62. On the slow death of Asian America
Happy AANHPI Heritage Month!
I’m feeling quite accomplished because I’ve been trying to read much more frequently. It's something that I used to do almost daily in the late 2010s, but it significantly dropped off after 2020, and I’ve just now tallied up everything I’ve read this year so far for a total sum of eight books (plus one more in progress—Shen Tao's The Poet Empress). Given that 2026 is not yet halfway through, I’m moderately pleased with my progress.
Flux by Jinwoo Chong
Time is a Mother by Ocean Vuong
The Woman in Me by Britney Spears
The Daddy Diaries: The Year I Grew Up by Andy Cohen
You Better Believe I’m Gonna Talk About It by Lisa Rinna
Pretty Mess by Erika Jayne
The Empress of Salt and Fortune by Nghi Vo
Hunger: A Novella and Stories by Lan Samantha Chang
It humors me to see the titles listed out because there’s a very clear genre divide that neatly splits them into two categories and capably articulates my current interests. Four of them are very obviously related to my Real Housewives hobby, while the other four fit squarely beneath the all-encompassing “Asian American” label, albeit perhaps within the science fiction and magical realism sub-genres. These books came to me from the New York Public Library, the Aesop Queer Library, the community library where I live, and both brick-and-mortar and digital bookstores alike; of them, I want to explicitly mention that the lattermost two are extraordinarily compelling reads.
It’s May again and with it returns Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander (AANHPI) Heritage Month. Originally signed into law in 1978 and first commemorated in the United States as Asia-Pacific Heritage Week in 1979 for the first ten days of the month of May, a 1990 bill was later passed to extend it through the full month beginning 1992. In 2025, President Trump eliminated various White House initiatives and commissions on addressing the communities’ needs, and with them federal recognition of the commemorative month, but it continues to be observed across the country. Therefore, it is also an annual reminder that my presence here is racialized.
After finishing college last decade, I wanted to spend more of my time reading for leisure. I’d seen mentioned somewhere that books by authors of East Asian descent were emergent, the popularity of which most likely being spurred by the success of Crazy Rich Asians (Kevin Kwan), and I thought it would be a good starting point for my own recreation. So, in addition to the other works on my shelf such as The Fifth Season (N. K. Jemisin), I picked up Free Food for Millionaires (Min Jin Lee), The Three-Body Problem (Liu Cixin), The Paper Menagerie (Ken Liu), and The People in the Trees (Hanya Yanagihara).
A part of that was due to conscious choice. It was an easy decision to dive deeper into “Asian” literature because it was a “genre”—if all writing by authors whose ancestral lineage share a continent can be flattened into a singular genre—that had been scarcely present throughout my schooling. I have never professed to exist within a vacuum, to be independent and self-made, because I don’t think of myself so highly (and, moreover, because it would simply be untrue), and so I have acknowledged that my existence, like that of everyone else, is contextual. I am here at this juncture in time and space as a result of macroeconomic forces. Thus, I didn’t necessarily begrudge the American education system for, by virtue of existing in the West, prioritizing Western works, but it was also true that I had my own culture I enjoyed seeing discussed and reflected back to me within this genre of novels; some reinforced certain traditions and behaviors that are integral to my heritage, while others opened me to new ways of thought.
In hindsight, I do believe another part of that was due to subconscious desire. I searched primarily for Asian American authors because I felt disillusioned with the dismal state of Asian America. I looked for great writers and thinkers to read because reading is an exercise of internal deliberation, and I wanted to converse with these people so I could reassure myself that we are collectively capable of more, that we are more, than boba liberalism—but I was not yet capable of verbalizing this sentiment.
The era of the second Trump presidency has had, of course, a chilling effect on minority advocacy. In the past, May was populated with myriad self-aggrandizing events put on by brands to score Asian diversity points, but those—and their sponsors—have since vanished, hoping to curry favor with or avoid maltreatment from Republican menacing. I don’t mean to imply that they’ve disappeared altogether, but I do proffer that they’ve significantly dwindled in number. As a result, with their funding imperiled and their supporters routinely persecuted, some of the organizations that remain have retreated to staking out the most banal sociopolitical positions. In lieu of displaying the bravery they might have professed to possess ere the far right’s ascension to power, they’ve instead proven themselves to be spineless now that push has predictably returned to shove.
What should AANHPI Heritage Month celebrate? What should be the purpose of recognizing at national scale the continued existence of Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders beyond the fact? To me, the answer seems straightforward: it’s a dedicated month for the zeitgeist to specially organize—indeed, galvanize—the public towards learning about systemic discrimination against the AANHPI populations for the purpose of achieving true social equality. Yet, such attempts feel nonexistent. Instead, the celebrations amount to little more than champagne toasts in service of protecting capital from scandals and targeted advertisements to sell us more stuff. (There’s a train of thought that inclusive advertising is a net positive because it is a function of societywide attitudes towards demographic diversity; I wouldn’t bother challenging that if said advertising went hand in hand with more serious, dedicated efforts.)
Since I live in a city that’s never lacking for such celebrations, I’ve been to many over the years and occasionally involved myself with their planning. I have fond memories of a May Day organizing dinner held for former Chinese-speaking volunteers of a New York State Assembly campaign; I accepted invitations to Grammy- and Live Nation-sponsored networking soirées to connect with the music industry crowd; I worked with friends to produce queer nightlife events for Asian crowds. The gatherings that I believe have been most successful in creating positive impact for our people all share a through line, which is being purposeful in connecting people, be it through sharing knowledge or mutual aid in any form. Because over half of all Asian Americans (numbering 7% of the U.S. population) were not born in this country, we’re especially lacking in very particular sets of resources.
The logic of representation and identity politics was that the ascension of one of our kind would set the country on a righteous, progressive path forward, notwithstanding all the drone strikes as we continued to wage war around the world on civilian populations or the rapidly-inflating and crippling medical and student debt nationwide. What did any of these issues matter? We had hollow victories to celebrate.
Last week, I was at The Asian American Foundation (TAAF)’s Heritage Month Summit. They were founded in 2021, so this was their fifth annual conference and the first I’ve attended. My first impression was that it was ran like a moneyed and well-oiled machine. For it, they rented out sections of Javits Center, the largest convention center in New York City that hosts the likes of the annual Armory Show as well as Hillary Clinton’s 2016 doomed presidential campaign victory party; they platformed illustrious celebrity speakers including Auliʻi Cravalho, Min Jin Lee, Sunisa Lee, Ke Huy Quan, and Tan France; and they provided three generous meals per day gratis, catered by trendy local restaurants such as Saigon Social. My second was that TAAF had done a better job than most other comparable organizations in ensuring that the people of Asian descent represented there were not all of East Asian backgrounds. “Asian” as a term predominantly refers to East Asian and too often leaves out the rest of the continent in everyday American usage (I understand it to skew towards South Asian in the U.K.) as a result of imperialist histories, but TAAF’s speaker panels and guest appearances showed a modicum of intent towards diversification.
That is more or less where my positive sentiments ended. The attendees ran the gamut from white-collar banking and consulting professionals to social media influencers, and the panels were faux-inspirational TED Talks-esque drivel dedicated to identity politics and the singular logic of representation, the sort of neoliberal rhetorical prisons that constrain us from accurately diagnosing and resolving the issues that plague our communities. I listened in on a moderated conversation with athletes about representing the United States at the Olympics, during which one discussed feeling personally validated because their grandparents had been forcibly incarcerated in the 1942-46 Japanese American internment camps. “The Proud and the Brave: AAPIs in the Military” was the feature for another such conversation, “exploring what it means to claim pride in being fully Asian and fully American, to serve with courage, and to lead with conviction […] reflect[ing] on visibility [and] patriotism.” I wish I could say that I disrupted the latter with loud dissent and got myself thrown out—instead, I boycotted it and refused to add to its attendance metrics.
“TAAF serves the AAPI community in their pursuit of safety, belonging, and prosperity.” This is the sort of boilerplate mission statement that I have seen replicated ad nauseam across virtually every Asian American advocacy group, and I’m skeptical of them all because I have witnessed them in action throwing their weight behind exclusionary politics or eugenics (see: the recent uproar surrounding Gen Z meetups marketed for mixed-race individuals but in practice only selecting for participants with White parentage), all framed through the all-too-familiar trappings of representation. The best of them go only so far as to share uplifting stories about history-making individuals of Asian descent and concern themselves with assimilationist questions about “belonging” as “Americans”—which, in the context of the current challenges to birthright citizenship, for example, are not wholly unimportant.
Yet I tire of the same decades-old talking points because we are being afflicted with worse upon worse, and I strenuously desire the impossible: a concerted, community-wide, generational reckoning with the underlying structural forces that more than disadvantage us as a collective—in effect, that which #StopAsianHate failed to achieve. TAAF had invited former U.S. Navy and Air Force personnel who currently provide “advisory services for the defense and investor community” to bestow upon us their infinite wisdom from their golden perch within a B-52 as the only service members of Asian descent; I desperately wanted to stand up and inquire whether they now feel more like a man—or, worse, a girlboss—now that they’ve committed the same crimes against their own people that have been done by their new masters for centuries, as they sowed Agent Orange across Vietnam, as they dedicated their lives to enforcing ethnic cleansing across the lands of our forebears, as they pressured women across the continent into sexual slavery, as the United States of America right now bombards West Asia in service of the Epstein class. I wanted to question them about resolving their cognitive dissonance—any, if at all. I’m ashamed that I did not. There are no just wars, except perhaps the theoretical war against the ones we Americans are currently waging. It felt insufferably self-serving and -laudatory.
I know that TAAF has never claimed the mantle of decolonialism. I’m aware that they don’t incorporate its language into their marketing materials. I read their annual disclosures and saw some disbursed funds and I don’t doubt that that money was life-changing for two or three people, but it does not materially affect the reality that TAAF, like Gold House and all their ilk, exist to enrich themselves in return for feel-good pats on the back. They insert themselves into ecosystems of capital wherein they solicit funds from high-dollar donors with beautiful soundbites about aid and impact and justice, all the while entrenching their proximity to systemic power. (I note that they don’t seem to have ever passed the low bar of due diligence set by MacKenzie Scott, a philanthropist more serious about the impact of dollar-giving.) However, although I recognize the precarious contemporary state of minority advocacy, they and their identity-oriented peers are at best irresponsible and at worst carrying water for genocide. To them, it seemingly would not matter that the Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents deporting our families are Asian so long as they are personally gratified. Perhaps those very agents will be invited to speak at next year’s Heritage Summit.
Yet this vacuous phenomenon is not limited to Asian American organizations, because these organizations are also comprised of, supported by, and led by Asian Americans. It is a moral failing on not only a collective but also an individual level.
During the height of ICE-led raids across California and Minnesota earlier this year, the queer Asian nightlife production company with which I sometimes associate put out a call to action. We leaned into our network and invited all to join us in supporting ICE victims with concrete, tangible actions. In response, we received hundreds of likes and comments and shares—but not one dollar was raised. Months after our initial call, during which we promised to match monetary donations, the donated dollar balance languished at zero.
Money isn’t everything. I can easily acknowledge that there are multiple ways to contribute because I myself have also contributed in multiple ways, and I don’t assume that everybody did nothing, yet I am also not incapable of piecing four and four together. I know our demographic—the jobs they hold, the leisures on which they spend [a lot]—and I know our collective capabilities. That not a single penny was raised is not just a statement of intent—it is an indictment of my kind.
I want more for us than a servile, consumerist politics that is governmentally impotent because it is too concerned with its own conceit, a political identity that wields its many cultural heritages as a cudgel in service of entrenching monopolized power and not as a weight that bends it to concede. I am dissatisfied with the Asians of my generation who pride themselves on their apathy, the self-proclaimed "Gaysians" in my social circles attending their "homepas" financed by their six-figure email jobs who will trot out their identities as permanent victims and not as a stepping stone towards challenging our own complicity in abetting historic wealth transfers to the upper echelons of the economic top 1%, for whom we work as investment bankers and lawyers and accountants and technical PMs.
The bulk of what I want to express has not meaningfully deviated from what I wrote last year. I remain as frustrated as I was then with the struggles of the diaspora. Meanwhile, the motherland does not care. She continues to iterate and evolve without us, as is her right to do so. She does not concern herself with us because we do not make our lives on her soil, she is but a concept to us that has ossified within our minds, yet we remain unable as a collective to deeply engage with our existence in the West because we are reduced to tropes and redundancies—some voluntarily—here, where we are willfully misinterpreted and misunderstood. All I want is for everyone to be afforded the same opportunities out of what's increasingly seeming to be my own misguided sense of fairness—because the world is not fair yet some of us still hope to make it so—but I tire of swimming upstream. It's a hermetic logic with a dead end, but I am simply so tired of struggling.
“Wenn ich dich liebe, was geht es dich an?”
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795-96)
“毁灭你，与你何干?”
—Liu Cixin, The Dark Forest (2008)
And I suppose this is the real reason why I've been burying myself in books, written by the people who look and behave and experience and live like me, because I'm in sore need of inspiration and, moreover, of evidence that my life is not a waste, that I am not wasted effort, that my insignificance can be a consequence of my own volition and not because it was imposed upon me. So I come to terms with my own triviality, I do, I will not miss the forest for the trees, but it is a curse that I am this kind of person to whom all of this matters, because I too do not want to be talking about this forever! It is a trap! This is not the kind of person that I want to be! I am able-bodied and capable, and I am more than the returns I can generate for my employers' shareholders and I resent that forces greater than me have decided to engender this sort of existential miserliness—that I must be measured and disciplined because of who's in power or due to me only having limited agency over my life. I can only be hired, I can only be dated, I can only be desired as a result of decisions outside of my control. This is not who I am—it is not who I want to be.
June follows May and with it will come yet another reminder that I exist at another junction: sexual orientation. I should be at the apex of my abilities come midnight on June 1st, and yet I will be at my most disappointed. Confronted by our performed helplessness, willfully meek and unable to engage with the serious reality of our politicized existences, by gays who couldn’t read their way out of a coloring book and Asians who must consult ChatGPT to create Instagram captions—what good is it to be gay and of Asian descent, what good are these labels, when the community at large is fucking useless?
I have friends who do not read my writing. They do not converse with my thoughts. That is fine, because this is who they are, and my thoughts are not so crucial as to demand their consideration, and I accept them for who they are, but I would like for them to not promise to read my work because it is not only a tad insulting, it is also altogether unnecessary. Because—is that not the function of friendship? I listen to the songs they like even if the music isn’t to my taste, I walk to their bars and sit on the train for an hour just to hang out with them. I inconvenience myself a million ways every day because it’s ultimately an infinitesimally tiny price to pay for friendship, and my friends mean something to me, yet reading is a prerequisite gateway to critical thought of which I fear my loved ones becoming incapable. And, so, I read and write. I read and I write because I want to have hope again. I want to converse with our luminaries and to believe that there remain more of them out there, and I do, I do still believe, but every day that belief shrinks, and I cannot go on like this.
“I wanted to live at any price. I confess I might as well have resented that blind, deaf fate, which, with no apparent reason, seemed to have decided to crush me like a fly; but why did I not stop at resentment? Why did I begin to live, knowing that it was not worthwhile to begin? Why did I attempt to do what I knew to be an impossibility?”
—Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot (1868–1869)
P.S.—If you’re interested, I wrote this very brief post below earlier this month as a sample of my process, sharing the very disjointed sentences that eventually became this entry.