Asian American
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: No Wound
Maybe I can touch it and show it to you. If I convince you, we can call it real. And then perhaps it will be.
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Literature’s Second-Class Citizens
They’re there but not there. They’re included but their stories don’t fully weave into the story.
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Florence Foster Jenkins, Meryl Streep, and White Feminism
Streep’s career encapsulates the mid-to-late 20th century ideal of American whiteness as aspirational and as attainable.
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The Rumpus Review of Seoul Searching
Seeing is a critical part of normalizing, and though it seems like a rudimentary expectation, it’s important for American audiences to see Korean-Americans simply living their lives.
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Breaking the Script
There’s a tendency to take writers who write about race and shuffle them into a genre, into a predetermined conversation, whether they wanted to be there or not. But even if the constraints of the game are rigged, what Jenny…
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The Catch-22 of Representation
Heroine Complex author Sarah Kuhn writes on her impulse as a child to dislike Jubilee, the Marvel superhero she was “supposed” to identify with as an Asian-American woman, and the pressures of creating representative characters for women of color in…
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Graphic Novels, Fatherhood, and Asian-American Culture
I feel like I’m just a hair’s breadth away from a consensus that what I do is horrible. Guernica has a wonderful interview with graphic novelist Adrian Tomine, whose latest book Killing and Dying was recently released. Tomine talks about…
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The Rumpus Interview with Yumi Sakugawa
Yumi Sakugawa discusses her latest book, Ikebana, discovering meditation, exploring blank spaces, and drawing a world of sentient oranges and one-eyed monsters.
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Beyond Joy Luck
At The Toast, Nicole Soojung Callahan, Christine Hyung-Oak Lee, Karrisa Chen, and others weigh in on the state of Asian-American literature: I grew up in L.A. and Long Beach. White people were always the minority in my schools and neighborhoods,…
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Hearing Mandarin, Speaking English
In middle school, “Yo Mama” jokes infuriated me. My mother was so Chinese she couldn’t eat a hamburger without pinching her nose. She was so Chinese she wore bamboo slippers. In a stunning essay for the Michigan Daily, Carlina Duan writes…
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Millennials of Color Don’t Fit Your Stereotypes
There have been a lot of hand-wringing thinkpieces about Millennials in the media, but most of them are just wordy ways to say, “Kids these days.” As Mike Dang points out, these thinkpieces also fail to take race into account, which…
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When Racist Stereotypes Work in Your Favor
At Slate, computer-science professor Philip Guo discusses an odd side effect of stereotypes about Asian men: when he was first learning to code, they actually worked in his favor. Even when Guo was a novice, people gave him the benefit of…