? The power of cross-racial solidarity is real. We need to have conversations like these to check our future actions at the door with the power of hindsight. We need to learn, in order to progress together to face the challenges that will surely come.
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