Asian American X is a timely addition to the discourse of identity for one of the fastest growing groups in the nation. In an age of increasing exposure for Asians and other minorities, it explores the young generation of Asian Americans coming to terms with who they are in an American context.

One of the most urgent issues for Asian Americans is immigration and adaptation. This refreshing collection of coming-of-age essays, edited and written by young Asian Americans, clearly captures the joys and struggles of their evolving identities, and poignantly depicts the many oft-conflicting ties they feel to both American and Asian cultures. The collection highlights the vast cultural diversity within the category of Asian American, yet ultimately reveals how these young people are truly American in their ideals and dreams.

Asian American X is more than a book on identity; it is required reading both for young Asian Americans who seek to understand themselves and their social group, and for all who are interested in keeping abreast of the changing American social terrain.

"Label Us Angry" by Jeremiah Torres

"1984" by Sunita Puri

"China Pearl" by Julie Jia-Yi Greene

"Out and About: Coming of Age in a Straight White World"
by Michael Kim

"How Not to Eat Pho: Me and Asia America" by Michael Sue

"Seoul Searching" by Rebecca J. Kinney

From “Label Us Angry” by Jeremiah Torres

It hurts to know that the most painful and shocking event of my life happened in part because of my race—something I can never change. On October 23, 1998, my friend and I experienced what would forever change our perceptions of our hometown and society in general.

We both attended elementary, middle, and high school in the quiet, prosperous, seemingly sophisticated college town of Palo Alto. In the third grade, we happily sang “It’s a Small World,” holding hands with the children of professors, graduate students, and professionals of the area, oblivious to our diversity in race, culture, or experience. Our small world grew larger as we progressed through the school system, each year learning more about what made us different from each other. But on that October evening, the world grew too large for us to handle.

Carlos and I were ready for a night out with the boys. It was his seventeenth birthday, and we were about to celebrate at the pool hall. I pulled out of the Safeway driveway as a speeding driver delivered a jolting honk. I followed him out, speeding to catch up with him, my immediate anger getting the better of me.

We lined up at the stoplight, and the passenger, a young white man dressed for the evening, rolled down his window; I followed. He looked irritated.

“He wasn’t honking at you, you stupid fuck!”

His words slapped me across the face. I opened my stunned mouth, only to deliver an empty breath, so I gave him my middle finger until I could return some angry words. He grimaced and reached under his seat to pull out a bottle of mace, spraying it directly in my face, barely missing Carlos, who witnessed the bizarre scene in shock. It burned.

“Take that you fucking lowlifes! Stupid chinks!”

Carlos instinctively bolted out the door at those words. He started pounding the white guy without a second thought, with a new anger he had never known or felt before. Pssssht! The white guy hit Carlos point blank in the face with the mace. He screamed; tires squealed; “fuck you’s” were exchanged.

We spent the next ten minutes half-blind, clutching our eyes in the burning pain, cursing in raging anger that made us forget for moments the intense, throbbing fire on our faces. I crawled out of my car to follow Carlos’s screams and curses, opening my eyes to the still, spectating traffic surrounding us. I stumbled to the sidewalk, where Carlos pounded the ground and recalled the words of the white guy. We needed water.

I stumbled further to a nearby house that had lights in the living room. I doorbelled frantically, but nobody answered. I appealed to the traffic for help. They just watched, forming a new route around my car to continue about their evening. The mucous membranes in our sinuses cut loose, and we spit every few seconds to sustain our gasping breaths. After nearly five minutes of appeals, a kind woman stopped to call the cops and give us water to quench the burning.

The cops came within minutes with advice for dealing with the mace. We tried to identify the car and the white guy who had sprayed us, and they sent out the obligatory all points bulletin. They questioned us soon after, asking if we were in a gang. I returned a blank stare with a silent “no.” Apparently, two Filipino teenagers finding trouble on a Friday evening raised suspicions of a new Filipino gang in Palo Alto—yeah, all five of us.

I often ask myself if it would have been different had I been driving a BMW and dressed in an ironed polo shirt and slacks, like a typical Palo Alto kid. Maybe then the white guy would not have been afraid and called us lowlifes and chinks. I don’t think so. He wasn’t afraid of us; he initiated the curses and maced us from a safe distance. He reached out to hurt us because he was having a bad day and we looked different.

That night was our first encounter with overt racism that stems from a hatred of difference. We hadn’t seen it through the smiles and happy songs of elementary school or the isolated cliques of middle and high school, but now we knew it was there. We hadn’t seen it through the clean-cut, sophisticated facade of the Palo Alto white guy, but now we knew it was there. The “lowlife,” “chink,” and “gangster” labels made us different, marginalizing us from the town we called home.

Those labels made us angry, but we hesitated to project that anger. At first, we didn’t tell anyone except our closest friends, afraid our parents would find out and react irrationally by locking us in our rooms to keep us away from trouble. But then we realized that the trouble had found us, and we decided to voice our anger.

We wrote an anonymous article in the school newspaper narrating the incident and the underlying racism that had come to surface. We noted that the incident wasn’t purely racial, or a hate crime, but proof that racist tendencies still exist, even in open-minded suburban towns like Palo Alto. Parents, students, and teachers were shocked, maybe because they knew the truth in what we were saying. Many asked if it was Carlos and me who had been maced, but I responded, “Does it matter? What matters is that some people in this town still can’t accept diversity. It’s sad.” We confronted the community with an issue previously reserved for hypothetical classroom discussions and brought it into the open. It was the least we could do to release our anger and expose its roots, hoping for a change in those who chose to label us.

After the article, Carlos and I took different routes. I continued with my studies, complying with my regimen of high school classes and activities as my anger subsided. I tried to lay the incident aside, having exposed it and promoted self-inspection and possible change in others through writing. Carlos remained angry. Why not? He got a face full of mace and racist labels for his seventeenth birthday. He alienated himself from the white majority and returned the mean gestures of the white guy to the yuppie congregation of Palo Alto. He became an outsider. Whenever someone would look at him funny, he would stare back, sometimes too harshly.

On the day after finals, he was making his way through the front parking lot of school when a parent looked at him funny. He stared back. The parent called him a punk. Carlos exploded. He cursed and gestured all he could at the father, and when he sped away in his Suburban, Carlos followed. Carlos couldn’t keep up with the Suburban, so he took a quarter from his pocket and threw it at the back window, shattering it to pieces. Carlos ran away when the cops came to school.

Within two days, students had identified Carlos as the perpetrator, and he was suspended from school as the father called his lawyer, indicting Carlos of “assault with the intent to hurt.” Weeks passed until a court hearing, and Carlos attended anger management counseling, but he was still angry— angry that he was being tried over throwing a quarter and that once again “the white guys were winning.” His mother scraped up the little money she had to spare to afford him a lawyer for the trial, but there was no contesting the father’s accusations. Carlos was sentenced to a night in juvenile hall and two hundred hours of community service over some angry words and throwing a quarter. He became a convicted felon.

He had learned once again that he couldn’t win against the labels thrown at him, the labels that hurt him more than the mace or the night in juvy, and so he became more of an outsider. In both cases, the labels distanced us from the “normal” Palo Altans: white, clean-cut, wealthy. That division didn’t always exist, however; it was created by the generalizations “normal” Palo Altans made through labels. To them, we looked like lowlifes, chinks, gangsters, and punks. In truth, we were two Filipino Americans headed toward Stanford and Berkeley, living in a town that swiftly disowned us with four reckless labels after raising us for ten years. Label us angry.

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From “1984” by Sunita Puri

What I remember most vividly about the party is the colors.

I could not have been more than five years old—in fact, I was definitely five because I remember jumping off of my father’s lap when he began yelling and pointing at the television, shocked beyond belief at the horrific images of mass executions of Sikhs following Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s assassination in 1984. Sikhs, a religious group marked visually by their turbans and beards, were targeted in numerous riots across Delhi because Gandhi had been assassinated by previously loyal Sikh bodyguards. I remember much of my father’s anger and frustration during that year—the year that the Delhi he knew collapsed under the twin threats of India’s second Partition and the advent of terrorism in Punjab, our homeland.

The colors on the television set were both conveniently foreign and eerily familiar. Above all, shockingly frightening. I had never seen the bright red that I saw spilling out of a murdered Sikh sprawled facedown in a dusty Delhi street. The dark blue of his cloth turban, now unraveled beside him, lay somewhere between the sky blue of the Smurfs that I knew and the deep blue of deep sea trenches that threatened to swallow me when I examined pictures of the ocean. The camera suddenly zoomed in on the face of one man who, exhausted, backed away from the Sikh man that he had helped to beat to death. I remember the color of his eyes: a strange, possessed yellow, immediately reminding me of the time I took too many B-vitamin tablets (the chewy, fruit-flavored Flintstones kind) and urinated a thick, deep yellow fluid. I had known only comfortable colors: the fluffy pink of my bedroom, the inviting gray of my cat, the soft black of my mother’s hair.

I looked desperately for any sort of familiarity in the room. But the room, full of only my father’s friends (who were necessarily male, in keeping with the unspoken Indian tradition of segregating guests by gender at large gatherings), was unfamiliar to all my senses: sight, sound, touch. I grabbed my father’s arm and pulled at it, exclaiming, “Daddy! Daddy! I want apple juice!” His arm was strangely cold, and he yanked it away from me, murmuring “Choop karo!” to silence me. Usually, I would get some reaction from another uncle in the room when I acted cute, but this time not even my tinny child’s voice could unglue the pairs of eyes in the room from the television. I saw the dark brown eyes of my father’s friends lighten slightly as tears welled up and were promptly blinked away. A teardrop flickered in the dim yellow light as it fell from Gurdeep ji. I watched it drop to the lush brown carpet, memorizing its exact location.

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From “China Pearl” by Julie Jia-Yi Greene

I look at my grandparents across the pink tablecloth and try to think of something to say to these relatives whom I haven’t seen in nearly a decade. My Cantonese is pretty much limited to “I have this,” “I want that,” “I eat this.” I am silent, nervous. I am thankful for the loud chatter from the other tables in the restaurant that fills the silence at ours.

Kau-mo picks up the blue and white teapot. She stands and reaches across the table to pour for my grandmother, my grandfather, my other aunt, me, and finally herself. I mentally scold myself for not paying attention to the state of everyone’s tea. I am the youngest at the table and should have poured.

Yi-ma breaks the silence with a burst of uncontrollable giggles. She gestures in my direction. “How can it be that someone who looks like this could have come from people who look like that?!” she says, motioning toward my grandparents.

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From “Out and About: Coming of Age in a Straight White World” by Michael Kim

If I found a genie in a bottle, after my Upper East Side Manhattan townhouse and BMW 760, I would wish upon everyone in the world a coming-out experience. Forget sexuality, I am talking about the kind of critical existential moment that provokes unsettling questions about faith, religion, truth, society, and norms. I am talking about the kind of terrifying moment in which one perceives the limits of provincial sensibilities and questions the intellectual and moral constructions of one’s upbringing. This moment might come in meditation on the logic of Christian belief and on the reasons for being a Christian apart from parental admonition. It might arrive in the exploration of the personal and social complexities of being a second-generation Asian American. Often, it comes in dealing with being gay. In this essay, I will ask—you and myself—what it means to come out at the intersection of all three, to consider the complex but underexplored world of a gay Korean American Christian man.

I spent every Sunday morning from the time I can remember until the time I graduated high school at Grace Baptist Church, a 3,000-member Southern Baptist congregation that practiced compassionate conservatism well before George W. Bush gave it a label. The congregation enjoyed Sunday-morning fellowships, Bible study, a 150-member choir, a thirty-piece orchestra, and a transcendently charming preacher. My family thrived within this warm and inviting community, without any feelings of exclusion despite the fact that we were one of three Asian families in the entire congregation.

As a child, I demonstrated a special aptitude for playing piano and as a result came to be celebrated and embraced widely within the church community. I became the church pianist and organist and made myself blissfully indispensable to the music ministry of the church. I played so happily for choir rehearsals and with the orchestra that this welcoming bunch of white Christian adults took me in collectively as their adopted son. It was of no consequence to them that I was Korean American; perhaps more important, it was of no consequence to me that I was Korean American.

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From “How Not to Eat Pho: Me and Asia America” by Michael Sue

I was brought up as a kid on a daily helping of good ol’ American hot dogs and beans, so one can imagine how different a bowl of Vietnamese pho would have tasted to a college kid who had been taught all his life that “it was okay to like Asian food, but just not to let other people see you eat it.” As a third- generation Chinese American on my mom’s side and as a fourth-generation on my dad’s side, I grew up in a world where I was discouraged to reveal or express my Asian identity. I was taught that if I brought any Chinese food to lunch, the other kids would look at my food, laugh and point their finger at me, and say that I was strange, different, was not a real American but “Chinese.” Accordingly, I grew up believing that eating Asian food meant you were a foreigner and un-American. Foreigner or not, when I had my first taste of pho my sophomore year, it was love at first taste. For those unfortunate souls who have not experienced pho, it’s a Vietnamese rice-noodle soup in a beef or chicken broth, served with bean sprouts, green onion and cilantro, basil leaves, and different meat strips and meatballs. To enjoy pho fully, most people flavor the taste of its broth, kinda sweet and salty, by adding lemon, hoisin sauce, and red chili sauce. In fact, it’s exactly this sweet and salty taste that everybody strives for when they’re adding their different ingredients. Everybody wants to get the pho just right. Unfortunately, I never do and always seem “to be looking for pho in all the wrong places.” Rather than my pho “hitting the spot,” my bowl almost kills me. Strangely enough, though, it is from these “pho fiascos” that I have gained a better understanding of who I am as an Asian American.

It starts simply enough. I have the big bowl of pho in front of me, and as soon as I sit down, I instantly put some hoisin sauce into the bowl without even thinking. I don’t put too much in, however, just enough to make the soup look black. Then I add the red chili sauce to give it that extra kick, and that’s when things start to turn dark. Thinking that the soup could use more hoisin, I add some more. Then I add more red chili. Then I add hoisin. Before I know it, my tongue starts to burn and my eyes tears up. Moreover, I’m only about five minutes into it; I practically have a full bowl left. But like any good American schmo, I think to myself that I just can’t leave the bowl right there; I have to finish that baby up. So, thinking that I can somehow beat the “pho game,” I add more hoisin sauce in the hopes that the hoisin will somehow overpower the chili sauce, but that only worsens it. I am in tremendous pain, both mentally and physically, not only because of the extreme heat from the sauce but because of the humiliation of the situation. I’m literally crying over a bowl of pho.

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From “Seoul Searching” by Rebecca J. Kinney

Usually the metal bars lining the ceilings of a commuter train exhaust me. Whether in San Francisco or in Paris, I always find my arm stretched out like a human Gumby when faced with the uncomfortable reality of a full train. In Korea, however, the subway trains are better suited to fit my compact build. My arm reaches easily above to secure myself against the jarring of the train.

As I ride the subway around Seoul I find myself an “invisible foreigner” until I open my mouth. People turn to see the “American,” speaking English with a bit of Detroit twang. No “American” is detected, all they see is me. I traveled halfway around the world and I am still faced with a second round of questions after I tell people I am American. “But aren’t you Korean?” “What are you?” How is that for irony? The dominant way that people think about identity is constrictive but is still able to transcend borders, moving fluidly over place and time. I struggle to claim and create a space representative of my multiple identities, but my international status only seems to complicate things.

I began my life, transnational garbage—thrown out, abandoned. Picked up thousands of miles away and loved. I am one of thousands of Korean children who were adopted by United States citizens. This is where my traditional narrative begins, six months old and on a flight from Seoul bound for Detroit to a family already comprised of a mom and dad, both descendants of poor white sharecroppers, and a three-year-old sister who had been adopted from Korea three years earlier. However, I have begun this piece on “Asian American identity” where I am right now, at a PC bang in Seoul.

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