OpEd: The Invisible Discrimination Behind Asian Xenophobia

Photo by Fei Lei, AsAmNews

By Emily Cai

Author’s note: A note on the word ‘Asian’ –  I acknowledge that the use of the term ‘Asian’ is problematic. I am Chinese American, and this article refers specifically to my experiences as a Chinese-American/East Asian-American, although I have included references to characters and actors from different parts of Asia. Even though we’re all technically ‘Asian,’ I don’t intend to broadly generalize for those whose experiences vary from mine.

A few weeks ago, I checked out a book from the library. It was a book that had been recommended to me by a couple of friends on separate occasions, and that I had recently stumbled across a mention of in the New York Times’ Sunday Read. Hoping to enter an expansive and impressive tale about trees, I began to read. By the second chapter, I was incensed.

Chapter 2 of The Overstory by Richard Powers introduces us to the character Winston Ma.

Winston Ma is a Chinese Muslim who immigrates from Shanghai to San Francisco in 1948. He’s described as small and smiling. He speaks in stunted English. He hates Japanese people.  He loves math.

Winston Ma’s own daughter describes him as ‘some other, distant thing.’ And who can blame her? Winston Ma himself seems to think of China and Chinese people in the same way. He tells his daughter, “China surely a funny place.’ And when his daughter asks, ‘Are Chinese all Communists who eat rats and love Mao?’ He responds by saying, ‘Chinese eat many strange thing. But rat not so popular.’ In one of the more baffling scenes, Winston Ma saves his family from a bear by speaking to it in Chinese. This method apparently works because the ‘alien language’ that he speaks ‘baffles the bear’ and allows the family to escape to safety.[1]

After reading this, I took to the internet with one question in mind: how was this blatantly offensive description of a Chinese person acceptable? I searched reviews, looking for any sign that I wasn’t the only one who read this portrayal as problematic. Not only were opinions conspicuously silent on the matter, the public seemed to hold a completely different opinion: the book had been awarded the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, described as a story of wonder and connectivity.

To put it in Richard Powers’ terms, I was more baffled than a bear who had been spoken to in Chinese. The description of Winston Ma had been so heavy-handed in its stereotypes, so outrageous in its exoticisms, that I couldn’t have been the only one who noticed. Could I?

And yet, this instance is the continuing of a thread that has followed me through my life as an Asian American. It’s the feeling of being gaslit by a society that tells me my experiences of discrimination and racism are not, in fact, discrimination and racism. That these experiences are, at best, either hilarious misunderstandings, or, at worst, isolated instances that absolutely are not indicative of a larger narrative of xenophobia.

After all — it’s not racist if strangers approach me in the street to try to guess my ‘ethnicity.’ It’s just an honest question if people want to know ‘where I’m really from,’ right?

Or if someone mixes me up with a Korean classmate who looks nothing like me – it’s just an honest mistake, isn’t it?

And it’s not racist if people always assumed I was good at math, good at violin, and asked if my father is Jackie Chan, right? I mean – there are definitely worse real racist things they could say about me, aren’t there?

And those guys out there with yellow fever — isn’t it a compliment if certain men are just really into Asian chicks?

And if a white man kills eight people, six of whom are Asian – well, that’s not really a hate crime, is it?

In a New York Times article following the Atlanta shooting (read: hate crime), Angela Hsu states, ‘There’s a tendency to not believe that violence against Asian-Americans is real. It’s almost like you need something really, really jarring to make people believe that there is discrimination against Asian-Americans.’

This unseen violence, this invisible discrimination, is the reason why people like Richard Powers can write racist depictions of Chinese people into their 2019 Pulitzer Prize winning books – because discrimination against Asians is so thoroughly ingrained in society’s collective conscience that not only has it been largely overlooked, it’s been normalized. It’s the same reason why Asian stereotypes and tropes are allowed to unexaminedly and unabashedly persist: because deep down, we, as a society, believe them to be true, accurate, and authentic.

After all, It’s not racist if a white author depicts a Chinese man saying Chinese people ‘eat many strange thing’ – because, well, don’t they?

From Charlie Chan to Diane Nguyen, from Daito and Shoto in Ready Player One to The Overstory’s Winston Ma, from the Chinatown gates to the myth of the model minority, our identities as Asians have been misjudged and misconstrued, our ‘stories ‘ warped and propagated by people who tell us time and again that ‘Asians’ and ‘Asian’ culture as inherently ‘foreign,’ who deny us the right to our own authenticity. It’s the narrative – over which we’ve had no control – that has distanced us from the rest of society, stripped us of our humanity, denied us any chance at integration. It’s an insidious narrative of acceptable and accepted xenophobia.

As Charles Yu says in his book Interior Chinatown, ‘Being Chinese is and always has been, from the very beginning, a construction, a performance of features, gestures, culture, and exoticism. An invention, a reinvention, a stylization.”[2]

 This mirage of ‘Asian’ – the reduction of our identities to a handful of preconceived tropes – has been perpetuated for so long that it has subsumed us.  Society takes for granted that Asians are constantly being described in terms of ‘strangeness,’ but the legacy continues to this day, forcing us to exotify ourselves in order to be palatable to the public, despite how it erases our identities, bars us from empathy, belittles our existence.

It’s the episode of Master of None where Aziz Ansari and Ravi Patel deliberate over being asked to put on an Indian accent for auditions. It’s the facade of the Chinatown gates. It’s Ken Jeong in The Hangover.  It’s Willis Wu from Interior Chinatown having ‘Fluent in Accented English’ on his resume.

Embedded behind the image of ‘Asian’ is our alienation. At best, we’re eccentric and comical as much as we are submissive. At worst, it allows us to be coded as evil, cold, inhuman. Always, the message has been the same: to be Asian is to be undeniably foreign.

It shows in the myth of the model minority, typifying us as intelligent but unfeeling.

It shows in real life interactions, where being described as ‘exotic’ is supposed to be considered a compliment, not a demeaning and distancing reminder of xenophobia. It shows when others constantly feel entitled to ask, ‘But where do you really come from?’

It shows in society’s insistence on Asian white-washing because it makes us more relatable, more accessible (hello, Emma Stone, hello, The Mahjong Line).

It shows through Winston Ma in The Overstory. Because if people unquestionably buy into the belief that even we, as Asians,say things like,‘Chinese eat many strange thing!’ then it’s not too far of a stretch to buy into the belief that maybe we also ‘eat many strange thing’ like bats, and that maybe our inherent strangeness — our codified villainy — has caused this pandemic.

It shows in what Charles Yu describes as the real history of Asians in America: ‘Two hundred years of being perpetual foreigners.’[3]

In a 2018 op-ed published by the New York Times on the lack of Asian representation in Hollywood, Thessaly La Force points out, “It is only when [Asians] are hidden that we are allowed to succeed. Which leads to a more troubling but inevitable conclusion: that there is something about the very physiognomy of the Asian face that American audiences still cannot or will not accept.” (And that, according to The Overstory, even the bears in the woods don’t accept).

I’ve sometimes found myself looking in the mirror, trying to diagnose what was so ‘exotic’ about my face. What was it that other people could immediately peg as so distinctly different? (hint: surely, it’s the ‘Almond Eyes,’ although I’ve never been able to see it.)

But unlike Winston Ma — a Chinese character written by a white person — I don’t look at myself and marvel at my own strangeness. I look at myself and wonder, what exactly is it about me — and, by extension, about Chinese food, Chinese language, Chinese culture —  that other people think is so foreign?

When I told my father that ‘Winston Ma’ claims Chinese people ‘eat many strange thing,’  he replied, “Idon’t think we eat strange things.”

Charles Yu summarizes this problem by asking, ‘If someone showed you my picture on the street, how would you describe it? You might say, an Asian fellow. Asian dude. Asian Man. How many of you would say: that’s an American? What is it about an Asian Man that makes him so hard to assimilate?’[4]

It’s the problem of living in a society that erroneously thinks it knows and recognizes us, all the while ignoring our voices and dismissing our experiences, all the while refusing to understand and engage with us.

It’s the same problem that allows characters like Winston Ma to be believed as accurate portrayals of Chinese people.

It’s the same problem that asks the question, ‘If Bridgerton was so diverse, how come there weren’t any consequential Asian characters?”

And it’s the same problem that asks the question, “Why does it have to take something jarring in order for violence and discrimination against Asian Americans to be believed?” 

Anti-Asian violence and discrimination didn’t begin in 2020. It has always been here, festering in the subconscious of society, raging beneath the surface of racial tension. And when it finally erupted in tragedy, it was because the groundwork had already been laid: an entire identity constructed, accepted, and normalized in the public conscience. An entire identity built around fetishization, emasculation, exotification, alienation, appropriation, objectification, and, ultimately, dehumanization.

And so, for those of us who want to move beyond performative allyship:

If we truly want to stop Asian hate, we need to change the way we look at ‘Asians’ as a whole. We need to stop exotifying ‘Asian’ cultures, explaining away traits and features that are different from dominant society as ‘weird.’ We need to stop erecting barriers between ‘us’ and ‘them’.

We need to acknowledge that the term ‘Asian’ is a meaningless categorization that lumps together an absurd number of different peoples, cultures, experiences.  We’re not all the same. We don’t all look the same. We need to acknowledge how society mistreats and misrepresents each group separately, from Indians to Vietnamese to Thai to Koreans to Chinese.

We need to examine and challenge our presumptions and assumptions around the Asian identity.  We’re not objects, fetishes, stereotypes. Seek out real Asian portrayals – whether it be in books, movies, or TV – that are actually written by Asians.

We need to increase Asian representation and we need to amplify Asian voices and authentic Asian stories. As much as it is our responsibility to stop perpetuating harmful messages and stereotypes surrounding Asians, it is also our responsibility to listen to us, to hear us, to believe us.

We must actively deconstruct the damaging and dehumanizing myths about Asians in the United States and reconstruct the identities of the people we’ve always known ourselves to be.

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