your best american girl
Before diving into today’s newsletter, here’s a solid list of groups I recommend donating to to help the Asian American communities across the country:
Asian American Journalists Association (AAJA)
*Fun fact! You can also JOIN the AAJA, even if you’re not of Asian descent. You can absolutely join as an ally!
The past year has weighed heavily on me, especially since Tuesday marked the official one-year mark of the pandemic hitting Charlottesville. It’s also the day a white man shot and killed eight people in Atlanta; six of whom were of Asian descent. It just made everything that’s happened up until now feel even heavier.
Why? Because I’m half-Japanese. I’m a member of the Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) community. There are days when I’m white-passing; the spitting image of my Caucasian mom – except with dark hair and brown eyes, like my dad*. Then there are days when I look identical to my Japanese dad. I have been questioned about my racial background more times than I can count on both hands. People mistake my brother and I for twins, because we look nearly identical to each other, except nobody questions his racial background (at least that I’m aware of).
*when people first hear that I’m mixed, they automatically assume that my mom is the Japanese one and my dad is white, because of his military ties. this is a terrible stereotype that’s been perpetuated over the years that dates back to World War II, if not earlier.
Not only do I have to worry about being murdered for being a journalist, but I have to worry about being murdered for being Asian. It’s a fear that’s grown stronger in the back of my mind over the last year, especially as a former president pushed harmful rhetoric towards the Asian community in the early days of the pandemic. There’ll be more on that in a bit though.
Music Break: “Your Best American Girl” - Mitski
Back in June, I wrote a little bit about my cultural identity, during a time of social unrest. It’s time to revisit that and add in a little more context.
Growing up, I didn’t really think much of my racial identity. As a baby, I was a chunky lil squish, and you could definitely tell I was of Asian descent. I didn’t really start to think about my racial identity until I switched elementary schools and moved from a suburban area in the Chicago suburbs to a rural area in Southcentral Pennsylvania that was predominately white.
One of my earliest race-related incidents took place when I was in fourth grade. It was standardized testing time and we were handed our PSSA books with our information already bubbled in by the teacher (because fourth graders weren’t capable of doing it themselves?!?). I asked my teacher if I could change my race, because I wasn’t white, like she had marked. She questioned me and told me she wouldn’t change it, because I was white. I told her that I identified as Pacific Islander*, and that should be marked instead, but she still refused to change it. I still think about that incident today.
*at that time, many standardized tests and racial demographic identifiers didn’t have anything where you could mark “multi-racial” or the ability to select two or more races. because of that, my parents told me to put down Pacific Islander on things like that because it was the closest thing to “Asian.”
Over the years, as I became more inherently aware of my identity, I had to fight back against the stereotypes that Asians are bombarded with on top of dealing with some pretty vile language and actions from schoolmates.
In my younger years, I did get called “slanty eyes,” and even the (very wrong and much worse) “chinky eyes.” I had classmates who would pull their eyes taut around me and say “Hey I look like you now! How can you see if your eyes are squinted like this?” My brother also experienced similar things.
As I entered middle school, my math skills weren’t exactly the best and that might be because of the “gifted kid burnout” phenomenon where I intentionally dumbed myself down so I wouldn’t stand out as much because I didn’t like feeling smarter than others. In a way, at a young age, I did have some internalized xenophobia because I would just joke with classmates and say “I might be Asian, but I’m not great at math!” or go on some form of the stereotypical language. In a way, by trying to “blend in” with my white peers, I was internalizing harmful rhetoric and trying to be the one who broke the stereotypes of how people saw people who looked like me.
I didn’t realize that this was just the tip of the iceberg and that things were only going to get worse from that point on, especially once I entered the dating scene. That’s where the microaggressions really started to come out and it was not pretty.
Music Break: “STFU!” - Rina Sawayama
I was in a long-term relationship with a guy who was so excited that I was half Japanese. His mom told me he’d always envisioned marrying a “petite, Asian girl” when she first met me. He was the first to really sort of fetishize me, based on my ethnicity alone. There were times when he got upset that I wasn’t “fully Asian” and that I didn’t know much about my cultural background. There were also times he got upset because I was being loud and boisterous, and had a totally different opinion than the one he expected me to have. When he was stationed in Korea, he tried to get me fully immersed in Korean culture and then complained when I said I didn’t like certain aspects of it. There are stark differences between Korean and Japanese cultures and it’s not fair to impose them on someone because you think they fit the ideal of what they pictured someone Asian to be.
After that relationship ended, I tried online dating, like most millennials I know were doing at the time. There was a man who questioned my ethnicity because he was absolutely convinced my chest was fake, because “a Japanese girl doesn’t have big boobs!” I never met up with him in person, nor did he ever get my phone number. My photos on that specific app weren’t super revealing either.
There were guys who were all excited because they’d “never been with an Asian girl before” and were enthralled that they were finally going to be with one because the idea of hooking up with me seemed exotic or something. Spoiler alert: I never dated any of them and only met up with one of them, who had an extremely weird fixation on Asian culture as a whole.
Then there’s Weezer’s “El Scorcho,” which states “goddamn you half Japanese girls! Do it to me every time!” If I had a dollar for the sheer number of men who’ve quoted that song to me while getting to know me on a dating app, I’d be pretty damn rich.
I have been “othered” and I have been asked where I’m “really from.” I’ve been reduced to harmful stereotypes based on my ethnicity by men who’ve never met me, and it’s vile. Like many Asian American women, I’ve been shouted at with the horribly offensive “me love you long time!”
In the wake of Tuesday’s violence, I think about how oversexualized and fetishized Asian women have been over the years, but it never really garnered this much media attention. It’s always been something that’s loomed in the background, but was seen as “too taboo” to really talk about. On Wednesday, Emily Gorecenski tweeted out, “Anti-sex work tropes have been weaponized against Asian women for years. Asian women suffer from this form of bigotry in ways that other people don’t.”
And then there’s the plight of the “model minority myth,” which is entirely problematic on its own.
Nikole Hannah-Jones had an incredible Twitter thread yesterday about that topic, and how it is so deeply interwoven in with anti-Black violence and racism.
Towards the end of February of 2020, I started my “panic buying spree” because I was paying attention to the news reports and was trying to make sure I had essentials before everyone made a mad dash to the stores for them. On this particular day, I stopped at the local Walgreens. I walked through the makeup aisle only to be accosted by a woman who shouted “stay away from me you'll get me sick!” at me. We were the only two people even remotely near each other in that aisle, or even in the store at the time.
To this day, that still haunts me. I wasn’t wearing makeup that day, which I’ve come to realize does make me look more Asian to others. It becomes even more apparent when I’m wearing a face mask in public, which I was hesitant to wear at the beginning of the pandemic, for fear of being shouted at or blamed for the pandemic by complete strangers.
I’ve expressed fears about being Asian on Twitter for over a year now, because of the hateful rhetoric pushed by former President Trump, who took to his platform to fuel the fire that led to Tuesday’s events, because he singlehandedly singled out one group (that already gets marginalized and generalized!) in his vitriol. That rhetoric, combined with things said by his supporters and in his speeches, led me to repeatedly quote-tweet myself with the awful things said, and trying to educate my followers that it’s not okay to use this sort of language.
On May 29, 2020, President Trump spoke in the Rose Garden and terminated the United States’s relationship with the World Health Organization, while trying to place the blame on a specific country for letting the pandemic get so bad; in term, he made it fully acceptable for his base to continue fanning the flames he had already ignited.
And it only went downhill from there.
It’s March 2021 and I’m exhausted. Processing the events of the last year took a toll on me. I’m still processing what happened on Tuesday. I’m hurt; I’m numb. Collectively, the AAPIs of the country have been through a LOT.
I’ve seen how news organizations, both big and small, have tried to frame the narrative about Tuesday’s shooting. The police officer with the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office said the shooter was “having a bad day,” but has since been exposed for promoting some anti-Asian messages on his Facebook. Investigators told officials that the shooter has a “sex addiction” and his actions weren’t “racially motivated.”
Looking at the landscape over the last year, and the history of how Asian women have been treated in America, the massacre can be seen as racially motivated. Racism and misogyny go hand in hand with each other too, because men feel they’re entitled to women and their bodies, especially if they’re not white. When they don’t get their way, violence happens.
And it’s absolutely terrifying.
Music Break: “To Carry (On and On)” - KOJI
You might have noticed that in today’s newsletter, there are some small Music Break moments. All three Music Breaks feature Asian artists.
The first one seems pretty obvious, because “Your Best American Girl” is a song Mitski wrote about her upbringing as a half-Japanese person. I saw her perform at The National in Richmond back in 2019 and while I was happy to see people in the crowd who looked like me, it was a very strange experience to be surrounded by white girls screaming at the top of their lungs to a song that wasn’t written with their identities in mind.
The second song, “STFU!” by Japanese-British star Rina Sawayama, highlights the annoyances of being bombarded with all the microaggressions associated with race. The music video is pretty rad too. Rina only recently made it onto my radar, and I’ve been kicking myself for not getting into her music when it first came out.
The last song is by Harrisburg, Pa. native Koji Shiraki, who wrote “To Carry (On and On)” about their “experience as a member of asian diaspora, facing white supremacy in the so-called united states, and the movements to eradicate the conditions that cause violence.” It was released yesterday. Proceeds from the upcoming “Sunday, Someday” benefit on Bandcamp will go towards@RedCanarySong who organize with migrant and Asian sex and massage workers in New York City.