Forty-seven.

Enter part two of two, wherein I endeavor to make peace with my existence at this current juncture.

Were I a Real Housewives cast member, I think my tagline would be: "I'm not just gay—I'm also Asian."

Every episode of the Real Housewives television franchise opens with an introductory reel to acquaint viewers with the major players of the show, during which they each deliver quippy one-liners. Some of the housewives use it as an explicit branding opportunity (Bethenny Frankel); others like to make oblique references to ideas or concepts logical only to themselves (Ramona Singer, Sonja Morgan). The truly savvy deploy searing tongue-in-cheek remarks that verbally skewer rivals and demolish the fourth wall, inviting audiences into their world with all the finesse of a nudge and a wink (Lisa Vanderpump, Erika Jayne).

Fans of the series commonly invent taglines for themselves as a comical and reflective exercise intended to mimic the show's stars. I began to brainstorm mine after seeing a 2013 Lady Gaga interview on Andy Cohen's Watch What Happens Live late-night talk show, during which he asked her what her tagline would be. I was watching the interview because I was, at the time, a diehard Lady Gaga fan, and I very much enjoyed her answer: “They may say I'm a woman, but underneath I’m all man.”

Gaga’s tagline was a cheeky nod to the clickbait rumors at the time that she was a transgender woman, rumors that she herself didn’t care to dispel when asked during a separate interview with broadcast journalist Anderson Cooper, explaining that she felt no need to do so because she doesn't consider being transgender as wrong or offensive. Her tagline was therefore a triple entendre: it played with the frivolity and artifice of celebrity, it invoked a Judith Butler-esque understanding of gender being a performance, and it demonstrated simple self-awareness and humor.

I never watched Real Housewives until after my big breakup in 2022, when I was desperately using media to distract my brain from grief, but it didn’t take me long to come up with a tagline of my own. I imagined myself filming a season as a new member and considered how my debut would be received. To the society crowd that often features on the show, appearances are everything and I knew I would be immediately judged by them on my discernible physical traits; to the fans, every housewife fits neatly into an archetype, and I would probably be boxed in as the gay Crystal Minkoff. Some housewives are brought onto the show because their celebrity attracts viewers, whereas others are cast to provide the kind of train wreck soap opera drama that has defined the show and made it so memorable—if I had a choice, I'd like to be the latter.

I structured my hypothetical tagline to place "gay" first and "Asian" second to subvert the obvious: when first encountering me, I know that my physical appearance is perceived first; my being gay, like my other traits, is secondary. Although I can no less divorce one from the other, I'm well aware of the operational logic of categorization when it comes to identity and first impressions.

In the United States, May marks the start of a month-long celebration of pan-Asian, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander heritage, and I've found myself thinking about my most immutable characteristics. I am a gay, cisgender man who is also of ethnic Han Chinese descent; I am an Asian American who happens to be gay. I am this and that and both at the same time.

As published in full within Forty-six, the following text is the opening section of my personal statement from when I applied to law schools for admission:

Are you familiar with General Tso’s Chicken? It’s a popular Chinese take-out dish, but there isn’t much authenticity to it—it is largely nonexistent within China.

My biological parents are Chinese immigrants, and for them my birth was symbolic—I was named after Uncle Sam. My ancestry is rooted in Hunan, a province in southern China, where I lived when I was young. Hunan is famed for its fiery spirit, which is reflected in both its cuisine and its people: the food is blisteringly spicy and the region birthed decisive figures like Máo Zédōng and my (actual) ancestor, Zuǒ Zōngtáng—or, General Tso. As I was born in the year of the rooster, I jest that I am General Tso’s Chicken personified. More seriously, I hope to embody throughout my lifetime that Hunanese spirit of transformative passion.

I was twenty-three when I wrote that essay. Fresh out of college and working an entry-level job for a banking conglomerate, I felt aimless. I had spent years reading critical race theory as I tried to enlighten myself to the state of the world because I felt disillusioned and, as a result, dissatisfied, and the idea of spending my life generating shareholder wealth didn't excite me; I wanted to be the change I hoped to see, as the platitude goes.

As the internet has connected people from all over the world and collected us into many shared town squares, I've seen over time a recurring comment from non-Americans that the Americans are preoccupied with the concept of identity, most typically with regard to race, gender, and sexual orientation (the latter of which being a function of gender, because the categorization of attraction is predicated upon the gender binary). It's implied that discussing our social strata and milieux is inherently divisive, but I disagree—I think it's part and parcel of critiquing power, and I believe that doing so matters because we live in this society. We owe it to ourselves to be proactive participants in shaping our lives.

In college, I read and reread Audre Lorde's Sister Outsider and her seminal essay, "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House," over and over again because I was jaded. The Obama years in the United States had engendered a cheery sentiment pervading popular culture, that equality and improved civil rights were on the horizon for minority groups in the country because we finally had a President who'd experienced firsthand a lifetime as a person of color, such that compassion was more than expected—it was assumed. 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.

We are also citizens of the most powerful country in the world, a country which stands upon the wrong side of every liberation struggle on earth.

Lorde's 1985 essay, "Apartheid U.S.A.," brought to light the contradictions of being an American citizen of color, benefiting from existing within the heart of the empire as the empire meanwhile did its utmost in oppressing people of color around the rest of the planet. She saw the Black American fights for equality and justice as intertwined with the liberatory struggles of Black non-Americans elsewhere, arguing in this context for a focused boycott of and financial divestment from Apartheid South Africa. As I sought to understand my own place in the world by studying scientific racism and colonialism, her insights became my guiding light, and remain ever-relevant even today given the United States's ongoing actions against the Palestinian people.

I wrote the following paragraphs in the midst of the reactionary anti-Asian violence committed in the wake of COVID-19's initial spread and impact here in the United States:

I’ve been quietly ruminating upon the recent spate of brutalities inflicted upon Asians, particularly elderly Asians, across the West and I don’t quite feel outrage alone—I also feel deep sadness and unsurprised disappointment that the Westerners, in their infinite, self-proclaimed civility, continue to demonstrate their commitment to Orientalist violence, not least because each successive video, sensational, vivid, depicts attacks on those who might very well be my own grandparents, which isn’t to say that attacks on complete strangers are any less upsetting but rather that they are all my people to whom I’m inextricably linked by heritage and spirit. From the Chinese Exclusion Act to the Japanese internment camps to the Vietnam and Korean Wars to America’s neocolonialist presence in the Philippines and elsewhere, Asia(ns) in the American imagination has/have never progressed beyond being the Other.

I’ve seen enough of my friends and peers moderate their own calls for justice to explicate that we as a community don’t want increased policing, which must be abolished for its explicit connection to anti-Black racism, such that I feel somewhat hopeful that my community is learning to preserve the traditions of solidarity established by the likes of Yuri Kochiyama and the self-proclaimed Yellow Peril activists (Third World Liberation Front). The attempts to self-educate are there, as is a demonstrable intent to act beyond feel-good platitudes; so, I won’t repeat what has already been said.

The truest solution to preempting further attacks, bigotry made physical, is simple yet still unattainable, resultant of willful ignorance. White supremacy, the very foundation of capitalism, will not acquiesce overnight to efforts seeking to educate it out of existence because those enshrined in its power, laymen and heads of state alike, revel in its benefits such as perpetuating the permanent (and disproportionately non-White) underclass. Ergo, I’m frustrated by futility: with each passing year, I believe less and less that any semblance of equality will be achieved within my lifetime. Members of the various Asian diasporas understand all too well the impulse to minimize ourselves, attempts to preempt danger, yet what appears to be the active targeting of our elderly, the easiest victims and perhaps most inoffensive, signifies something much more sinister: this is deliberate retribution—hunting season.

This isn’t an impassioned plea for peace—I don’t believe that oppressors can be begged into recognizing the humanity of their victims. It also isn’t that I’m hopeless—my people and I will continue to strive for survival with or without it. But, I would qualify this as yet another somber reflection on the sad state of the West’s multicultural experiment, particularly that of the United States, flawed from the onset for its original sins. I’m not despondent, but still I grieve in my own way, silently.

Truthfully, I really was unsurprised at the violence to which Americans resorted in dealing their retribution to the people they held responsible for the pandemic: Asians. For the color of our skin and the shape of our eyes, we would be made to pay a blood price for the freedoms Americans never lost—mask mandates went unenforced as Americans politicized the virus and faked vaccine records, undoing centuries of medical progress despite all evidence pointing to the contrary. I watched bad faith efforts to pin the brutalities on Black Americans even as the facts blared an obvious truth: this was about who gets to be American, and people of all colors were all too happy to scapegoat Asians, the perpetual Other. McCarthyism never left; Edward Said ought to be mandatory reading across the nation.

As my people grappled with what it meant to be Asian American, a demographic roughly grouped together only by an estimation of our ethnic heritages, all that we could collectively sputter was a hashtag: #StopAsianHate. There would be feeble attempts at reckoning with being a citizen of the empire even as leopards ate our faces and anti-violence protests saw fewer attendees than Electric Daisy Carnival, otherwise known as the largest annual gathering of Asian Americans on this continent. I'm not saying that I hate fun—I just hoped, with a pogrom on the horizon, that we would have devoted greater energy towards building organized power.

Ryan Coogler's reference to the Mississippi Delta Chinese in his newest blockbuster, Sinners, was a welcomed depiction for highlighting the long-lived history of Asians in America. Advocacy groups breathily lauded the film's surfacing of "our legacies," yet what is our legacy beyond total capitulation? I'm well aware that we're a non-monolithic, amorphous entity with vastly divergent viewpoints, so perhaps "Asian American" is no longer a useful framing for discursive purposes. I mean, come on: Kamala Harris, the most powerful Asian politician in the country, was by and large endorsed without question by virtually every Asian advocacy group without seriously endeavoring to seek meaningful concessions, such as a guarantee of the ceasefire in Gaza for which she was allegedly (and untruthfully) "working tirelessly" to achieve. Absent such concessions, she alienated her core constituencies and lost the election, jeopardizing each and every one of us.

I guess I might as well spell it out in plain English: I'm frustrated with the current state of Asian America. Who are we beyond a class of perpetual outsiders, tech company product managers, rave attendees, cut fruit poets, and bubble tea connoisseurs? For what do we advocate beyond hollow representation? Kamala Harris, Tammy Duckworth, Ted Lieu, Grace Meng, politicians who weaponize their identity in service of corruption and war, none of these people will save us because they're too busy chasing down their next AIPAC dollar.

Look—I get it. We’re not Black, and we’re not White either. We exist in an oft-ignored liminal space because we number less than a tenth of the United States, but we must interrogate our own standing. There's a through line from the Chinese Exclusion Act to the reactionary violence of the coronavirus era; it is long past time that we shed our model minority badges. I don't want to be in the next Marvel film. I don't need the next President of the United States to be Asian. I don't look forward to a future of tokenizing myself as an accessory to racialized institutional power by donning the caricatured garb of my motherland's aesthetics. I am Asian American by default; should I spend a lifetime apologizing to myself for my lunchbox trauma?

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.

Just as Audre Lorde was Black, she was also lesbian, too. Her identities were inseparably linked and how, I believe, she was able to arrive at her political compass. I've experienced a lifetime of discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation from people of all ethnicities, yet I've also encountered firsthand discrimination on the basis of ethnicity from people of all sexual orientations. It is precisely because we are marginalized that apathy is not an option; we must be proactive instead of appeasing via conformity. It's not to say that none of us are trying; it's to point out that not enough of us are doing.

I am heartened by the best of us, from ACT UP protesting the FDA for its deadly inaction on the AIDS public health crisis to 18 Million Rising standing firm after losing a quarter of a million dollars in funding for their stance on Palestine. I am inspired by my friends, who actually work tirelessly to provide free English classes and tenant unionizing support to the Chinese enclaves here in New York. I have witnessed my Asian American peers donate their time and hard-earned dollars to the most pressing causes of our time. I have not lost hope on us yet.

These next two paragraphs are excerpted from the closing sections of my aforementioned personal statement:

As the firstborn of my family’s first American generation, I arose where East met West. So, too, did General Tso’s Chicken. But it is marketed to Americans as Chinese without being Chinese, and it is considered by the Chinese to be specifically American. It inhabits both worlds without citizenship, yet it is still tangible, it is popularly consumed, and it is real.

Just as I exist at the intersection of my identity, so does everyone else at theirs; this makes evident the necessity of interdisciplined leaders, particularly in an age of violent and virulent demagoguery. With my skills and an open mind, I won’t back down—I am no chicken.

This past week, one of my best friends and I walked her childhood block as we canvassed in support of Zohran Mamdani's mayoral campaign. We're just two people who each inhabit our own multitudinous identities, but we're aligned in not giving up on shaping the world in which we live. I doubt either of us believes that electoral politics is the only means to our desired end; nonetheless, neither she nor I exert ourselves solely in that direction. I might harbor my own conflicting emotions about the complexities of my identity, but I try to let it guide me towards proactivity. It's the only way I can make peace with my existence at this juncture.