I can’t help but see the character PSY plays in the video as a certain Asian stereotype, and I can’t help but point out that knowing how the lyrics are critiquing the rich residents of Seoul’s Gangnam district, lovers of coffee and brand names and partying, makes a huge difference in how you see PSY as either a stereotype or a rapper critiquing that stereotype.

The author’s daughter.

What I mean is, the video can be seen (and enjoyed) in two different ways: 1) as a video with quirky humor, a catchy beat, a fun and child-friendly dance, and a goofy dancer/rapper, or 2) (if you’re Korean or have a Korean wife or someone else to explain PSY and the lyrics and the district in Seoul, and if you look carefully at the rich neighborhood versus PSY’s self-representation as someone who doesn’t fit that model) as full of all of those aforementioned things, plus satire. Sure, it’s goofy, but the goofiness is making a point about Korea’s 1%. The representation of a man who wants a party girl who can afford to drink coffee, as the lyrics say, is put forth ironically. Somewhere along the way, that irony was lost.

A few weeks after my wife showed me the “Gangnam Style” video, I came across this essay at Racialicous (reprinted from init_music): “PSY and the Acceptable Asian Man.” From the essay:

You only have to look at a handful of other Asian and Asian American men that have made any impression in mainstream American music to guess what role PSY fits. Just this year, Korean American Heejun Han made it to the elusive top ten of American Idol and, while his buttery baritone did cut muster, it was his off-stage antics as a hilariously deadpan prankster that the public particularly reacted to. Before Han, the other Asian male that made any particular impact in American mainstream music was William Hung. Yeah.

That’s right: alongside clowns from other mediums like Ken Jeong (and yellow-face disgraces like Mickey Rooney’s Mr. Yunoishi from Breakfast at Tiffany’s), PSY fits right into the mainstream-friendly role of Asian male jester, offering goofy laughs for all and, thanks to PSY’s decidedly non-pop star looks, in a very non-threatening package. Psy doesn’t even have to sing in English or be understood because it’s not the social critique offered by the lyrics that matters to the audience, but the marriage of the funny music video, goofy dance, and rather catchy tune, of which two…elements are comical and, again, non-threatening.

The question is: If you take the PSY in the video at face value, absent of irony, are you left with an emasculated overweight horse-dancing clownish foreigner? And what does it say if this is what most Americans see and if they love the video despite (because?) of it?

In Korea, PSY has a history of breaking the rules. Of being—as Jeff Yang puts it in the Wall Street Journal—“as close to a bad-boy punk as K-Pop gets.” The more I learned about PSY, the more I didn’t get his popularity for this video in particular or his satisfaction with that popularity, which means he has to dance like a horse for Western crowds who don’t see the joke in it, unless that joke is him. I mean, I get it because I get the idea of the kind of Asian whom America will accept and the allure of fame/money, but I don’t get it because it doesn’t seem like PSY fit this personality before. And yet there he is on Ellen and other talk shows, gracious and well behaved, far from a K-Pop “bad boy.”

Interestingly, the current news has brought the old PSY into the public eye because of “anti-American” statements PSY made in two protest songs earlier in his career. One came out during protests over the murder of two Korean girls by American soldiers who drove over the girls in a tank, and one during protests over the Iraq War, American torture of terrorism suspects, and the effects of the war on less involved countries (in this case, a Korean evangelist was beheaded on live video while terrorists blamed America).

싸이 rap :
이라크 포로를 고문해 댄 씨발양년놈들과
고문 하라고 시킨 개 씨발 양년놈들에
딸래미 애미 며느리 애비 코쟁이 모두 죽여
아주 천천히 죽여 고통스럽게 죽여

PSY Rap:
Kill those fucking Yankees who have been torturing Iraqi captives
Kill those fucking Yankees who ordered them to torture
Kill their daughters, mothers, daughters-in-law and fathers
Kill them all slowly and painfully

PSY has apologized for the lyrics. In one of the first English articles to report on the protest songs, writer Bobby McGill suggests wisely that some will like PSY more for his past while some will turn their backs on him. McGill is writing from Korea, where people understand the context PSY came from.

The American context is quite different, as it subtracts the subversiveness, as well as PSY’s history and identity within Asia, from the “Gangnam Style” video. Is the PSY who sang those protest lyrics the “real” PSY? Is that a PSY Americans could accept? So far, people have been happy to take the goof without the message—why is that?

***

Recently, I have been emailing with the editor of a new Asian American anthology, Where Are You From?, about his essay in the book, which discusses a “heteronormative” or “traditional” masculinity and the idea that Asian American men should pursue that masculinity, i.e., be more assertive, more aggressive. He makes a lot of interesting points. But I find myself wondering if his essay is encouraging something similar to what the majority culture does by assigning us an identity according to our skin color. Talking about so-and-so as if it is or is not our nature, as if Asian Americans have a nature, is not an assumption I am comfortable with. Not just because “Asia” encompasses many different cultures and many different cultural views of masculinity, but also because, damn, I hate to be lumped in. Everyone has his personal idea of what being a man means. That’s one of the reasons I can feel secure with myself as a sensitive writer dad, a guy who cries when his feelings are hurt.

My wife, a native Korean, has a conception of the Korean man as one who never shows pain or weakness, who fights other men, who protects women, who is the main breadwinner, who changes the light bulbs. This Korean man, though he is also the type who isn’t embarrassed by holding a purse, is mostly in keeping with the “heteronormative” masculinity talked about in the Where Are You From? anthology as characteristic of white men. Sometimes it bothers my wife that I complain when I am hurt, that I am sensitive about certain topics, that I express my insecurities, that I cry. Sometimes she asks me whether this is what American men are like.

I’m an adoptee and was raised by white parents, Polish and Irish American, with their Western view of masculinity. I could also feel the way people wanted me to fit into an idea of the type of Asian male they were comfortable with. Both sides made it hard to be myself. I was often described as quiet, studious, easygoing, book-smart but not street-smart, and some of these descriptions stuck in a self-fulfilling way. It took me much of my life to realize that I was molding myself to a stereotype. I wanted to be accepted, so I valued those characteristics that made me acceptable. Yet I was never accepted. I was either picked on and called “flatface” or would hear people whisper that they shouldn’t mess with me because of course I knew karate. When I was able to start processing how I fit or didn’t fit an acceptable representation of Asians, I held those same stereotypes against the people I met who looked like me. In college, I refused to join the Asian American group because I felt they were too studious, too earnest, too cliquish. Instead, I valued white friendships, white girlfriends, white literature and art and film. I tried to be more assertive but was paralyzed with fear. Whichever role I tried to fit, I didn’t value myself. I didn’t see how I had internalized the same descriptions that the majority culture employs to keep “us” separate from “them.”

***

I remember a road trip one summer with two Asian American women and one Puerto Rican woman, from Connecticut down to North Carolina. I had just begun to acknowledge some of the identity issues brewing in me, but I wasn’t yet interested in exploring them—I still have plenty of denial about who I am. I was in love with these girls. I had the idea back then, since the few women who had hit on me were almost exclusively Asian, that Asian American women had lower standards for Asians. This is how I thought of it. I had an insecure kind of confidence around Asian women but was simply insecure around white women, and I thought it was because white people were inherently more attractive and I stood more of a chance if compared to someone on my level. This is hard to admit. It’s hard to write about right now, knowing that people I know and respect will see how much I didn’t know or respect myself. I wanted badly for these girls to want me. They weren’t interested, of course. They were open about who they were. They were self-referential, self-aware, and race-aware. I remember they joked about how white guys fetishized Asian women, even as one of them dated a white guy. I remember wanting, acutely, both to be white and to be the kind of minority they so easily were, to be comfortable with myself. I wasn’t comfortable. I wanted to be Asian as a fallback for when I wasn’t able (of course) to be white.

One of the women was having a relationship crisis with a man she had nicknamed Jesus—no lie. I was giving her advice. I said Jesus wouldn’t call immediately. I constructed a man out of heteronormative stereotypes. I thought that this must be the kind of guy who got such beautiful women to like him, the kind of guy I was never really like. I pretended to know because I thought it would make me seem like him, that it would make me seem more normative.

The women in that car treated me very nicely, though they must have seen how desperate I was. I think I had just broken up with my long-term (white) girlfriend. I had a lot going on. And when one of them said I was a handsome guy, why didn’t I have a girlfriend, I felt like I had been right about Asian women. But I also thought, Why don’t you like me, then? I felt as if I had tried my best to fit into the person I was supposed to be, and it didn’t work for either white people or Asian people. I was a mess of longing, not seeing how confused my ideas had gotten. I wrote about these women in an essay in which I boiled down the 13 hours into ten pages that made it seem like I was so close to a connection, that made me look far better than I was.

***

When I look at pictures of PSY in the American media—and yes, I’m probably projecting, but allow me to be personal here, because my point is the individual—I see frustration. In a recent statement (that he later backed off from), he even mentioned that he was sick and tired of the horse-dance. I can see how he would be. I can see how he might hate to be so well known for a dance he’d meant as a joke and/or as social commentary. To be treated like he’s the joke, or it’s all a goof.

The PSY who sang those protest lyrics was someone standing up for something, someone “being real,” even if the lyrics went overboard (they did). That PSY was someone who fought the establishment, who didn’t meet the expectations of those who have the power to give attention and fame. He was in control of his reputation, then.

The power dynamics at play are fascinating to me. I know a little about the tank incident that led to PSY’s first protest song. What I know I know from talking to Koreans, in Korea, as McGill does. I will tell you what I remember people telling me, whether or not this is what happened. The incident was, and is, colored with emotion. The two Korean girls were walking down the sidewalk to a birthday party. The tank seemed to have a clear view of them. It drove straight at (over) them. The soldiers got off with a dishonorable discharge, not even the prison time an American would get for running over another American in a car, accidentally or not. The soldiers had all the power, represented by a giant tank. They killed two girls who couldn’t have been in a more innocent or helpless position. Then this same dynamic played out on a (inter)national level, as the US Army determined the fate of the soldiers while the Koreans could do nothing but watch.

Roh Moo-hyun rode the anti-American sentiment to the presidency. Koreans everywhere were devastated. The only power they could wield was through protests. PSY wielded his only power through his protest lyrics. And yet now PSY never points out the meaning of “Gangnam Style”—in fact, he even said that the song isn’t social commentary, only fun. He never refuses to do the horse-dance. He never tries to be a different person from the tuxedoed jester in the video.

We need someone Asian to become influential for standing out. For so long, Asian Americans have been sidelined or stereotyped. Now as the demographics change, Asian Americans are starting to be recognized as holding some political power. And then there’s the high representation of Asian Americans in elite schools. But all this talk of roles and demographics and model minorities does nothing to talk about Asian Americans as individuals. Even if we are seen as increasingly important as a group, who are the Asian Americans we see in the news, starring in movies, in culture? PSY is now the most powerful Asian in America. Earlier this year, I wrote a couple of essays about the other breakout Asian guy of 2012, Jeremy Lin, whom the media will not stop describing as smart, hard-working, etc., even as Asian Americans write about how he has changed how Asians are seen as athletes. PSY was always an individual in Korea, a quintessential individual, a bad boy bucking the system. And now he is apologizing for that.

For me, the new PSY doesn’t fit with the protest PSY. I am sure that I’m projecting. I am sure that it’s expecting too much of an entertainer to want him to reject what can help make him famous, in the name of a fight one might say is primarily Asian American, not Asian. But I want to be able to root for someone who “looks like me” and is willing to stand outside the cultural stereotypes, willing to be Bizarre not as an Asian, but among Asians.

I don’t condone what PSY said, though he said it in context and years ago. The lyrics about killing entire families are especially awful. But I can’t help but hope we get to see the PSY who risked making outright social critiques. I can’t help but wish we could see how a real PSY, a PSY out of the ordinary and out of the box, would fare if he weren’t the acceptable Asian.

***

Rumpus original art by Jason Novak.

Related Posts:

• The Sacred and the Profane
• On Loitering
• Yellow Peril and the American Dream
• Indian River
• Sleep Song, The Poetic Epilogue to War, Cancelled

Maybe this was the trouble I had, as a child growing up in white America, reading desperately. I never found anyone like me, except for in a single book, We Adopted You, Benjamin Koo. A book I recently realized has become a huge part of my subconscious past, so much so that I can no longer tell book from reality. I’ll get to that.

I love books. I loved them as a kid. I was always reading fast enough for multiple personal pan pizzas at Pizza Hut (Book It!). I could get lost in a book completely, closing off the outside world. My parents would ask why I hadn’t done whatever they had asked me to do while I was reading, and I wouldn’t be able to recall ever hearing the question.

But I was never able to have that moment, which I realized other kids had, where the character seemed to be me. I was always aware that I was reading about other people. Sometimes people I wished I was. White and with secret powers.

Recently, another writer told me he thinks the world is getting better for people like me. For Asian Americans, he meant, and for adopted kids. This was a white person, though he was full of hope. He is an adoptive father himself. I found myself thinking immediately of Jeremy Lin. Yet not as a positive example.

Lin is back at the top of the media cycle, and the Asian American consciousness. This time, it’s about money. Or, rather, it’s still about race. When the original story was playing out, the underdog story—in part because race had made Lin an underdog—people were rooting for Lin or at least were caught up in the narrative. Then the first loss came, and with it the Chink headline and lower TV ratings, and finally, injury, and Lin was out of the news cycle. Sports media shifted its focus to articles explaining why we should at last stop hating Lebron James for rejecting his hometown team in a public broadcast.

Now the season is over and Lin is in the news for getting paid and “leaving” New York. At first, the media seemed to blame James Dolan, the owner of the New York Knicks, for letting Lin go. Then articles started to appear in which the decision was explained as being about money and loyalty. Dolan didn’t like the way Lin had stayed out of the playoffs when he was physically at “85%” (which he clarified later to mean 85% of the bare minimum to play). Dolan didn’t like the way Lin had shopped around and gotten a high-paying offer from the Houston Rockets, an offer that, if the Knicks matched it, might cost them over $30 million in Lin’s third year. Dolan thought Lin was being disloyal, wasn’t the “hard-working,” “humble” player he was before the Knicks “gave him his big shot.”

When Lin announced his decision on Facebook, the responses looked like this:

It seems to me that the racism in those responses is not so far from the factors behind Dolan’s “decision.” The money argument simply doesn’t hold water. Lin would have made the Knicks much more than he cost. His rise to stardom had already increased the value of Madison Square Garden, their home court, by an estimated $600 million and $228 million during said rise. The advertising money and the TV rights abroad would have added even more. Lin’s jersey was the highest-selling jersey last season. So what we are left with as a possible reason is loyalty.

Loyalty on a team of highly paid superstars who left other teams to go to New York. Loyalty on a team that nearly cut Lin, was rumored to dismiss his talent all season, and only played him when they had no other option. Loyalty when the Knicks hadn’t re-signed Lin right away, when they had told him to shop around instead of making an immediate offer that would have shown they wanted him. Where does this notion of loyalty come from?

I keep going back to what one coach said about why he had passed on Lin in the first place: because he “didn’t have a frame of reference” for him. He didn’t have a model for Lin as a basketball player, as there were no other Asian American point guards in the NBA. But that coach, and Dolan, had a frame of reference for Lin as a person. That was the problem. The frame of reference didn’t include basketball star. I will bet it included quiet, reserved, humble, loyal, studious, hard-working, etc.—all the labels the media put on Lin after he broke out—as well as weak, effeminate, exotic, and so on.

As others have brought up, I cannot escape thinking about Dolan’s loyalty issue, an issue he applied only to Lin, as racial.

I am worried about singular models. My daughter just turned one, and we spend most of our money building a library for her. The more books we buy, the more I find myself liking animal protagonists, because the English books with human characters are largely books with white children. On the other hand, the animals are defined by their physical characteristics, and I worry too that this presents a message to my daughter that what you look like determines whether you get to play in the Reindeer games or not.

Maybe I am being oversensitive. My wife might say so. But I have experience with this.

It wasn’t until a couple of months ago, when I was reading through my daughter’s bookshelf for the books that might best instruct her in life, that I realized I had been confusing my experiences and even difficulties as an adoptee with those of Benjamin Koo, the character in the children’s book my parents gave me.

Imagine me as a kid in rural Connecticut, in a college town full of white professors’ kids. I have one Asian friend. My parents have told me I’m adopted, but I don’t really know what that means. I think of my parents as my parents, and how do I reconcile that with what they’ve told me? Always I try to forget that I am a kid from another family, that my mother left me not knowing whether I would live or die, that my parents are not my biological parents and who they are does not make a genetic difference to who I am.

What I get at that time of confusion is We Adopted You, Benjamin Koo. And Benjamin Koo is 9 years old and was left on the doorstep of an orphanage as a newborn, where the orphanage workers found him and gave him a name and a birthdate and raised him until his adoption. Benjamin Koo, as a child of white parents, was called “Chink” and teased and got strange looks from people when he went out with his family, and didn’t know who he was. Benjamin Koo would draw pictures of his family with him brown and his parents white without realizing what that meant. Benjamin Koo, one day in second grade, looks in the mirror and is shocked to find that he looks like almost no one he knows, that he is the only one who is different in his particular way.

Benjamin gets angry and confused. He wants to know who his birth parents are. He tells his mother he is going back to Korea, to find his “real mom.” He wants to run away, but doesn’t know where to go. Then the guidance counselor tells him a story about a duck looking like a duck and quacking like a duck, and he sees that his mom is his mom after all.

This is the turn in the book, the realization, that his mother is his mother, because of a story about ducks. He never comes to grips with who he is, but all seems happily resolved.

I feel something lodged in my throat as I look at this book now and type these words, making the comparison.

There were the similarities to my situation, you see: being left by my birth mother and taken in by an orphanage, being named by someone else, being made fun of and looked at strangely, being adopted by a schoolteacher, that day in the mirror. I saw myself for the first time as not white (literally saw this) around the same time I read Benjamin Koo, and I didn’t know what to do with this knowledge.

I began to confuse my life with Benjamin Koo’s, I think because I had little else to help explain what I was feeling. For a long time, I thought that like Benjamin Koo I didn’t know my real birthday, that I was the one who arrived in America in pink and was mistaken for a girl, that I drew those pictures and made those same realizations about my mom being my mom. And that I had gotten over all of that and was fine. Because I didn’t have any context for what my parents had told me, I borrowed context from a story written by a white woman who had “consulted” an adopted boy to know how he felt.

As if a boy, an adopted boy, knows how he feels as an adopted boy! That realization with the ducks. That happy ending that focused on Benjamin Koo knowing that his parents were his parents. That fucked me up. How simple it seemed, that someone could tell you a story about ducks and you could all of a sudden feel at peace. What was wrong with me, that I didn’t? That even if I accepted that my parents were my parents, which I eventually did, I didn’t feel any less confused about myself?

I had only that one model, you see, for resolution. And there wasn’t even any resolution in it, a fact I didn’t see until those few weeks ago. I didn’t realize until then how much of my experience I had conflated with a fictional character’s, and I am still unsure about what this could mean (and has meant) to me.

Singular models. How dangerous they can be. And how often they are applied to minorities. The way we extrapolate a person from another person we know, when we lack context.

Recently, I had a short story published with the subtitle, “How to Be Asian American.” The story deals with a half-Korean kid who grows up always confused about the white and Asian sides of himself, unable to figure out who he is. An Asian writer on Twitter said she wasn’t sure what she thought of it, but it made her think, and I asked her to share her thoughts once she was ready. When she emailed later, one of her points was that she knew a half-Korean man and he wasn’t like the protagonist of my story. This was an Asian person telling me this. I couldn’t help but think no one ever says, I know this one German American person and he’s not like the German American person in your story. To give the writer credit, she did also mention that we each have our own experiences, and I did title the story as I did. Perhaps I was worried I wouldn’t get people to read it, otherwise, as the teen writer asked me. By people here, I mean Asian Americans.

Another publication story: a piece of mine was accepted at a literary journal a few months ago and I was contacted by the editor who said the major misstep was that the narrator, who is Korean American, refers to another character as Asian—“simply Asian,” wrote the editor. The editor said he didn’t know any Asian Americans who wouldn’t specify another Asian person’s ethnicity. Setting aside the fact that the person being described is a ghost, and that I am an Asian person who often calls other Asians “simply” “Asian,” there is the issue that because this editor doesn’t know anyone who would do this, that my protagonist should not do it. I debated pulling the piece or writing back with the above facts, but in the end I tried to be happy for the acceptance at a magazine I deeply love. I made the changes.

Singular models. Or limited models. And our insistence on them.

Maybe why all this Jeremy Lin news keeps getting to me is because I wanted, as a kid, to be a professional basketball player. It was my one true dream, the path I would have chosen if God had let me be anything I wanted. I grew up thinking I was going to be—different. I didn’t have a player like my friends whom I could point to and say, I want to be him. Now with Lin it feels as if the world is telling Asian American kids that even if you can be different, be the first Asian American basketball star, that difference means you have to follow different rules than white or black stars, that that is the bigger difference and you can never get away from the Asians in movies, you have to be “loyal,” “humble,” etc. That is the model you must not break.

After a while, when I realized there was no way I could play in the NBA, I had very serious dreams of playing basketball at least in college. I remember distinctly telling myself that if I couldn’t make a Division I team, I could at least play Division II. That my best friend could play Division I, but let’s face it, I wasn’t as good as that, so I would settle for Division II. This is the friend who turned his back on me, in sixth grade, without warning. His father was the coach of our travel team.

I didn’t play much. Mostly I sat at the end of the bench, wishing I had a real opportunity but never getting one. Years later, when we were no longer friends, a fact that only seemed to bother me, this former best friend had me and another childhood playmate over to shoot some hoops for old times’ sake. His father, our former coach, was there, too, so we played two on two. This was a summer home from college, I think. My former friend was playing Division II somewhere. In his driveway, I had a good game. I don’t think it would be an exaggeration to say that I was the best player on the court that day. As I sank a shot on his father, my former friend said, “Were you always this good?” I felt a rush of angry pride, a pinch behind my eyes for all of the games we had played together and the games we could have played if we’d stayed friends. You can see how I was still trying hard to show him why he should have loved me. I never really got over losing his friendship, and I thought of basketball as the one way I could show him I was different, better, than who he thought I was now that he no longer knew me.

My daughter turned one-year-old a month ago today. In Korea, a person’s one-year birthday is a huge deal. My wife and I decided to throw a couple of parties back-to-back, one for my relatives (hers are in Korea) and one for our friends. We rented all the traditional decorations and the materials with which our daughter would, as is the custom, choose an item that represents her future life. An old coin for wealth; a bow and arrow for the military—I made my wife leave this one out; a stethoscope for medicine; a notebook for the world of letters; and so on. I know, I know, models, but I am superstitious and fond of the traditions of this birth country I hardly know.

For one of my daughter’s presents, my aunt sent a book that must have been hard to find, about this “game” and the traditional one-year birthday, 돌. It was a very thoughtful gift, in one way. I was able to learn from the book a full explanation of what the traditions meant. But on the other hand, it was very clearly written by a white person, like my Benjamin Koo book. The baby is described as having “silky black hair” and a “round-as-the-moon face,” etc.—the pervasive descriptions you find in many stories where a white person describes Asians (not to mention unnecessary in an illustrated book). Things that white people say by rote, but an Asian person would avoid because they know it’s how white people think of them. How do I read this to my daughter? How do I explain to her that this is probably all my aunt could get, a book about Korean tradition written by a white person who had “consulted” a Korean?

How do I explain to her that even if she grows up with the multiple talents her choice in items predicted, that the majority of people in this country will still see her in only one way?

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Those meetings made me feel classified by my parents as other. One of the things I most remember from that time (and from books like We Adopted You, Benjamin Koo) is the common experience that the adopted child has when one day he looks into the mirror and all of a sudden realizes that his skin color is not the same as his parents’. Up until that moment, he sees himself as white (in the case that the parents are white). I saw myself as white. When I closed my eyes, or when I was in a conversation and seemed to be watching from above, I was a skinny white boy, a combination of my parents, just like other kids. Sometimes, if I am being honest, I still catch myself looking down at my conversations with white people and picturing myself, in that strange ongoing record in my head, as no different from them. As a boy, the one thing that nagged at me was the flatness of my nose. I was constantly tugging on it, thinking that I could stretch it out and thereby gain acceptance.

But let me pause here for a moment. This is going to be a difficult essay to write, and I want to prepare myself—and you, reader—by coming at this topic from a larger angle.

Right now, it seems to me that a similar type of self-contextualizing (through race) is happening on a grand scale in Asian America, as Jeremy Lin takes over sports news and much of AA media references. With Lin’s rise, there has been a feeling, a swelling collective feeling, that we Asians are no different from the other people we see on national TV, almost exclusively white and black. That we are Jeremy Lin, able to play as well as they in “their” arena, the ability of Jeremy Lin pointing to a potential in all of us. The writer Jay Caspian Kang says something to this effect in his Grantland article: “The pride we feel over [Lin’s] accomplishments is deeply personal and cuts across discomforting truths that many of us have never discussed. It’s why a headline that reads ‘Chink in the Armor,’ or Jason Whitlock’s tweeted joke about ‘two inches of pain,’ stings with a new intensity. Try to understand, everything said about Jeremy Lin, whether glowing, dismissive, or bigoted, doubles as a referendum on where we, as a people, stand.”  When the disparagements came—as we feared and maybe suspected they would but hoped they wouldn’t—it was like that first time looking in the mirror. We realized that for all of Jeremy Lin’s accomplishments, we as Asians are still different, are still seen differently than other races by the vast majority of Americans.

The truth is, racism toward Asians is treated differently in America than racism toward other ethnic groups. This is a truth all Asian Americans know. While the same racist may hold back terms he sees as off-limits toward other minorities, he will often not hesitate to call an Asian person a chink, as Jeremy Lin was referred to, or talk about that Asian person as if he must know karate, or call him Bruce Lee, or consider him weak or effeminate, or so on. Bullying against Asian Americans continues at the highest rate of any ethnic group. I remember, when I was taking the Asian American literature course, an article in a major magazine that ran pictures of (male) Asian models above the tagline, “Gay or Asian?” I remember a video that went viral last year in which people explained why men prefer Asian women and why women dislike Asian men. Some of the women on the video were Asian American.

As I said, I was treating the AA literature course as an experiment. There were a few white students in class who laughed at the “Gay or Asian?” tag and found little offensive about it, at least until pressed. Maybe the first sign that my experiment was working was the anger I felt toward them. The test, you see, was secretly how Asian I was, or maybe whether I was Asian at all. It was something to do with discovering myself, and how much that self was formed by my birth, which I knew nothing about, and by my birth mother, who had abandoned me, and by the country that had raised me while leaving scars of unknown origin on various parts of my body.

College can be a chance to remake oneself, or to get closer to the foundation of oneself that one gradually moves away from under the influence of peers. I had, in fact, as soon as I got to UNC, attempted to join the Asian American club, but I couldn’t get over how cliquish they seemed, embracing their strangeness, while the truth is that I was trying to get away from those differences. Soon I found myself, with this second chance, once again trying to be accepted by people who looked like my parents, telling myself I didn’t want to be Asian if this was what being Asian meant, being birds of a different feather, expected to be an automatic friend because of race. I had, as you can see, my excuses.

Yet somewhere inside of me, I must have felt that I was growing further from myself. Racist jokes were told with alarming frequency for a school billed the “most liberal in the South,” and I was friends with two groups: one mostly white, mostly Southerners in the same dorm; the other mostly black, with whom I played pick-up basketball. They joked without censor. I had a girlfriend whose aunt and uncle lived in North Carolina, and when we went to visit, they would say that at least I wasn’t black, often before some racist diatribe. This seemed the predominant sentiment then. At least I wasn’t ____.

I was taking the AA course to find out what I was. I hadn’t read much Asian American literature at that time—I think almost all I could add to the class discussion was Michael Ondaatje—and a couple of books planted seeds in me then that would grow into a certain self-awareness later in life. I will always be grateful to Don Lee’s story collection, Yellow. In Lee’s stories, Asian American characters experience racist incident after racist incident, but these incidents are mostly background to their lives as sculptors, surfers, lovers, etc. The characters are very much of the world in which they live, the world in which I lived and a different world than the one in which white people live with the privilege of their color. In class, the white students were incredulous. They claimed such acts of racism could never happen with such frequency. Yet if anything, to me, the racism seemed infrequent, and with minimal effect on the characters’ lives. I had grown up constantly wavering between denying and suspecting that my skin color was behind the fights picked with me, the insults, the casual distance kept up even between myself and some of my closest friends. Sometimes—in retrospect: oftentimes—these incidents were obviously rooted in race. I have been called “chink” and “flat face” and “monkey” many many times. And it is the context of these words that make a child grow uncomfortable with who he is, that instill a deep fear in him. (As a side note: I am married now to a Korean woman who grew up in Korea, and when I mentioned the “flat face” slur to her, she said, “but your face is flat.” Yet how different was this from the leering way it was said to me as a child, something she hadn’t felt as a Korean in Korea.) I was afraid, back then, of myself, as if there were a little Asian person living within me that was corrupting my being, taking me away from the white person I thought I was.

There are still incidents from those days that I cannot get out of my mind. I remember watching, in one middle school class, a video meant to teach us that blackface and sculptures of big-lipped black people and stereotypes of watermelon and fried chicken were wrong. Later that same year, one of my best friends drew a picture of a square with a nose poking off of one side. I knew this was me even before he said it. Sometimes my friends would ask me to do the trick where I put my face against the table, touching both my forehead and my chin to the wood. I thought of this as a special ability, but underneath, I knew I should be ashamed.

I would bet that this friend does not remember drawing me in that one science class. We often drew together. He was in all of my classes that year, as we were allowed two friends to share a similar schedule, and I was the only one who requested him. That he wouldn’t remember this drawing is part of the problem, I know now. He thought of the picture as a joke, though I had never seen him draw caricatures or draw anyone else so simply. Surely a part of him knew what he was doing but didn’t stop him. There was no video to tell him not to—there was no one to tell him not to, even me. I pretended it didn’t bother me.

That was the same year my closest childhood friend suddenly cut me off. We had been inseparable, but at the start of that school year, he made fun of me and seemed to use this attack to springboard into popularity. I spent many nights during those first few weeks of school crying myself to sleep, not understanding why we weren’t friends anymore. It is a wound that still hurts—as I type this, I find my face heating up and my breaths deepening. I still don’t understand completely, but I can point to the fear that this was due to the color of my skin, more than anything, as an indication that it indeed was. I understood even when I didn’t understand, as children can.

In response to the students who didn’t believe the frequency/viciousness of the racism in Yellow, the professor showed us an interview in which Lee says every incident in the book has happened to him. Or perhaps I found this interview later, I don’t remember now. As a matter of research, I thought I would ask a few Asian American authors I know about racist incidents in their books that are based on events that happened to them. Earlier this year, Salon ran a piece by Marie Myung-Ok Lee about a bully who made it into her novel and whom she finally, after many years, confronted. I heard from several writers about experiences making it into their books: how they were unable to get away from writing about those experiences, as unable as they were to stop thinking about them, but hardly anyone seemed to want to call out those past attackers. I spoke with one writer about the condition of anonymity, as the people who had hurt him most were those closest to him.

I think what all of this says to me is that 1. these things happen to all of us, and 2. they leave the type of mark that we cannot escape, that we return to again and again, as writers do.

A few years after UNC, when I was an MFA student at Emerson College (where Don Lee got his MFA and then later edited Ploughshares and taught), there was a rumor going around that in the original workshop stories from Yellow, the characters were white. That Lee made them Asian later. I’m not sure the truth of this statement. In fact, I’m not interested in the truth of it. I’m more interested in the fact that this was a rumor at all. This was something people wanted to talk about, and talked about as if the truer versions of the characters were white. If Lee did use white characters, originally, he is not alone. I know many Asian American writers who refuse to write about Asian Americans, out of a fear of being typecast, or a fear of being seen as “using” their ethnicity, or a fear of being an “Asian American writer,” or something. And really, I understand that. I have been one of those writers. This may not come as a surprise, at this point in this essay, but for a long time, I wrote only about white characters. I wrote about them because I grew up with people like them, but also because they were the people in books and because I, too, feared the label, or at least told myself I did. What that fear really is, it seems to me now, is a fear of not being taken as seriously as the White Male Writer, who has so long ruled English literature.

The breakthrough came when I started to be able to read my own stories objectively. Something was not making sense. Why were my characters who they were? I inserted plenty of flashbacks and backstory to try to “explain” them. But in the end, I realized that what they were missing, in many cases, was a crucial piece of me that had gone into them. They were Asian, like me. Many of them were adopted, like me. The original characters were not the true characters. And “changing” them to Koreans made everything make sense.

For my day job, I organize a seminar at Harvard on the topic of Inequality. I attend these talks both out of responsibility and out of interest. But after two and a half years, I can only remember Asians being mentioned twice, once in direct response to a question by an Asian student. I remember sitting beside another Asian American student and listening to a lecture earlier this year. He said something like, “Nobody ever talks about Asians,” and I said, “Asians don’t exist in Sociology.” We both laughed. It was a joke, but it stung with a certain truth. The time Asians were mentioned not in answer to a question was in reference to university admissions—a heated topic now in the AA community—as numbers show that students of Asian descent make up a disproportionately large percentage of admissions to top schools.

Often I have heard Asians talking about these percentages with pride, even in responding to racism. If attacked, they “point to the scoreboard” of college admissions. Yet it is a very real complaint that Asian descent seems to count against us in those same admissions numbers. Both Harvard and Princeton are currently under investigation on charges of racism toward Asians, whose grades and SAT scores, on average, must be higher than those of other races in order to gain admissions. Many Asian Americans are responding by marking the box on applications that declines to indicate race, something I cannot help but read symbolically. I confess that I would give my daughter that exact advice, in admissions: not to reveal her race. The accusation is that schools have capped their “quotas” of Asian students, and this is why Asians need to score higher, because they are competing amongst themselves for a limited number of spots. Most Asians accept the unwritten rules, pushing themselves or their children harder. But why should they, in a country that prides itself on equal opportunity?

To bring up college admissions is often to be met with the complaint that we should be happy with the success we have. In fact, success is often used as a justification for why Asians are ignored in discussions of inequality. I was forgetting a third mention of Asian Americans in the seminars: as a group other immigrant races should look toward as an example of successful assimilation. Why aren’t we happy with our disproportionate admissions and the many children who grow up to be doctors and lawyers, pushed by their parents? (The more sarcastic answer: why aren’t white people happy enough with EVERYTHING?)  Jeremy Lin, early in his success, was called out by boxer Floyd Mayweather as only getting the attention he was getting because he is Asian, since every day black athletes accomplish what Lin has and receive no fanfare. Or something to this effect. Other journalists responded by saying Lin is getting the attention because he worked so hard and is the ultimate underdog. Both these points, it seems to me, have a lot to do with race. Why was Lin an underdog, ignored by scouts when he had succeeded at every level and outplayed the best point guards he faced (see: John Wall, Kemba Walker)? Writers always seem to mention how hard Lin works, and often mention this as a trait of Asian Americans. They mention that he went to Harvard, how smart he is. They mention that he is humble. When I wrote about the “Chink in the Armor” headline for the Good Men Project, a commenter responded by pointing to Asian Americans being too respectful to speak up against racism. This respectfulness, he said, was something he admired about Asians.

It is hard to call someone who thinks he is complimenting you a racist. But the positive stereotypes people think they can use because of their “positivity” continue (and worsen) the problem. Thinking you can call an entire race “respectful” is thinking you can classify someone by race, is racism. Which is what is happening to Jeremy Lin when he is called “hard-working” instead of “skilled,” when his talent is marginalized by a writer who sees him as the Asian American stereotype, the child of immigrants who outworks and outstudies everyone else. Mayweather has one point, at least—other athletes work as hard or harder than Jeremy Lin. I’ve seen the videos of Lin’s workouts, how intense they are, how long, but this is not unusual for a basketball star. Read about Kobe Bryant’s work ethic, or Ray Allen’s, either of which put Jeremy Lin to shame. Jeremy Lin is the success he is because of his individual talent, not because he is Asian American. His ethnicity, I would have to argue, was only a factor in him having to “come out of nowhere,” since that was where Asians have been relegated to in sports.

After ESPN ran the “Chink in the Armor” headline, the writer of the headline made a very defensive apology in which he claimed to be a “good person” who didn’t know the weight of the word he was using. He was fired, and this apology came afterward. When he was first fired, I felt sorry for him. I didn’t think he deserved to lose his job but then his defensiveness came and took that sympathy away. Some on my Twitter feed suggested he didn’t know the term because of his young age. He is 28. I am 29. “Chink” is a very common term, probably the most common slur against Asians, and this was a writer and (I’m assuming) a reader who made his livelihood online. I find it impossible to believe that he hadn’t come across the term in some way. It bothers me to see people make excuses for him. “I’m sorry, but” is not “I’m sorry.” If you believe you can get away with the excuse, then what is that telling me?

A few years after I graduated from UNC, I decided to go to Korea. I had never been back. I was still writing white characters, though I had let a Korean American slip into my novel in a supporting role, a character who never finished his sentences, who was always cut-off or cutting himself off. I was still searching for that Korean part of me. I had spent a long winter in Prague as one of the only Asians in the city, strange in a strange land. In Korea, I fell apart immediately. I ended up losing twenty pounds in two weeks, and I would have run back to the States if not for meeting my wife.

But then a strange thing happened. I got used to seeing Koreans, and was surprised whenever I saw a white person. And after some time, not like the sudden realization in the mirror but a gradual process, I began to see myself as a person from this country. I wrote my first story with a Korean character, and something in it, the vulnerability, the honesty, clicked. In Korea, I had different differences than in America. Not that race was out of the picture—the biggest shock to people was my culture, in spite of my skin color, my inability to speak Korean—but it was like looking at race from the inside out, the opposite of how I had been forced to see myself my whole life. It was a lesson: that I had control over my differences, that I could choose to build them up or break them down, that they were not simply genetic, something that had never been true in America.

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