Paper Tigers
By Wesley Yang
1 Millions of Americans must feel estranged from their own faces. But every lf-estranged individual is estranged in his own way. I, for instance, am the child of Korean immigrants, but I do not speak my parents’ native tongue. I have never called my elders by the proper honorific, “big brother” or “big sister.” I have never dated a Korean woman. I don’t have a Korean friend. Though I am an immigrant, I have never wanted to strive like one.
2 You could say that I am, in the gently derisive parlance of Asian-Americans, a banana or a Twinkie (yellow on the outside, white on the inside). But while I don’t believe our roots necessarily define us, I do believe there are racially inflected assumptions wired into our neural circuitry that we u to sort through the a of faces we confront. And although I am in most respects devoid of Asian characteristics, I do have an Asian face.
3 Here is what I sometimes suspect my face signifies to other Americans: an invisible perso
n, barely distinguishable from a mass of faces that remble it. A conspicuous person standing apart from the crowd and yet devoid of any individuality. An icon of so much that the culture pretends to honor but that it in fact patronizes and exploits. Not just people “who are good at math” and play the violin, but a mass of stifled, represd, abud, conformist quasi-robots who simply do not matter, socially or culturally.
4 I’ve always been of two minds about this quence of stereotypes. On the one hand, it offends me greatly that anyone would think to apply them to me, or to anyone el, simply on the basis of facial characteristics. On the other hand, it also ems to me that there are a lot of Asian people to whom they apply.
5 Let me summarize my feelings toward Asian values: Fuck filial piety. Fuck grade-grubbing. Fuck Ivy League mania. Fuck deference to authority. Fuck humility and hard work. Fuck harmonious relations. Fuck sacrificing for the future. Fuck earnest, striving middle-class rvility.
6 I understand the reasons Asian parents have raid a generation of children this way. D
octor, lawyer, accountant, engineer: The are good jobs open to whoever works hard enough. What could be wrong with that pursuit? Asians graduate from college at a rate higher than any other ethnic group in America, including whites. They earn a higher median family income than any other ethnic group in America, including whites. This is a stage in a triumphal narrative, and it is a narrative that is much shorter than many remember. Two thirds of the roughly 14 million Asian-Americans are foreign-born. There were less than 39,000 people of Korean descent living in America in 1970, when my elder brother was born. There are around 1 million today.
7 Asian-American success is typically taken to ratify the American Dream and to prove that minorities can make it in this country without handouts. Still, an undercurrent of racial panic always accompanies the consideration of Asians, and all the more so as China becomes the destination for our industrial ba and the banker controlling our burgeoning debt. But if the armies of Chine factory workers who make our fast fashion and iPads terrify us, and if the collective mass of high-achieving Asian-American students arou an anxiety about the laxity of American parenting, what of the Asian-American who obeyed e
verything his parents told him? Does this person really scare anyone?
8 Earlier this year, the publication of Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother incited a collective airing out of many varieties of race-bad hysteria. But abnt from the millions of words written in respon to the book was any rious consideration of whether Asian-Americans were in fact taking over this country. If it is true that they are collectively dominating in elite high schools and universities, is it also true that Asian-Americans are dominating in the real world? My strong suspicion was that this was not so, and that the reasons would not be hard to find. If we are a collective juggernaut that inspires such awe and fear, why does it em that so many Asians are so readily perceived to be, as I mylf have felt most of my life, the products of a timid culture, easily pushed around by more asrtive people, and thus basically invisible?
9 A few months ago, I received an e-mail from a young man named Jefferson Mao, who after attending Stuyvesant High School had recently graduated from the University of Chi
cago. He wanted my advice about “being an Asian writer.” This is how he described himlf: “I got good grades and I love literature and I want to be a writer and an intellectual; at the same time, I’m the first person in my family to go to college, my parents don’t speak English very well, and we don’t own the apartment in Flushing that we live in. I mean, I’m proud of my parents and my neighborhood and what I perceive to be my artistic potential or whatever, but sometimes I feel like I’m jumping the gun a generation or two too early.”
10 One bright, cold Sunday afternoon, I ride the 7 train to its last stop in Flushing, where the storefront signs are all written in Chine and the sidewalks are a slow-moving river of impassive faces. Mao is waiting for me at the entrance of the Main Street subway station, and together we walk to a nearby Vietname restaurant.
