Narrating Failure: MC Jin's Return to Rap in the United States

When MC Jin returned to the United States in 2012 after a four-year stint as a Hong Kong entertainer, US media was fixated on a particular narrative of his "failed" opportunity to be one of the first Asian American rap stars nearly a decade prior. This essay examines how MC Jin himself explains his interest in rap as a source of Asian American identity and kinship formation. His self-narratives both respond to and prompt media coverage of failure as a racial discourse in MC Jin's biography as a rap artist. I argue that MC Jin revises existing knowledge of his biography, which counters the modelminority logic attributed to Asian American rap stardom and resignifies "failure" as an ongoing dialogue to explore, develop, and imagine new ways of becoming Asian American.