On Inclusion
Growing up Asian before we were everywhere.
When I was eight, my family moved from Long Island to Shawnee, Oklahoma. Oklahoma was once Indian Territory, so Native Americans were a large presence there. But East Asians were an unknown quantity. My sister and I were the only Asians in the school the year we arrived. The term was “Oriental” back then, and we were practically the only ones in the entire town. Everywhere I went, people kept asking if I was related to George Ing.
He was, it turned out, the owner of the only Chinese restaurant in town; a man who — sorry to say it — knew well how to play the part of the foreigner-as-showman. And so began eight years of being yoked time and again to his bright, white suit and ingratiating ways.
Being Asian at that time, in that place, was a constant thing. I was whatever association with Asia first came to the mind of you, the greeter. Your uncle fought in the war. You knew Ruby Lee. Did I?? You wondered if I had just arrived from Vietnam, by boat, if it was 1975.
Culturally, though, and intellectually, I wasn’t raised with a strong sense of Asian identity. My parents spoke to me in English. Their own tastes in art, literature, and music, were decidedly European.
Our world revolved around classical music: Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Brahms. My mother had majored in English literature and made casual references to Middlemarch and Wuthering Heights; my father, to Tess of the d’Urbervilles.
My father, an avowed secular humanist, had read Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, and Hegel, and I followed suit on entering college. I almost chose philosophy as a major because, like him, I was drawn to phenomenology and ontology and the modern Continental philosophers: Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Buber, Sartre. All that cogito business. I knew nothing of Lao Tze or the Buddha.
To be sure, I grew up hearing stories about the Korean War, not to mention hearing the words of the language, shuttled back and forth from parent to parent — a familiar cadence to my non-comprehending ear. And the food at our table was almost exclusively Korean (Friday night hamburgers aside). And there were photos of my sister and me as toddlers, dressed in traditional Korean garb; seated on the Alma Mater statue at Columbia on a sunny day, looking dubious about the combination of sun and hot bronze.
Yet Koreanness was never so central to my being from within that I read the outward world through its lens. Nor did I wish to make it the subject of my writing when, at a certain period of my life, I wanted to become a writer.
For what could be more mundane to me — would-be-cosmopolitan-minded individualist that I was; decrier of all forms of tribalism and group-consciousness — than something as questionable as the value of ethnic pride? What could be less transporting (thought I) than a conversation about race and identity?
And so I remained largely silent, until now.
As I watch the country careen toward nativism and xenophobia; as I witness racial bigotry creep back into the foreground — from deep secret, to open secret, to no secret at all — I feel the time to keep silent has passed.
It’s something I’ve watched other Americans of non-European descent feel compelled to do recently, too, especially in the wake of the malicious Twitter offensive toward the four Congresswomen of color, dubbed the Squad. So many, like me, felt triggered by those words, with their visceral sting, touching a very raw nerve.
*
Although I wasn’t aware of this fact until well into adulthood, I was born the same year as the passage of the Hart-Celler Immigration & Naturalization Act, under Lyndon Johnson, which undid the national origins quota system that had been in effect since 1924. That year, under Calvin Coolidge, the previous, Johnson–Reed, Immigration Act had barred immigration from all Asian countries, including some from which it had previously allowed entry — namely, Japan and the Philippines.
“America must be kept American,” was what Coolidge famously said when he signed the bill.
In 1952 there was a relaxation of the law — one that allowed both my parents to come to the U.S. as college undergraduates, a few years after the end of the Korean War.
But the 1952 McCarran-Walter Immigration Act still maintained severe restrictions on the number of people allowed into the U.S. from what had previously been called the Asiatic barred zone.
It wasn’t until 1965 that this quota system was done away with, and a huge demographic shift began to take place, from European to non-European immigrants.
My birth pre-dates the wave of Asian immigration that occurred throughout the 1970s and 80s. Outside of Hawaii and the West Coast, there were precious few of us in the country before then. We weren’t present in substantial numbers, as we are now, in higher education, the arts, the sciences, and the professional work force generally. There was no tech industry to speak of.
A lot of my early experiences — like the years in Oklahoma — involved being one of only a handful of Asians, or of doing things that apparently produced cognitive dissonance in the mind of the average American — like playing in the NBA if you’re Jeremy Lin.
By the early 80s, a shift was underway, but there were still moments being Asian could prompt a reflexive sense of exclusion, or remind you of the uphill climb you were destined to face, if you wanted to enter certain fields.
As a sophomore at Yale, I switched from philosophy to English as a major, having been encouraged to think I’d have a promising career in the field, should I choose to go into it. It seemed I wrote well. I was told I had a talent for literary criticism.
Once I made the change, I needed to take courses from all periods of the language, so during “shopping period,” I sat in on an Anglo-Saxon literature course. The teacher (who shall remain nameless) was a grey-haired, Southern man in his mid-50s. He wore a small American flag pin on his lapel, which in those days tended to signal that you were a Reagan Republican.
He opened the class, appropriately, with the opening line of Beowulf, which starts with the word “What!,” except that in Old English it was HWAET!, with the H and the W inverted, and the H distinctly pronounced.
He spoke of the eventual transformation of HWAET to WHAT; of the loss of the pronunciation of H; and of the beauty of that bygone, halcyon age, when WHAT was HWAET.
“This,” he said, turning in my direction, and catching my eye and not disengaging it as he spoke, “was prior to the mongrelization of the language.”
Mongrelization?? Had he actually said it? Had he said it to me? He had looked at me — I was sure. While extolling the virtues of a Germanic, golden past. There was meaning in that look. I was certain. But who would believe me?
It sounds shocking today, but Ivy League English departments have a notorious history of excluding those not of Anglo descent — notably, Jews in the 1950s. And African Americans — it goes without saying. By the time I started graduate school, at Harvard, the field was changing rapidly. But there was still a handful of old-school professors who were thoroughly Anglo-centric in their sensibilities, including their sense of who should inherit the field.
By the early 90s, I had aspirations of writing a novel and perhaps even becoming a writer. A Saul Bellovian novel of consciousness, was the thing I had in mind.
To say that now does not, as far as I can tell, trigger a reaction of cognitive dissonance. But at the time, the commonplace response to my interest in writing fiction was, “You mean like Amy Tan?”
And so, again and again, instead of George Ing this time, I found myself obligated to answer whether or not I’d read The Joy Luck Club.
For, surely it must be that whatever I wrote would involve tigers or dragons or women warriors of some kind, or at the very least, mothers and daughters in cultural conflict. The game of ma-jong must make its obligatory appearance. The book cover might suggest Chinese takeaway font, without actually stooping to employ it. I would be an Asian-American writer, after all. A Woman of Color writer.
I adopted the eye-roll as a shield of defense. I continued (and continue) to wince when I hear certain phrases, like Tiger Mom.
The point is, I’ve spent much of my life having to put up with being typed and labeled, or being the object of a certain pin-the-Asian-on-the-donkey mentality. I spent years bristling at every attempt to “read” me as more Asian, more culturally Korean, than I felt myself to be. My shyness and introversion were temperamental, not cultural; my inclination toward balance, more Aristotelian middle way-ism than Confucian harmony. I fought to maintain my narrative as the story of me, the individual, not a parable of cultural cliché.
*
Fast-forward to the late 90s and 2000s, and you started to see Asians everywhere in the professional workforce — a workforce I eventually joined, after deciding against an academic path. A lot of the issues I’d had to deal with as a young person seemed slowly to be disappearing — at least in New York, which I had happily come back to and have since made my home.
Fast-forward again to 2008. We elected a Black president. And it was no longer assumed that because you were Asian, you wouldn’t speak English, or not without an accent, at least. Nor that, of all the books in the universe of books, there could only be one you’d want to emulate as a writer.
Being Asian in America seemed less of a cross to bear for ethnic Asians of younger generations. And although I didn’t have children, it made me so happy to see this.
I could remember the feeling I’d had at one time, that almost every person of Asian descent I met seemed somehow to be trying too hard. Over-compensating. You wouldn’t know what I mean unless you know what I mean. But to me, it was painful to observe.
Then I remember one day, maybe ten years ago, seeing some Asian male teens on the subway. They were joking around and ribbing each other, but what I noticed most of all was how decidedly natural they seemed in their use of American lingo and colloquial speech. Not trying too hard. Not exaggerating. Just being themselves. At ease being guys. American guys, who also happened to be Asian. Or so it seemed to my eye. It felt like a watershed.
These tiny, imperceptible changes have been, to me, the signals of progress — a sign of the passage of time that evens out the rough edges of history; of the waning of a kind of unfamiliarity with Asians that had led to both intentional and unintentional forms of marginalization throughout my life; of the welcome anachronism of slights like “Go back to China” — which, yes, I have had said to me and have witnessed being said to a parent whose sense of dignity was indistinguishable from my own at the time.
So it was lovely to think young Asian-Americans might be spared some of the indignities I had faced — from being made the object of open slurs and even physical menace, to being exoticized all too often and perceived through the tiresome lens of otherness.
But now fast-forward to November, 2016…
Many of my fellow liberals experienced shock and trauma. I certainly shared their despondency. But it was hardly the same sense of surprise and disbelief that caught so many of my friends off guard.
I had always felt it could happen here. As a minority, you live with an awareness of that dark underbelly of America. You know it’s there, even when it lies dormant.
I always wondered if I might one day witness that darkness rise to the surface, if I lived long enough to see the pendulum of history swing in the other direction. Who would have guessed it would come as an immediate backlash to such a short-lived feeling of progress?
I should have, that’s who!
*
And yet, things get tricky when you talk about Asians within the inclusion conversation. Especially in the professional spheres — the only base of knowledge I have experience to speak from.
After all, we are no longer shunned as a group, as we were long ago, from the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, through the Asian Exclusion Act of ’24. I wasn’t alive in that era. I cannot speak personally to what it was like. I wasn’t alive to witness the internment of Japanese-Americans in 1942.
Despite my personal experiences, I know recent history has been gentler on my group as a whole; that we haven’t been shut out as persistently as, in naked truth, Black and brown people; or dare I say, browner people. Some would even say — at least until three years ago — we were essentially being treated as if we were White.
The suggestion makes me cringe. And scoff, to a degree. It certainly depends where you look. (Consider Hollywood.) Yet I could bring up examples that suggest a degree of truth in it; of being told things that offended my sensibility on behalf of other groups the words were meant to exclude, even as the hand was purportedly being extended to me.
So let me pause to say that if I feel an urgency to speak out, it ultimately stems from a feeling of powerlessness to do more about the larger, far more urgent, things I see happening in, yes, my country. And I do so in solidarity with those being explicitly targeted in this tragic historical moment, and those wronged more directly and maliciously than I ever have been.
Here I am, after all, musing on subtle forms of behavior, while egregious abuses and inhumane practices are being systematically carried out in the name of returning America to a romanticized, homogeneous past. Already the scapegoating has begun, with Muslims and Latinos bearing the brunt this time. Our head of state spouts a toxic rhetorical brew; shamelessly soothing to naked white nationalists and closeted soft bigots alike, who gobble it up like warm comfort food. Their energy will not soon dissipate or go back underground.
I harbor no illusions, by the way, that I’m not ultimately in the line of fire, too. No Asian ought to, in my view. In the grandiose, nativist’s dream of weeding out non-white from white, we are all within range. The specter of having one’s birthright citizenship revoked should prove the point to any child of more recent (read non-European) immigrants.
Still, in my day-to-day life — at least for the moment — I occupy a more ambiguous, less directly threatened space, just to the side of the bullseye.
*
Between 2017 and 2018, some eye-opening studies about Asians in the workplace were published. One, by the Ascend Foundation (re-quoted in The Harvard Business Review), showed that of all minorities, Asian white-collar professionals were the group least likely to be promoted from individual contributor to manager level, as well as to the executive level, behind both Blacks and Latinos.¹ This was true even within the tech sector, where white men were 222% more likely to be executives than Asian men; and white women 164% more likely than Asian women.²
For Asian women in particular, the ratio of executives to entry-level professionals was lowest. Even the rise of Asian millennials showed no signs of closing the gap, since Asian millennials were not being promoted to managerial ranks as quickly as their white counterparts.³
Asians were also the largest minority group in major law firms but the least likely to be made partner by mid-career. The ratio of partners to associates was lowest for Asians, and the attrition rates highest.⁴ And statistics were similar for Asians in landing federal and state clerkships and, later, judicial appointments.
“Asian Americans,” the HBR article declares, “are the forgotten minority in the glass ceiling conversation.”⁵
I wondered, in reading, if it had happened to me, too.
But had it? Despite facts like these, could I really apply a simplistic, bare-bones narrative to my own story?
As a student of English, I had been drawn to modernist literature in part because it poked holes in the authority of the classic, 19th century narrative. I liked Virginia Woolf, because she asked, “What is a story? Are there even stories?” I liked Joyce, because he stretched the contours of a single day into a behemoth of a book that called into question the nature of narrative. And I have always been inclined to focus on the trees, in spite of the forest.
This, I have come to learn, is itself an Asian stereotype. (“She’s a little too detailed.”) But I like to think of myself as more Woolfian. My focus is on the trees. And on the here and now. Or if it is an Asian thing, let it be! I quite like losing sight of that forest, now and again.
I once argued with a fellow graduate student (we were both Asian, by the way) about the utility and limits of Linnean classification. We had been reading Nietzsche. On the Uses and Misuses of History for Life. The thesis was that German culture had become calcified through the over-use of the historical lens, and that it needed a dose of forgetting in order to have life breathed back into it.
My classmate made a point, using the example of eggs. Even though they came in all different sizes, he said, you could still classify them into small, medium, large, and extra large. (He said nothing of jumbo.)
“But you could argue it the other way,” I said. Although eggs could be categorized into fixed sizes, if you looked closely, you began to see through the artifice of the categories. Those individual eggs began to escape easy classification.
And so, with my inclination to see the trees, I have always been reluctant to read my own narrative as the obvious one. To try to re-read it now through the crude lens of conscious or unconscious bias makes me uneasy. It misses the grey. The ambiguity and half-truths. It sacrifices too much for the sake of the elegant narrative line. Virginia Woolf would be proud.
Besides which — and here is the kicker — before 2016, if ever I suggested the possibility of bias at play (as in that mongrelization remark), I would usually be met with by that look. The kind I’d seen over the years.
If a physical squirm could take on the form of a look in your friend’s eye, that’s the look I’m trying to describe. You venture to confide in someone, and they return your gesture of trust with a, “Really??” Their spine seizes up like a runner with a charley horse. “Don’t you think you’re being too sensitive?” Or, sometimes, outright disbelief, “Are you sure you weren’t imagining it?”
Perhaps I was…
And yet, those articles, and those statistics…
And that graduate school classmate of mine had a point about eggs.
Imagine my surprise, then, to find that I may have been part of a statistical pattern, after all. It certainly was not all there was to the story, but it might not be nothing.
*
About twenty years ago, I was at the wedding of a close friend. The bride was my roommate from a decade before; a Harvard law student, while I was in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.
It was, shall we say, a wedding of upper-middle-class, beyond-college-educated liberals. We were both in our mid-thirties. It was a difficult time. My mother was dying. But the event served as a bit of respite. An evening to dress up and forget and allow myself to glam it up a little.
Months later, when the wedding photos came back, we met up. And as we sat, looking through the album, it slowly dawned on us both, almost simultaneously, that there were hardly any pictures of me. I was there, in the background, in two or three. But in none was I front and center. In none was I the focal point.
Among the guests, there was one young woman in particular who clearly had captured the photographer’s eye. She wasn’t a close friend of the bride. But, of course, the photographer didn’t know that. And she was an attractive woman, for sure. And she was in photo after photo after photo.
My friend saw immediately what also rose to my consciousness as a likely explanation. She felt bad about it. She was a liberal, after all! And a future legal scholar in the area of discrimination law.
It wasn’t deliberate on the photographer’s part. It wasn’t malicious. I simply hadn’t been seen.
But, there, of course, is the oh-so-obvious rub. Because when you’re Asian, or Black, or brown, or anything but white, you’re just not always seen. Or from the other side, you’re seen before you’re seen. The two go hand-in-hand. You’re measured against an implicit preconception. You counter the stereotype, or you reinforce it. But a tabula rasa you are not.
Perhaps, on that evening, at that wedding, the photographer had a vision in his mind’s eye of what a wedding like this ought to look like. Perhaps the vision excluded me before he ever snapped the first shot.
And if I am Asian in professional America? — as I find that I am! (with Western, ontological, cogito consciousness) — am I quick to be hired (because of my industriousness and natural work ethic) but slow to be elevated (because of my deference and lack of leadership traits)?
Am I welcome as second-lieutenant, or deputy, or right-hand (wo)man, but not as top dog? Am I permitted a seat at the table, as long as it isn’t your seat? As long as inclusion can be granted with a hint of patronage bestowed?
Probably. As statistics bear out…
More troubling, from the standpoint of subjective consciousness and self-awareness…have people been speaking down to me my entire life in ways I didn’t even recognize, beyond the obvious moments when I did recognize it? And have I so internalized this that it has eroded — to a degree — my ability to assert my will and show authority?
I have seen certain older, especially Southern, African American men speak with a kind of reflexive deference, and it pains me to guess at the lifetime of social conditioning that must have resulted in this.
Has something like this happened to me? Has it happened to us?
Did culture really come first? Is it really because “ours” is a culture of humility and restraint? (Have you met any Koreans, by the way?)
Or is there a chicken-egg question to be asked? And within this chicken-egg dynamic, where does the truth lie?
If we are welcomed, but treated as subordinates, do we internalize and eventually externalize the stance? Like some sad, evolutionary mutation?
Have years of being imperceptibly passed over chipped away at our expectations? Has it dampened our moxie and mettle?
Is this, in turn, why we are sought out for the chorus but never the lead?
Have we thus been conditioned to seek out only the chorus?
Have we thus been transformed into the model (invisible) minority?
But I hate to think in such reductive, inside-the-box ways.
And I wonder, if I do, am I seen as too Asian, because it fits with your suspicion that my thinking is less imaginative, less creative, and less original?
But that way lies a hall of endless mirrors…
And so I — perhaps we — put aside these questions and choose not to ask. And yet I — perhaps we — wonder, why have we been forgotten?
Somewhere along the line, I dare to speak not just for myself but for others like me, even though, individualist that I am, I’ve spent my life feeling I am only capable of speaking for myself.
One thing I do know, as I step back and look at the statistics; as I view the broader outlines of the more classic narrative; as I cast my gaze squarely at the trees — something age and what may one day, unhappily, be called The Age of Trump have allowed me to do — is that, however much we may or may not pertain directly to me, we do seem to have been overlooked. Under the presumption that we have not been.
Would that we didn’t have to remind you to look (or complain that you haven’t). For we are awfully polite, as you know, being Asian. Besides which, no one wants to go where they’re not wanted. If only we’d been invited along, before we had to stop and ask to be. But in this, we are like all people of color.
And if you get tired now of hearing our voices reminding you; if you get tired of seeing us get hot under our professional white collars, know that most of us probably never wanted to speak up in the first place; to have to challenge, and badger, and jockey for a turn at the mic.
And if you feel inclined to tell me, personally, to stop being so sensitive; to lighten up; please know (for I am ever polite), that I have been lightening up for the past fifty years now. And in this, the era of Trump, I lighten up at my own peril.
