Asian American X: An Intersection of Twenty-First Century Asian American Voices

INTRODUCTION

Introduction Arar Han and John Y. Hsu No one will know who we are until we know who we are! —Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X The Origin of Asian American X Before all of this—the thousands of emails, countless conversations, and the book contract that have led us here to the opening pages of Asian American X—we were simply old high school friends attending college in Boston, just trying to better understand ourselves. You might have called us constructively confused—groping in a cave of questions about identity and race—yet gravitating toward the light, whether through casual conversations or the books we shared. Then, in March 2001, the Harvard Crimson ran Justin Fong’s “The Invasian.”1 The article was a satire accusing Asian American students at Harvard of living up to, and even reinforcing, Asian American stereotypes. According to its author, who is himself Asian American, our generation of college-aged Asian Americans represented a “segregated community of stereotypes: selflacking males that don’t have the courage to talk to anyone unless they appear just as ›accid as that image in the mirror, and a smattering of females that exist to satisfy someone’s fetish.” A frenzied intercollegiate discussion immediately erupted, and we both watched in fascination. Given the provocative language of the article, most responders to “The Invasian” were furious and defensive, vigorously rebutting Fong’s blanket negative portrayal of Asian American college students. More speci‹cally, they rejected his assertion that Asian American identity is de‹ned by sexual stereotypes and self-segregation (see Lee, Unraveling the “Model Minority” Stereotype). One woman opposed Fong on the grounds that such a portrayal of Asian American collective identity would fan the proliferation of hate crimes against Asian Americans.2 Another reader suggested that Fong ought to soften his “aggressive tone,” since phenomena like selfsegregation could equally apply to other groups, including Caucasians.3 Still others understood the printing of “The Invasian” as the Crimson’s lack of cultural sensitivity toward Asian Americans, and some ‹fty Harvard students staged a protest against the editorial board for printing “words which act only to undermine the efforts of other Asians who wish to defeat stereotypes constructively .”4 The Crimson published two apologies days later. While we, too, found Fong’s article to be excessively brash, we also identi‹ed with his emphasis on individual identity. We recognized that a grounding point of “The Invasian” was its assertion that, like all other individuals , each Asian American of our generation has the right and even the responsibility to work toward an authentic life—a life that is faithful to one’s uniquely individual way of being.5 In an attempt to reinforce this point and steer public debate away from name-calling, Arar wrote a letter to the Crimson that appeared four days later: Granted, Fong makes some egregious faux pas in his open letter, but these missteps do not justify many Asian American students’ simplistic accusations that Fong has set Harvard Asian American students back ten years. Such attacks stem from a complete failure to appreciate his point that we must strive to live by the truth of our substance rather than blundering down the path of super‹ciality and falsehood by ignoring basic human responsibility to be true to oneself.6 Through the smoke of the ‹restorm ignited by “The Invasian,” we came to recognize a central question of this challenging debate about Asian American identity: As individuals and as a collective body, who are we, and what are our de‹nitive individual and collective features? Understanding through Self-Evaluation In examining ourselves, we started to explore why we identi‹ed so strongly with the individual conception of the self. What caused us to part company Asian American X 2 with many of our Asian American peers and conceptualize Fong as a liberator of sorts—taunting his fellow students out of a trap of stereotypical Asianness and daring them to step out of their racial con‹nes to construct an original identity? Why did we believe that we had to transcend our collective identities—such as race, gender, religion, sexuality, and class—in order to realize an authentic personal identity?7 To answer these questions, we began to re›ect on our education and upbringing. One of the very ‹rst things we realized was that neither of us had experienced much racial persecution growing up...