stardust_rifle

(Crossposted from Reddit.)

Asian-American here. (Happy Lunar New Year!) I think I responded to one of your other threads a while back, about Buddhism.

I've been wanting to write about how our individual experience of being Asian-American has affected our plurality, but it's a surprisingly difficult topic - I think in large part because being Asian in the US has long been about invisibility, to the point that we've become habituated to ignoring our own Asianness. And Asian-American experiences are so diverse (especially when it comes to colorism, fluency, and citizen status - our experiences, being pale East Asian, US-born, and fluent in English are quite different from the experiences of a darker-skinned immigrant still learning English) that it feels fraught to write about our own experiences, out of concern that they'd be taken as Representation Of All Asian-American Experiences. But I do definitely think it has affected us, even if we can't name every way it has yet.

Off of the top of my head, our parents (who are immigrants) always had a strongly pragmatic cast to how they approached the world. Extremely resourceful folks, saw objects for what they could do rather than what they were "supposed" to do and could jury-rig anything to their needs. They didn't believe in letting their feelings get in the way of doing what needed to be done (or so they liked to claim) and what needed to be done was defined by what concrete value it brought to the family, not some kind of abstract morality divorced from reality. (Or so they liked to claim.) They thought constantly in collective - what was good for the family, not just our nuclear unit but the extended group, the way people's actions reflected on said family, etc.

Make no mistake: our parents sucked in a lot of ways that left scars. But they did teach us a lot of things, some good, some that can't be neatly classified as good or bad. When I look, I can see traces of it running everywhere through our plurality. Our willingness to jury-rig and modify parts of our own functioning. Our focus on concrete advice on living plural. The relative ease with which we accept ideas like "people in systems can be both individuals and parts of a whole - singlets, too, are individuals who are parts of their communities." On a more fraught level: a tendency to stifle our feelings and efface ourselves for the good of the group. Being perhaps a little too comfortable with being unseen. Difficulty distinguishing looking okay from being okay. Generational trauma that manifests, among other ways, as a fear of scarcity and a complicated relationship with food. A need to Achieve Something and Be Successful. Things that kept us outwardly functional, even through incredibly trying circumstances, while also eroding our deeper well-being.

And also, for us, US-born to immigrant parents who were our main connection to our culture, who we are purposefully no longer in contact with - there is a perpetual sense of... not simply loss, but having been severed from a greater whole. When we cut away what was killing us, a lot of good went with it too. Something that was always with us, unnoticed in the background, until it was gone. Even those of us who don't quite see themselves as Asian can sense its absence. We look after each other, try to create our own little culture with its own little traditions within, but it can't ever be a replacement.

Oh, and of course, there's the topic of race and internal identity. Sure have a lot of feelings (and frustrations) about the ways people handle that subject, considering none of us Look Asian internally and a number of us don't even feel personally connected to Asian identity. But I won't get into it here. Not on the new year. Inauspicious, you see.