Introduction: Jeremy Lin

I am a Korean-American who lives in New York. When I was in elementary school, Linsanity happened.

I imagine that Jeremy Lin is famous enough that most people know who he is. But to quickly sum up if one does not: in February of 2012, the New York Knicks were off to a horrendous start to their basketball season. Suddenly and miraculously, an Asian point guard that nearly no one had heard of named Jeremy Lin began to put on standout performances and carried the team to win after win. It was the perfect storm for a media frenzy: the basketball team of the biggest city in America was being saved from collapse by an Asian-American who had an incredible underdog story. Before the end of the month, he hit the cover of Time magazine.

Me and my dad loved Jeremy Lin — I ended up buying a book about him and getting a sticky wall poster of him shooting a layup on my bedroom door. My dad followed Jeremy Lin’s basketball journey all the way through to the end, even well after he left the Knicks: I stopped watching the NBA after about 2016 and only started watching again post-pandemic, but my dad was watching Lin play that whole time, even once he left the NBA and played in international leagues. We don’t exactly follow any other Asian-Americans that religiously, but I still take special note of Asians in the NBA and always want to see them do well: Rui Hachimura, an important player for the Los Angeles Lakers, Yang Hansen, a tall rookie on the Portland Trailblazers, Yuki Kawamura, an exciting point guard who plays for the Chicago Bulls. I want them all to succeed, and I always get annoyed when their coaches don’t put them in the game.

The strange part about all of this is that Jeremy Lin is Taiwanese, Yang Hansen is Chinese, and Rui Hachimura and Yuki Kawamura are Japanese. None of them are Korean, but I root for them anyway: they are Asian-American, and I am too, and that is the important part. There is/was a trend after Linsanity that any Asian playing pickup basketball would be nicknamed Jeremy Lin: that is, if someone was playing a game of basketball on the street and they wanted to tell a teammate to guard the Asian person, they would say ‘go guard Jeremy Lin!’. This happened to me precisely once, when I was playing basketball in a park, and it was sort of mildly offensive at no point did I think ‘that’s not accurate: I’m Korean, not Taiwanese!’ It felt correct, to be an Asian referred to by shorthand as a famous Asian. The specifics of ethnicity did not matter — my only gripe was in the general concept of reducing the entire body of Asian basketball players down into the image of one player.

However, this grouping of different Asian ethnicities feels highly offensive to me in many other contexts. In Nazli Kibria’s 2000 paper Race, Ethnic Options, and Ethnic Binds, countless interviews with second-generation Chinese and Korean Americans revealed exactly that: anger that specific cultures were being dismissed in favor of the generic label of Asianness. One Korean American reflected on her anger at a schoolteacher who complimented her daughter for learning “Asian dance,” as if all Asian cultures danced the same, while another recounted the story of a man who insisted that she must know the meaning behind a Thai painting because “Korean and Thai art and literature are the same or very similar.” At times, this lumping together of Asians had directly hurtful political implications: yet another Korean explained how he was irritated by Americans who were worried that he would be “offended” by criticisms of Japan, and responded by endeavoring to explain the “history of animosity between Japanese and Koreans.” In that case, the unthoughtful assumption that all Asians were the same ran directly counter to the reality that some Asians were specifically opposed to one another.

In this essay I aim to explore the contexts in which I and other East Asian-Americans have felt comfortable being grouped together, and the contexts in which we demand to be seen as separate. Very importantly, I also want to address how this has changed over time and how the opinions of Asian Americans from generations before me differ from my own modern opinions. Throughout this essay I will use ‘Asian-American’ nearly synonymously with ‘East Asian-American,’ but it should be noted that I will occasionally widen my scope as necessary, particularly towards the end as I speculate on what the future of the term ‘Asian-American’ may hold.

East Asian History: China, Korea, Japan, and War

The three major East Asian countries have a long history of tumultuous relations, and in particular Korea and Japan have warred with each other on and off for over a millenia. These wars have not been entirely forgotten or dismissed: the winner of a 2014 Gallup Korea poll asking Koreans who they most admired was Admiral Yi Sun-Sin, a legendary general famous for his string of miraculous victories over Japan in the 16th century. Like England and France in the West, Korea and Japan are no strangers to conflict.

If this history ended in the 16th century, then perhaps the two Asian countries could have, like England and France, become half-begrudging allies. Unfortunately, in the 19th-20th centuries, Japan launched the Meiji Restoration and became an imperialist empire that weakened China through warfare and annexed Korea, placing it under authoritarian colonial rule where the Korean language was suppressed and Koreans were forced to change their names to Japanese ones: even at the time one American expert considered this a “policy of cultural genocide.” The Japanese empire’s most disturbing crimes came in World War Two, with the Nanking Massacre in China and with the conscription of Korean and Chinese women into sexual slavery as ‘comfort women.’ This gave rise to significant animosity against Japan that will become highly relevant in the following section.

The black mark of Japanese imperialist sins has been a persistent source of conflict in East Asia ever since because the Japanese government has been extremely reluctant to properly acknowledge its historical crimes: as recently as 2007, then-prime minister of Japan Shinzo Abe claimed that there was “no evidence” that comfort women were coerced into sex. Although Japan and Korea appear to slowly becoming stronger allies, the specter of WW2 atrocities — and the Japanese government’s refusal to plainly admit them — remains a spanner in the works. Meanwhile, China is also responsible for several modern sources of conflict. China is “North Korea’s closest ally,” which obviously damages relations with South Korea, and in general the undemocratic rule of the Chinese government has kept other East Asian countries at arms’ length. 7 Furthermore, China’s claim to Taiwan has set it directly at odds with its pro-independence neighbors: most recently, an explicitly pro-Taiwan remark by a Japanese politician set off a diplomatic scuffle that was exacerbated when Japan seized a Chinese fishing boat operating in its waters.

To sum up: East Asian relations in the present day are quite shaky, and the past only raises worse and worse examples of East Asian conflict. However, the apparent strength and unity of the modern Asian-American movement indicates that something is very different on this side of the Pacific. It is possible that the difficult relationship between Asians on the mainland does not reflect the relations between Asians in diaspora.

Japanese Internment: Modern Merged Identity Versus Historical Divisions

When I was in middle school, I read a book called Fred Korematsu Speaks Up, about a Japanese man’s fight in the American courts against World War Two-era Japanese internment. This book was presented by my parents to me as a story of an Asian standing up for what was right: the U.S. government did something terrible to a group of Asian-Americans, and Korematsu was leading the charge for Asian-Americans. This attitude has stuck with me throughout my life: even though I am Korean, I treat Japanese internment as an almost personal affront.

When I look back at the reactions from non-Japanese Asian-Americans at the time, however, it is clear that many of them did not share my point of view. It is not as if they had no reason to join forces: scholar Jeremy Chan published a 2019 paper titled Chinese American Responses to the Japanese American Internment and Incarceration, in which he noted that U.S. laws passed in the late 19th century “collectively racialized” Asians. In the end, “Chinese and Japanese Americans were grouped together and similarly spurned […] seen as conniving, diseased, immoral, and unassimilable to the United States.”

However, even though they were marginalized as a whole, a sizable group of Chinese-Americans supported and even took advantage of Japanese internment. Chan highlights the prevalence of Chinese fortune cookies as an example of the ramifications of internment: what “started as a Japanese American invention” in California turned into a trademark of Chinese cuisine, as Japanese Americans were interned and Chinese Americans took over the fortune cookies and, more importantly, the vacant space in the Asian food market.

Chinese American newspapers took an anti-Japanese slant to the war and internment as well, pushing anti-Japanese sentiment by pointing out that Japan was “an enemy of China and the United States.” Some were active; the Chinese Press gave coverage to a lecture by an economics professor who claimed that the Japanese empire was being aided by “American-born Japs,” while some were tacit; the founder of the newspaper Chinese News did not report on Japanese internment at all, and when asked why claimed “my papers were for and about Chinese Americans.” In both cases it was clear that the idea of Asian-Americans as a unified front did not yet hold much water, even if the law tended to group Asians together. There was no instinct from the Chinese to protect their own — their own people were Chinese and Chinese only.

Chan also touches on the reactions of Korean Americans, who were even more hostile to their Japanese counterparts due to the brutal colonial regime that Japan had installed in the Korean mainland and the Japanese empire’s suppression of Korean language and culture. Nevertheless, average white Americans constantly mistook Koreans as Japanese, which was a source of significant resentment among Koreans: even worse, since Korea was under Japanese rule, Koreans were classified as Japanese subjects and thus also enemies of America. While Korean outrage caused some changes to that policy, some restrictions to Korean Americans still held in place, and they “were accused of using the war effort to support the movement for Korean independence,” a much less important concern to the U.S. government than improving their alliance in World War Two — at large Korean Americans were ignored and considered “suspect”.

It is odd to compare my view today to the anti-Japanese attitude then: a 21st century Korean American who considers Japanese internment an attack on Asian-Americans, versus a 20th century Chinese laborer like Howard Yip who was one of many to indicate that he was not Japanese; in his case, by attaching a paper sign to his back that read “ME CHINESE PLEASE NO JAP” when he went to work. Chan does highlight some “limited examples” of vocal Chinese opposition to Japanese internment, but this was also in context of supporting improving Chinese relations with many other minorities in general: for example, he cites a Chinese American named Xiao Lin who noted how Harlem and Chinatown were similarly characterized as criminal areas and Jewish and Chinese people were both accused of being “cunning and stingy,” the overall point being that Chinese Americans should ally with the Black and Jewish communities against oppression. At the same time, the idea of Asians unifying to fight against anti-Asian racism was “both rarely offered and not necessarily received well.” I am part of an Asian-American community that eighty years ago did not exist.

COVID: Modern Solidarity

My one and only personal experience with direct, on-the-street anti-Asian racism came a few weeks before I began high school. My mom and I were on a walk outside to see how long it would take to get to my new school and how to get there when a woman began yelling at us on the street. I texted my middle school friends about the incident immediately after the incident and I still have that message: in it, I described her as saying to ‘go back to where you came from.’ I cannot remember now if that was a direct quote or just a general sentiment, but certainly it was racism in that sort of spirit. What I do remember vividly is that she said something to the effect of ‘Chinese, Korean, Japanese; whatever you are, I don’t care!’ At once she asserted her knowledge of the different types of Asian-Americans and rejected its meaningfulness entirely. Once the woman eventually left (and/or we left her behind, I’m not sure which), my mom made a joke that was something like “good for us, we’re number two! I didn’t think Koreans would be mentioned at all, but she thought of us second!”

It is not a coincidence that this racist incident occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic. During the early years of the pandemic, violence against Asians skyrocketed: in just two weeks the group Stop AAPI Hate “received 1,135 reports of anti-Asian discrimination, assault, and violence,” a statistic that only trended upwards between 2020 and 2021 and was “likely a severe undercount” of the true number of incidents. Although it was ostensibly an anti-Chinese panic since COVID originated from China, violence hit Asians of varied ethnicities: among the most notable tragedies, 84-year old Vicha Ratanapakdee, a Thai American, was killed after being assaulted on the street in January 2021.

Anecdotally, I do not remember seeing any confusion about why Asian-Americans as a group were being targeted over what was ostensibly anti-Chinese hysteria. Nor did I see or hear of any non-Chinese Asian who fought against the racism they experienced by insisting that the racists were targeting the wrong ethnicity. During this time I would say that it was obvious that racists would spread their hate relatively indiscriminately, and that the only wise course of action was for Asian-Americans to unite as a whole against anti-Chinese rhetoric. So many things are different in the 2020s compared to the 1940s that it is difficult to pin down an exact reason for why the response to anti-Asian racism differs so greatly. Part of it must be that the crimes of the Japanese empire have begun to fade into memory as newer generations of Asian-Americans are born in the U.S. instead of Asia. This is not to say that I believe the crimes of the Japanese empire are being or should be brushed aside — rather, the key point now is that Japanese Americans seem disconnected enough from the mainland Japanese government that the history of Japanese imperialism is not a searing tension for us second or third-generation Asians in America. Similarly, Chinese Americans today are not responsible for the Chinese government’s current support for North Korea. While tensions in the mainlands remain, Asians in America do not directly feel them.

But the other half of the answer is that Asian-Americans appear to simply be tired of being incidental targets, or perhaps we have recognized that targets are not so incidental. When a racist declares “Chinese, Korean, Japanese, I don’t care,” it is hard not to take them at their word. In the modern day, racists seem entirely unconcerned by which precise race they are hateful against. In the 1940s, Howard Yip had reasons to be hostile to Japanese Americans and a reasonable belief that he could evade anti-Japanese racism by emphasizing his Chinese background. Today, I have neither. If racists want to group Asians together, let them fight us all.

High School: A Korean Among Chinese

Even with what I have said, unity can vary. The middle school I went to, IS318, was around six to eight percent Asian. Under these circumstances, it hardly mattered what ethnicity I was: those of us who looked East or even Southeast Asian all gravitated towards one another. (It helped that many of us were strong players on the school’s chess team.) New York City is diverse and liberal enough that I never felt that we united out of external microaggressions or other pressures, but I clearly remember thinking once something like ‘Aha! All of us Asians in one place.” When it seemed like a real feat to get a bunch of Asians all in the same room, I never thought much about what specific kinds of Asian we were.

When I went to high school at Brooklyn Tech, a school that is majority Asian, that changed. In Tech there were so many Asians that there was no need for us to all band together — it would have been very hard to not make Asian friends. Under those circumstances, the identity of ‘Asian-American’ lost a bit of weight… and it was then that I realized that even in that school, there were very few Korean Americans. Of course, it was still encouraging to be surrounded by people who looked like me. But when one of my Chinese classmates came up to me and randomly began speaking to me in Chinese, I was reminded that I am not actually like them, not entirely.

Perhaps even more important is the fact that I am a third-generation Asian-American, while many of my high school classmates were second-generation. Many of them spoke of what I would consider commonly entrenched Asian-American experiences: living with extended family, dealing with emotionally constricted and/or neglectful parents, feeling pressured to get into top colleges and get high test scores. Only the last of these applied to me — my life experience differs sharply from many of my friends on the basis that my parents were second-generation Koreans who lived through some of these stereotypes and sought to do things better as they became adults. I lack a certain trauma that is half-expected to be acquired in the typical Asian-American experience.

What this all tells me is that the presence of an Asian-American community is not at all exclusive with differences between subgroups, at least as of now. East Asians have not cast aside their Koreanness or Chineseness or Japaneseness in favor of being purely Asian-American. We have simply added ‘Asian-American’ as one of our identities. Which part of our identity we place the most importance on simply depends on the situation.

College: Conclusion

For me, Wesleyan has only put further spotlight on the divisions between East Asians. There is a group of Chinese people in my dormitory who often cook dinner together on the second floor and speak Chinese to one another, and although Wesleyan is not a school with many Asians, I simply cannot see myself entering their space under the banner of Asian community. Language remains a massive barrier, and precludes me from entering certain spaces.

Conversely, in my Korean language classes, I am more comfortable now than I perhaps ever have been. There are quite a few heritage students in my class, and so this is the first time in my life that I am in school and surrounded by Koreans. Frankly, the fact that Korean classes are being offered at all feels comforting and almost empowering. It is very pleasant to know that my ethnicity is being specifically acknowledged and supported, outside the general mesh of Asian-American studies or history classes. I would describe East Asian solidarity as something between a cultural and political alliance. It is not quite like the alliance Xiao Lin wanted to form with the black community, which was entirely practical and based purely on shared experiences with American racism: certainly I consider other East Asians similar to myself. But it is not entirely cultural either: it feels markedly different to be among Koreans than among Chinese, and in a real sense what it means to be ‘Asian-American’ is to have experienced the adversity that comes with white people marking someone as Asian. Our community was built in America; it was partly shaped by how white Americans saw us.

I now wonder if I would have objected to being called Jeremy Lin on the basketball court if there was a notable Korean American basketball player in the NBA. I think I would have been more annoyed, at the very least. Certainly if I was playing soccer and someone called me Mitoma Kaoru, I would take a moment to think ‘why is he talking about a Japanese player? Why not call me Son Heung Min?’ When there are few Asians around, I cast a wider net; when East Asian representation seems secure, I pull back to supporting Koreans specifically, or at least more vocally.

However, because anything political drags Asian-Americans out into the broader, majority-white American system, it is in moments of crisis that East Asian solidarity seems strongest today. This can even extend beyond East Asia itself, and for good reason: the aforementioned killing of Vicha Ratanapakdee proves that Southeast Asians can be targeted even during anti-East Asian panic. In recent years I have heard more and more the term AAPI, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, and it seems to be that this is becoming more and more of a political alliance. AAPI as a category does not so much cover people who come from countries with similar cultures. It is more concerned with people who may be visually confused for one another, who have suffered in similar ways from imperialism, and who should ally together to fight racism and create a powerful voting bloc in America. Looking into the future, it may be that ‘Asian-American’ becomes an increasingly important idea and the specifics of ‘Korean American’ or ‘Chinese American’ fade. But I hope this does not happen, because I believe that Asian-American identity is in a relatively strong position as it is now. Culturally speaking, I reject the idea of entirely assimilating ethnicities into one Asian-American soup, and I would rather every group keep their own traditions and language alive. Embracing Asian-American as the primary label is practical in many ways, but I hope it never becomes the only label, because the times I lean on it now is when I feel bereft of Asian support. I do not want to just be ‘an East Asian.’ I am a Korean, and many of my best friends are Chinese, and strangely I prefer that difference to be kept quiet yet clear.