Finding the Face of Asian New York

Even in the famed international mélange of New York City, many people learn about other ethnicities through popular culture rather than personal relationships, which is why a recent cultural cock-up at a local radio station was so troubling.

For listeners of WQHT/Hot 97 early last year, exposure to the South Asian tidal wave included "The Tsunami Song," a jingle of kabooming ignorance and empty-headed lyrics like "screaming chinks" and "little Chinamen." Never mind that mainland China borders a completely different ocean than the one that produced the surge that killed an estimated 118,000 people-none of them Chinese, unless of course they were on vacation. The broadcast illustrated what many Asians already know: their inner diversity is reduced by the outside world to crude stereotypes and gross generalities.

According to unscientific research conducted amongst more than 20 Asian New Yorkers, these consist of socioeconomic slights ranging from knowing "Kung Fu," working in a laundry and delivering food, to studying calculus, trading on Wall Street and conducting stem-cell research. They also include petty physical profiling along the lines of having buckteeth, a bowl haircut, dandruff, glasses and slanted eyes.

But perhaps the most powerful disregard for difference in the community is the very label "Asian American."

The latest census data finds over 30 languages and at least as many disparate cultures represented amongst the nearly one million "Asian Americans" that reside in New York City. Their homelands range from Iran-yes, Iran-to Japan. What good is a term that doesn't appreciate these differences? Who-and what, for that matter-is Asian?

I set out for answers. I walked the streets and rode the subway for my research, chatting up car mates on the 1, 4, 5, 6, 9, F and V lines, and cornering people waiting on platforms. When the train was late, I was happy. When the trains were crowded, I was happy. When the trains were too crowded, I squirmed into a seat and studied jean pockets and purse straps, computer bags and hair styles, trying to discern a pattern that would establish a rule.

'A big F.U.' On the eve of May's national Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, MiRi Park was one of many New York Asians without a hill to charge.

"May is Asian American Heritage Month?" asked a surprised Park, 27, a Brooklynite of Korean decent. "As if the term 'Asian American' has any intrinsic meaning."

Instead of joining some mythical all-Asian cookout, this hip-hop dancer and performer in the satirical urban arts troupe, Kate's Chink-o-Rama, spent the day at home in a bedridden state of convalescence. She had passed the weekend celebrating the arrival of Air Guitar Nation, a documentary about the first U.S. Air Guitar championships that had its New York premier at the Tribeca Film Festival. As the 2004 world champion representing America, Park was obliged to party like a mock-star.

But as exceptional as she sounds, Park is just one of the many first-generation, multiethnic, Asian New Yorkers who are turning the stereotypes into their own defiant joke. Park's air guitar routine, which won national recognition on Late Night with Conan O'Brien, is more than a faux-blistering rendition of Van Halen's "Hot for Teacher"; it's political art.

"The whole performance and all the details, from my schoolgirl costume to my initial shy-tiptoeing to my flashing Hello Kitty panties, are a big 'F.U.' to anyone who thinks Asian woman are all docile, nice and quiet," Park says.

Kate's Chink-o-Rama, the group to which she belongs, was founded in 1999 by Indonesian comedian and Julliard grad, Kate Rigg, to wage a similar war against the all-Asian norm. Today, the group tours the country performing rewritten popular songs ("Rice, Rice, Baby" and "Wok this Way") and parodying existing stereotypes with skits, such as slow-motion thumb wrestling to the tune of "Everybody was Kung Fu Fighting."

"We deconstruct, rebuild and redistribute all the received slander against the Asian community," says Park, who was born in Seoul, Korea, but moved with her family to suburban New Jersey when still an infant.

"I wasn't naturalized until I was 13, so you can imagine the confusion when I grew old enough to read the word 'Alien' on my green card," she says. "I never felt normal."

Finding Shade Beneath the "Asian" Parasol Feeling alienated is something Park shares with most U.S. Asians, and something sociologists call the "forever foreign" syndrome. A reference to a sense of perpetual characterization as non-American "others," the condition afflicts Asians at all levels of society, including New York's first "Asian American" council member, John Liu. Elected in 2001, the Taiwan-born, U.S.-raised Democrat recognizes the risks of accepting a generalized identity. But at the same time, he sees benefits in the shade cast by the larger Asian parasol.

"Although it's not a natural descriptor, I personally describe myself as 'Asian American' because I think it highlights the shared challenges faced by all Asians in America dealing with the 'forever foreigner' syndrome," says Liu, 39, the son of a garment worker, who attended the Bronx High School of Science and has a B.A. in mathematical physics from Binghamton University.

According to Dr. C.N. Le, chair of the Asian American studies program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and creator of Asian-Nation.org, smoothing over ethnic differences helps foster "a tremendous sense of solidarity that enables effective resistance to discrimination from the dominant majority."

Liu acknowledges the Asian American classification was Made in the U.S.A.-"foisted on us by the larger history of this country"-and was shocked to find a similar look-the-same, are-the-same mentality inside City Hall.

"I once had an elected official ask me to help them translate some materials into Asian," he first told the New York Sun in 2005. "And so I asked, 'So, Korean, Chinese, Filipino, what?' And he said, 'No, just Asian.' I'll never forget that."

Nonetheless, he recognizes the political potential of being part of a larger group, who can use the "Asian American" ticket to advance an agenda of "equal opportunity, due process and a level playing field."

Stir Frying Asian Fusion Manhattan-born and based Jeff Yang, 38, the founder of the now defunct aMagazine, the country's first Asian American cultural glossy, and currently the senior director at the consumer insights firm Iconoculture, says the search for commonalities is a function of the way the Asian label came into existence some 40 years ago.

"Myself and other members of the post-1965 generation grew up being shaped by the powerful symbols and precedents of the Civil Rights era-yet without any immediate parallels in our heritage by which to understand the identity that had been thrust upon us," said Yang via e-mail. "As a result, we've had to confront a few basic questions again and again: Who is 'Asian American'? What, other than executive order and political convenience, makes the term meaningful? What is 'our' culture, who are 'our' icons, 'our' heroes, 'our' martyrs; which battles are most critical for 'us' to fight?"

Such questions are leading a community of New York Asian artists into a struggle to wrest a genuine culture from a label they did not choose, and a larger society that ignores their complexity. In fact, bearing the burden of being permanent outsiders-regardless of their specific ethnicity-may ultimately be what bands Asians together and imbues "Asian American" culture with a kind of organic energy. The good news is the emergence of a larger institutional framework for culture beyond the stereotypes.

For example, 15 years ago, Filipino poet and novelist Bino Realuyo co-founded the Asian American Writer's Workshop with a small group of scribblers, holding weekly meetings in an East Village Greek diner.

"We started the organization to provide a literary space and voice for young Asian American writers against a majority culture that often acts as if we are all the same: all exotic Asian, none American," states Realuyo. Today, the AAWW expresses its collective self in a 6,000 square foot Chelsea loft with performance space, a library and workshops where NuyorAsian (New York Asian) identity takes form in an eponymous anthology of Asian writings about New York City.

Realuyo is himself an example of culture in the making. In addition to editing the 1999 NuyorAsian Anthology, he has published a novel, In Umbrella Country, and most recently an award-winning book of poetry, The Gods We Worship Live Next Door.

"I'm creating a fusion of identity in my writing that is more complex than saying, 'I'm an immigrant,'" says Realuyo.

Pride in Prominence Of course, the culture industry does not stop with literature. Jin Au-Yeung, 23, a former delivery man for his parents' Chinese restaurant, is fast becoming a major Asian rap star after signing a deal with Ruff Ryder records in 2002. Meanwhile, a random shoulder tapping on Mott Street revealed less prominent but equally influential Asian arbiters of our society's taste: Ai Ly, 31, is a Vietnamese American denim designer for Polo Ralph Lauren. Her sister, Wayne Lee, 29, is a buyer for the upscale Barney's department store. Further uptown, playwright Rehana Mirza sips an orange soda and talks about the theater group she founded with her sister Rohi in 2002. Known as Desipina & Company, the group's name is slang for people who embrace multiracial identities and fusion lifestyles, and its mandate is to "to unite and highlight differences," says Rehana, 27, a Pakistani/Filipino American playwriting student at Columbia University.

Such public displays of Asian-ness are clearly celebrated by some members of the Pan-Asian community. "When I see a Chinese or Filipino or Japanese gain some prominence, I feel a sense of pride," says Korean American graduate student Matthew Sun-Jin Rodriguez via e-mail. But others are less impressed with- accomplishments achieved in reference to existing norms and established channels.

Nearly everyone mentioned above was educated in an elite American university and could be said to have an "unconscious tendency to accept white culture as the majority culture as well as the favored culture. White is normal," writes Frank Wu, a professor at Howard University and author of Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White.

Life inside the 'Tofu Salad' White culture may predominate in the United States, but some New York Asians live psychologically, and in large part physically, apart. Queens green grocer Na Byong, 50, still describes himself simply as Korean, despite having lived in America for over two decades.

"I came for a better money-making environment and place to raise a family," says Byong while cutting bad grapes from a bunch in the back of the Elinkinia Greek Corner Grocery on 30th Avenue in Astoria. "But first of all, I'm a Korean. I'm part of a 5,000 year history."

Thirty minutes away in Manhattan's Chinatown, a yet-to-be naturalized teenager from Shanghai put everything in context for an uninitiated "Whitey."

Within the Asian American community, there are ways to categorize and differentiate one another, in terms that are freighted with judgment, John Kwok explains. He sports large angular hair that looks shaped by an ice sculptor and describes himself and his friends as lemons: "Yellow on the outside, yellow on the inside." He refers to Asians within the establishment, who have internalized white culture, as bananas: "Yellow on the outside, white on the inside."

But these are extremes. Perhaps the truest metaphor for the Asian experience in New York is the "tofu salad": a blend of different cultural ingredients topped with large chunks of white.

Then again, maybe metaphors are unable to truly define what it means to be "Asian American." Sometimes the growing pains of cultural discovery are not as temporary, or unnecessary, as we'd like to believe.