By Lauren Luna
Asian Americans have made recent gains in the realm of popular culture at the same time as hate crimes are on the rise, a UC Santa Barbara audience was told.
Chloe Zhao recently won an Oscar for best director for “Nomadland,” and films like “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before,” “Crazy Rich Asians” and “Always Be My Maybe” took fun themes of romance and humor and retold them through Asian American characters.
As Asian Americans become more visible, they also become more vulnerable to violence, especially since the COVID-19 outbreak.
“This is a conversation that needs to be had,” said Sameer Pandya, a professor of Asian American Studies and UC Santa Barbara.
Sameer Pandaya, left, and Lisa Sun-Hee Park, right, of UCSB’s Asian American Studies Department, who spoke recently about anti-Asian violence.
Pandya and Lisa Sun-Hee Park recently gave a talk titled What We Talk About When We Talk About Anti-Asian Violence. The discussion was part of the virtual All Gaucho Reunion, which invited both current and former UCSB students to join in communal discourse.
A study released earlier this month by California State University found a 164% increase in hate crimes against Asian Americans in 16 large American cities in the first quarter of 2021 alone. These crimes include recent shootings in Atlanta and Indianapolis, as well as smaller violent attacks across the country. Pandya and Parks delved into the reasons for the spike in hate crimes.
As COVID-19 started in Wuhan, China, people have taken the pandemic’s origin as a cue for hostility, spurred on by the circulation of anti-Asian rhetoric from politicians like former President Trump, who called COVID-19 the “kung-flu” and directly insulted an Asian American reporter at a press conference in May of last year.
The professors argued that though Asian America has witnessed a cultural breakthrough recently, Asian Americans also struggle with three things: how they can belong in a country like America, how they are represented in media and politics, and how their history is reflected in modern times.
Park recalled a study she did with Asian American college students at the start of her academic career that asked one question: What does it mean to be Asian American? “When I gave them this question, some of the students would literally start caving in on themselves,” recounted Park.
For these students, the biggest issue was proving that they belonged to a specific group, which showed how conflicted they were about their own identity. Pandya quoted English poet John Keats, arguing that Asian Americans are situated between “two diametrically opposed forces,” that is, Asian culture and American nationality.
Asian Americans also confront what Park calls “conditional inclusion.” A model minority myth, for example, has been imposed onto Asian Americans from the late 19th century, demanding they fit the mold of an obedient, materially successful citizen. Should they fail to fit that mold, people bluntly shun or invalidate them, according to both speakers, putting Asian Americans in a complicated spot.
More public visibility alone is not the end goal, the audience was told.
The portrayal of Asian Americans in films and television can be superficial, feigning progress by taking stories with white leads and inserting static and stereotypical Asian characters into the shows just for the sake of appearing “diverse.” According to Park, it is only by depicting Asian American stories in their entirety – colored with life and experience rather than fantasy – that representation makes any difference in how Asian Americans experience belonging.
The panelists said that current trends reflect a long Asian American history. Violence that has accompanied COVID-19 comes after other historical incidences of xenophobia and brutality towards Asian Americans – such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the internment of Japanese internment during World War II.
Park noted that it’s important to trace the recent violent attacks to historic events propelled by racism and anti-Asian sentiment, not merely as examples of gun violence. Only then will Asian Americans understand the roots of their problems, as well as the solutions.
“In a nutshell, how we narrativize the history of this social problem matters,” she said. “We must be attentive to this if we want to imagine otherwise and enact a different way forward.”
Lauren Luna is a second-year UC Santa Barbara student majoring in anthropology. She wrote this article for her Writing Program class, Journalism for Web and Social Media.