This goes out to all the cat eye girls, all the K-beauty fans, all the GOOP devotees who gua sha and jade roll and take ashwaganda supplements. This goes out to all the ‘namaste’ yogis, all the clean eating, wabisabi Zen purists who follow #Japandi on Instagram, all the foodies who buy $20 bowls of ramen from dudes named Ivan. This goes out to all the white lady entrepreneurs who have ‘adapted’ acupuncture and cupping, ‘streamlined’ mahjong tiles and ‘cleaned up’ Chinese food for a young, hip audience.
This goes out to anyone who talks about the Korean ladies who do their nails, who uses a funny accent as a punchline, who has said ‘you love me long time’ out loud at any point in their life, who thinks Long Duk Dong is a hilarious name, who has asked anyone where they are really from, who can’t pronounce Xi but can pronounce Xerxes. This goes out to anyone who has ever started a question with, ‘is it true that you eat…’, to anyone who rages about Communist China, or asks Americans of Chinese descent their views on Communist China, as if it’s a litmus test of loyalty.
We can all denounce hate crimes (or at least some of us can), we can all identify the gross injustice of internment camps, but ask yourself how and if you have added, in so many infinitesimal and insidious ways, to the other-ing of a massive diaspora of peoples and cultures, to the hypersexualization of our women and the emasculation of our men, to the perpetual outsider narrative of Asian America despite centuries of contributions to this nation.
Crack a book. Read about how 15,000 Chinese migrants helped build the transcontinental railroad from 1863 to 1869, men who were maligned as rat eaters and opium addicts, who worked twice as hard and earned half as little and when 3,000 went on strike in 1867, whose food supplies were unceremoniously cut off. Ask yourself why Chinatowns have a reputation of being dirty, seedy places full of red light districts and illicit opium dens — ask yourself why Chinatowns exist to begin with, why women and families were banned. Speaking of opium, look up the Opium Wars.
Read about the history of Chinese hand laundries in America, about how this was hard work that no one else wanted to do, and was the sort of thing you could do with blood, sweat and tears, because we all know how bank lending really works, and who gets start up capital. Think about the impact of that early racism, and its reverberations over the centuries particularly in urban centers in New York and California.
Read about the US occupation of the Philippines in 1898, and of Japan after World War II. Read about the Korean War, and the Vietnamese War too. Don’t just watch Kubrick, but try to understand the impacts of American interventionism and the legacy of US military bases throughout the Pacific. Read about the relationships between American men and local women. While you’re at it, read about ‘comfort women’ and sexual slavery during WWII, about the first double eyelid surgery performed by an American doctor on a Korean sex worker to make her more attractive to GIs.
Dive deeper into the reasons why Asian immigrants enter certain industries over others. Why do you think so many nail salons were started by Vietnamese refugees in the 1970s and 1980s? Anything to do with the legacy of French colonial occupation? There’s a heartwarming story floating around the internet around how Tippi Hendren showed a group of 20 refugee women how her manicurist did her nails, but that’s probably bullshit.
Learn about how Asian and Black communities have been pitted against one another for decades, read about the LA riots, Korean beauty supply shops in Black neighborhoods, read about redlining and access to bank lending (there it is again) and the damaging impact of a monolithic ‘model minority’ myth, read about the long history of Black and Asian solidarity, about Frederick Douglass advocating for Chinese and Japanese immigration in 1869.
I could go on, but I’d like to pass the baton over to you.
