Hello, my name is...
In Like a Lion
So much has happened this month that it’s hard to get my head straight. The death of Sarah Everard and the way the police responded to the subsequent protests, for one - followed by at least three mass shootings. It feels like we, as a country, barely had time to process exactly what happened in Atlanta before our thoughts were violently refocused to Boulder. Which is a shame, because there’s a lot of there there.
As shocking and awful as each one of these incidents are, it’s Atlanta that continues to haunt me. While I personally believe the murderer deliberately targeted people who look like me, it feels bigger than that to me. In no small terms, I hear it as a clarion call that has crumbled the last remnants of the foundation on which I was raised.
Work hard, stay out of trouble
I was born in America to Korean immigrant parents. This obviously makes me Asian American, but that’s not something I’ve historically identified with. For one thing, Asia is a big place and more than half the world is Asian. But even if you narrowed it down to Korean American, I never really felt that much in common with fellow Korean Americans growing up. In retrospect, the problem probably was that there weren’t that many of us in the time and place I grew up - central Ohio, in the 80’s.
This was an incontrovertible fact of the makeup of our suburban city, which at the time was 94.2% non-Latino white and 2.7% Asian. The Census tells me that my immediate family was 9% of all Koreans there. The point being, where I grew up was insanely white - even by Ohio standards.
It should come as no surprise, then, to learn that my path - from day one - was one of assimilation. To this day, I don’t speak Korean much at all - apparently, child psychologists of the time warned that teaching two languages at once would impair the ability to master one of them, and my parents wanted to make sure I spoke English perfectly.
Like many Asian Americans whose parents dreamed of bright futures for their kids, I was taught to keep my head down, work hard at school, and stay out of trouble by avoiding conflict. If I did this, I would go on to have a successful life. If I did this, the American Dream was in reach.
The adventures of “Chink Boy”
And that’s what I did, even as I fell in love with the weirder fringes of culture - leading me on a life-long journey that led me to create this newsletter. I had a keen sense of what was important to me, and learned to pour my heart into the things I cared about, and give zero fucks about the rest. I hung with the outcasts but did well enough in school to avoid the wrong kind of attention. But along the way, I learned how others saw me.
Like the time I was 8ish and a classmate ran up to me in the hallway to relay a joke that explored the different kinds of slanted eyes Asians apparently have. Or the campout during which the older kids nicknamed me “Chink Boy.” I’d never heard that word before and had to ask somebody what it meant.
Or the time I was cast as Ho-Jon in our middle school production of M*A*S*H. The play was part of a popular franchise that took place at a US mobile surgical hospital during the Korean War, and my character was its only Korean character. Looking back, it’s not a great one - a 15 year old “houseboy” who is taken under the wing of the surgeons at the unit. Even then, I knew it wasn’t a real Korean name. Here’s a taste of the screenplay:
But I mainly remember the note the teacher directing the play gave me one day:
Can you mix up your R’s and L’s like the way Asians do when they talk?
My response was fairly straightforward - that’s not how anyone I know speaks. From my perspective, this was evidently true. And it’s remained true since - of the hundreds or maybe even thousands of Koreans and East / Southeast Asians I’ve met, maybe one person ever mixed those letters up. The myth has to do with the way other languages transliterate “loan words” from English into their own alphabets. It also conveniently leaves aside the fact that many Asians learn English quite well, actually. And honestly have you ever stopped to wonder if you’re pronouncing “karaoke” correctly? But yet it persists.
But sweetly naive 13 year old me had no idea what one my favorite teachers was talking about, and he let it drop.
And just to be clear- I’m sharing this now not to provoke a sense of outrage, or to seek pity. My intent is to describe situations that many Asian Americans have experienced, which I’ll come back to later.
Erasure and invisibility
As I became an adult, I continued to keep my head down. I separated my life from my career like it was church and state. My pen name is a tribute to the writer Richard Meltzer, but it also makes it harder to connect my work life to my personal life.
I learned to stay silent at work, even if I should have raised an eye, a hand, a fist. Like when my boss told me, “you have a really Asian way of reacting to things. See, like that,” he said as I looked at him, stroking my chin while I controlled my emotions - trying and failing to come up with a suitable response to the guy who was going to give me my performance review.
Some of you might be shocked, but I knew what he meant. In a way, I appreciated his candor - if he saw that in me, I had no doubt that others did, too. I may have managed to say, “thank you for your feedback,” the way you’re supposed to.
Keeping my head down seemingly paid off - I’ve had good jobs with fancy titles. At a dinner party, I was told I was “basically white” by a co-worker’s partner. Again, good to know.
While I question whether I’ve been truly accepted at any of these day jobs, I was tolerated - even as I made my true self invisible at work. To this day, I have very few actual friends from that world. It’s why I laugh when I hear people say “do what you love and you won’t have to work a single day of your life.” It’s an easy thing to say when you’re accepted at work, a luxury afforded to a privileged few.
The price
But this past year - as I’ve heard story after story of the abuse and violence that’s been directed towards my fellow Asian Americans - I’ve started to understand the precise difference between being accepted and being tolerated. You can tolerate something if you don’t think it’s a real threat, but what happens when an incompetent President is looking for an Other to blame for his failures and starts demonizing people who look like you? Things can change real fast.
And that change has put the lie to the thought that keeping your head down, working hard, and staying out of trouble keeps you safe. It certainly didn’t help the six in Atlanta who were killed for nothing more than trying to feed their families in the best way they had available to them.
Which has led me to an emotionally turbulent couple of weeks as I’ve unpacked the steady stream of aggressions I’ve buried in my memory - a small portion of which I shared above. I feel like a magician who, after decades of performing a disappearing act, realizes that their audience could see everything the entire time.
I’ve been angry and sad and upset because - despite positive change - there’s many ways in which things haven’t improved significantly for Asian Americans since I was a kid. I dread the day when my son comes home from school, confused about having to defend his Americanness.
I am most recently reminded of what this might look like by Andy Kim, the U.S. Representative for New Jersey’s 3rd District - like me, he’s a 2nd generation Korean American trying his best to raise a son in this country.
He recently spoke to Jonathan Capeheart at the Washington Post, and talked about needing to develop an Asian American version of “the talk” that Black parents use to let their kids know about how to keep themselves safe in a world not made for them. Take a look below - notice anything familiar?
“I’ve thought about this recently because I never got any version of ‘the talk’ from my parents. I don’t know if that actually kind of exists in the Asian American community in the way that it does for the Black community,” Kim told me. “My parents… very much thought that just hard work and keeping your nose to the grindstone and kinda minding your business is gonna get you through. I never really had that talk, and I never really understood how to contemplate being Asian American.”
And the past has other ways of echoing - a mere few years before And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street was retired by the Dr. Seuss estate for “portray[ing] people in ways that are hurtful and wrong,” I saw an Asian American kid play the “Chinese man who eats with sticks” in an elementary school performance segment re-enacting part of that book.
My partner and I turned to each other and mouthed “wow,” but that’s all I said. And I wish I had said more. There’s no way I would have remained silent if it was my son, which is all the more reason I should have stood up for someone else’s. Not only because of that, but because that image went out to everyone on that stage and audience as something that’s totally ok to include in an elementary school production. Just as it was ok to ask a Korean American kid to switch up his L’s and R’s, decades ago.
What’s in a name?
When I said I was raised for assimilation from day one, that is literally true. My parents decided against giving me a Korean name at birth - they were unhappy with my brother’s, which they thought was easy to make fun of. In classic Asian immigrant fashion, his Korean name was his legal middle name. Yet I had none.
Once I became an adult, I persisted in setting this right - triggered by an event in Korea when someone asked my name and I had none to give him but my brother’s.
It took a while to make it happen. My mother wanted to do it the old school way, which - as I understand it - involves enlisting someone with sufficient knowledge to choose a name that has a specific number of strokes relating auspiciously to the time and date of your birth. Some kind of astrology may be involved. There are also complicated familial rules, which I think were set aside for aesthetic reasons.
Honestly, I don’t exactly know how it came about - but what I do know is I finally received it at the age of 33. And for all that trying, I haven’t made much use of it, except the last time I was in Korea. And never before in writing. My full Korean name is 임지훈, or Lim Ji Hoon (my family name comes first, as per custom).
It’s really just part of it - it has a corresponding name in hanja, the Korean alphabet derived from written Chinese. That name is 林志勳. As best I can understand, this name includes concepts of intention and merit - a fine fit for a guy still on a quest to find his best self.
I am leaning back into this name because of what it represents and why I pushed for it in the first place - it’s a tie back to a culture that has defined me, in the eyes of so many. And I do so now because of a realization: if you erase yourself in an effort to not be seen - to keep your head down - what else will you willingly blind yourself to?
Being a better model
Asian Americans have long been considered a model minority, a harmful construct that conveniently sets aside class in our national conversation. But maybe what’s made us “model” is that many of us come from heritages that prize social coherence in a way that sometimes runs counter to one’s own personal well being. I can see how that might be considered model-worthy, if you’re interested in keeping this country a certain way.
I’m thinking of something that Viet Thanh Nguyen wrote for Time last year, in an incredible, lengthy piece that sought to better frame this construct through the lens of our history in this country:
“Asian Americans” should not exist in a land where everyone is equal, but because of racism’s persistence, and capitalism’s need for cheap, racialized labor, “Asian Americans” do indeed exist. The end of Asian Americans only happens with the end of racism and capitalism. Faced with this problem, Asian Americans can be a model of apology, trying to prove an Americanness that cannot be proved. Or we can be a model of justice and demand greater economic and social equality for us and for all Americans.
It makes me think - my parents embraced change and made personal sacrifices to seek a better life for themselves and their children, including leaving their country to come here.
If I didn’t do the same, what kind of parent - or person - would that make me?
More reading:
Take a moment and read that Twitter thread from Congressperson Kim if you haven’t already (you can click on the tweet). I, too, had a #jackiechanmoment but never occurred to me that it could lead to a physical challenge.
I was inspired to reflect on my Korean name by this piece from Tanya (Tianyi) Chen for Buzzfeed.
Racist anti-Asian t-shirts have sadly been in the news recently, which reminds me of this story from 2002, when mall brand Abercrombie & Fitch unleashed their own version of this kind of thing. When they were rightly called out, a company spokesperson issued this wild non-apology, as reported by SFGATE:
“We personally thought Asians would love this T-shirt," he said. "We are truly and deeply sorry we've offended people... We never single out any one group to poke fun at. We poke fun at everybody, from women to flight attendants to baggage handlers, to football coaches, to Irish Americans to snow skiers. There's really no group we haven't teased.”
The media coverage of the Atlanta shooting displayed some real problems with the way Asian women are portrayed, which made it easy for a racist cop to frame the victims in a sexual narrative, as Karissa Chen wrote for NBC. Read about the lives of business owner Tan Xiaojie and former elementary school teacher Hyun Jung Grant.
If you’re interested in following this conversation, Celeste Ng is a great follow on Twitter.
Your musical moment of zen:
Rider Shafique, “I-Dentity” (2016)
Even at the age of five, I remember being asked “what am I,” not who I am. Not “how are you,” but “where are you from?” And to say “England” didn’t answer the question, despite both parents being born here, no. “Where are you really from?” You know, “originally.”
Originally I am from my mother’s womb.