Damn...

..Arthur Chu Gets It Right.

In the past I have criticized Arthur Chu for some aspects of his writing, but his latest piece is written with the kind of oppositional spirit that is all too-often lacking in Asian-American writers who have access to mainstream exposure. To me, Chu's piece should typify the Asian-American approach to writing about our experiences and not be the exception

I won't reprint the piece here, but here are some excepts......

It was a moral that explained many things. It explained, for instance, why he never went to parent-teacher association events, never integrated himself into “the community.” Why he consistently obeyed Rule #1, a rule that my friends’ white suburban parents had never considered—a rule I would not hear from others until I actually met people who’d grown up urban and poor when I got older—Never Talk to the Cops. (In the Bill of Rights it’s actually Rule #5.)........Why he urged me to choose a career specialization based on objective assessment of skills and achievements, one where success was quantifiable, one whose practitioners were organizationally indispensable. To take an “Asian” job like engineer, scientist, programmer. One where there was little room for subjectivity, where the personal impression of the interviewer counted less. To stay away most of all from fields where I would be judged purely based on how well people could relate to me, like direct sales, like middle management, like the performing arts........To never, ever, ever put my livelihood in a position where I depended on white people liking me.
That lesson was: This Is Not Your Country.........You can live here. You can make friends. You can try to live by the law and be a decent citizen and even maybe make a lot of money.....But you will never, ever belong. You will never, ever be one of them. And you must never, ever trust them. 

I swallowed it all. As much as I could. I swallowed things that tasted foul and struggled to keep them down, but I did the best I could, to prove I could, to prove that I could swallow anything. I stomached the Chinese Exclusion Acts and the Riots of 1871. The gold miners and the borax miners and the railroad workers. I held my nose and I ate Jack London and the Yellow Peril and the coming war with China. I swallowed H.S. Tsien's deportation and Cold War paranoia and Joe McCarthy and the Yellow Peril and the coming war with China. I choked down Wen Ho Lee’s arrest and Vincent Chin’s murder and Iris Chang’s suicide and Andrew Breitbart and the Yellow Peril and the coming war with China. 

The historical atrocities and the daily microaggressions. Kids who screamed “Chinese Pig!” and adults who asked in an exasperated tone “I mean where are you from originally?” John McCain and the gooks he could never forgive.

The white racist looks at me and sees a stolen job or the slow decline of national prominence, but he doesn’t see a rapist, a thug, a barbarian at the gate. I fear being snubbed and sometimes spat on but rarely shot. And that is a very important difference.

Please go over there and read the whole piece, I don't think I have read many pieces like it that are so honest about the Asian experience.

The only caveat I have is that it would be easy to view the piece and the sentiment as a mere tag-on or afterthought in the story of African-Americans, and whilst I see some value in intersectionality, the fact remains that the Asian racial experiences that Chu describes are sufficiently serious and do not require the intersectionality with the black experience to be given more credibility.