stopping asian hate, one boba at a time
(pt 4) choose your asian american aesthetic - compliant or carceral?
This is Part C, Chapter 7. Read the intro to my manifesto here, Chapters 1-3 here, and Chapters 4-6 at the link below. Subscribe to stay updated with my next manifesto installment.
In this installment, I’ll discuss our enduring mimicry of the aesthetic of the model minority that dissolves the specificity of Asian American identities into the wonderful melting pot of White America. Asian Americans searching for a political home often must choose between 1/ “Spineless Boba Liberal Savior of the Black and Brown” or 2/ “Carceral Capitalist American Dreamer” — in hopes of acknowledgement by White America, we either sacrifice the complexities of our Asian identity or toss aside our “undeserving” peers.
The former option reduces Asian American identity from embodiment to consumption of Asian-coded goods. The latter rejects solidarity and strives for individual, institutional-level recognition. The results are not so different, because both sides pursue acceptance by their respective White American elites. Both forgo Asian American cultural or political concerns in favor of economic legitimization.
I’ll wrap up with how the progressive-left’s embrace of Asian Identity As Consumption manifests in embarrassing auto-orientalist Asian American Food Capitalism, enduring orientalism in the music industry, and repressed melancholy in the Asian American indie music scene. I’ll offer Bianca Mabute-Louie’s idea of Asian American “unassimilability” as an alternative.
7/ Asian American political purgatory
Asian American liberals will deny contemporary anti-Asianness and White racial preference, but they literally will riot over boba — anyone whose seen that viral video of Simu Liu criticizing White people “Bobba” knows what I’m talking about.1
Listen, I’ve been drinking boba since I was barely 2 years old, so I have some stake in this.2 But, even I wonder, why is the only time we get a glimpse of Asian American Solidarity when a White person says our food is dirty?3
That Asian food carries Asian American Culture is obvious in the recurring themes of contemporary Asian American Art. I’d say 2/3 of art products and illustrations (prints, stickers, jewelry, little decorations, tote bags, etc) that I see at markets, gift shops, or on social media reference cut fruit, Vitasoy, Lao Gan Ma, boba, Asian pantry staples, or dim sum4 — all very subtle asian traits-approved5 goods meant to inspire Asian American Food Exceptionalism.
the aesthetic of Asian American Exceptionalism
It’s virtually impossible to patronize Asian American artists without ending up with a wall covered in pastel prints of peeled oranges and cut apples and tiger balm or tote bags depicting the Asian sauces and snacks in your weekly Ranch 99 grocery haul.6
It’s not that I don’t have any Asian Food Art on my walls. And yes, I think that the Ranch 99 mini tote is cute.7 But, I wonder if we intensely claim this auto-orientalist8 Asian American Food Exceptionalism because we don’t know what else we can claim for ourselves. Zoe Fuad observes:
“When [Asians] pursue activism, it’s meant to be about less depressing things: like, our right to get into Ivy Leagues, even when that’s at the cost of actual racial equity; or, the best way to cook rice; or, did you see those white folks claiming our right to bubble tea?9
Despite the tired fact that “Asian” covers an entire continent worth of flavors, and that yes, even White people have their own White people food,10 we take deep pride in Asian food and stinky tofu lunchtime horror stories as defining features of Asian Americanness. We embrace the “aesthetic exteriorization of our status as the model minority” through the “less depressing” identity of consumption of Asian-coded items.11 ARX-Han reasons that “Asian-American cultural elites produce an infinite slurry of thinkpieces and stories about food,” choosing this “safe commentary” because “the organic material that you place into your mouth-hole for sustenance is devoid of semantic content.”12
In Racial Melancholia, Racial Disassociation, David L. Eng and Shinhee Han suggest that we prefer non-confrontational social commentary because even though contemporary Asian Americans widely refuse the model minority myth, mainstream society still expects some mimicry of the stereotype for us to deserve any recognition. And, consciously or subconsciously, we give it to them.
After all, the model minority could even be considered a “positive” stereotype. In Asian Americans in an Anti-Black World, Claire Jean Kim explains how “nearness or farness from Blackness—not whiteness—is the overriding determinant of racial status.” Kim continues:
“Chinese foreignness was not only a site of dispossession, persecution, and exclusion, but also a site of plenitude, standing, and belonging. Even at the nadir of exclusion, the slave provided a floor beneath which the Chinese could not fall.”13
What Kim writes is true, and the foundation of Asian American politics across the political spectrum, has always been, in some capacity, either: “but we’re not Black!” (the left) or “at least we’re not Black!” (the right)
It seems that liberals want Asians to self-flagellate at the alter of anti-Blackness and many Asian Americans have fallen into line, not realizing, that unspoken in the contract of White liberalism is that Asians cannot also demand anything for ourselves — it would just be too confusing.
right or left, identity politics or post-racial, carceral or compliant?
In her Asian American manifesto Unassimilable, sociologist Bianca Mabute-Louie explains how Asian Americans “are simultaneously overrepresented and excluded” in affirmative action debates. We are allegedly overrepresented in higher ed, and Washington and Michigan even started grouping Asian Americans with White students in testing and graduation reports.14
Yet Mabute-Louie writes that there are still no Asian American tenured professors in her department and that while conducting sociology research, academics continue to reject the specificity of Asian American identities and opt to combine “Asian” with “Other,” or otherwise exclude them from consideration as a main demographic like Black, White, and Hispanic.15 Mabute-Louie asks:
What is overrepresentation without institutional or cultural power to influence how AAPIs are centered, or even considered, in decisions, policy, and practice in education?16
Asian Americans lack cultural power because “progressive” Asian Americans comply with White expectations while claiming otherwise. Boba liberals pursue the aesthetic of Asian Girlbossery and media representation because seriously embodying an (Asian) identity-based political formation is now considered “irresponsible, trivial, divisive” and unserious.17 On the other hand, “conservative” Asian Americans claim Asianness to seek individual, meritocratic differentiation from other undeserving groups (Black and Brown people) through recognition by academic, political, financial, or government institutions.
We are trapped in Asian American political identity purgatory, where our only options are:
Spineless Boba Liberal: A strategy for assimilation into the post-racial world via self-sacrificial offering of oneself as a protector of Black and Brown communities, which validates everyone’s oppression but that of Asian Americans themselves. (Rightly) believes Carceral Capitalists are deluded by American Exceptionalism.
Refer to my discussion of Asian masculinity and WMAF relationships.
Carceral Capitalist:18 An Asian identity-based empowerment trapped in the confines of state-based reform, which succeeds only in entrenching the colonial, capitalist, anti-Black foundations of meritocracy at the expense of “less deserving” communities. (Rightly) believes Spineless Boba Liberals are willing to deny the humanity of other Asians if it means White approval.
Consider pro-state, pro-law enforcement movements like Affirmative Action and Stop Asian Hate.19
While the first would be considered “progressive” and the second “conservative,” both are some arrangement of neoliberal/centrist/reactionary assimilationist strategies that depend on White institutions (the progressive-left or the state) to legitimize Asian American existence as one of the good ones…doesn’t complain or ask for much, able to make themselves useful to society, can be used as a DEI success story, etc.
“To occupy the model minority position, Asian American subjects must therefore submit to a model of economic rather than political and cultural legitimation… [it] demands not only an enclosed but also a passive self-sufficiency and compliance.”20
When we prioritize legitimization in the eyes of a White capitalist society instead of owning our un-assimilability, across the political spectrum, “Asian Americans themselves become attached to, and divided by, [the model minority’s] seemingly admirable qualities without sufficiently recognizing its liabilities.”
These unspoken liabilities include estrangement from our histories of American anti-Asianness, inability to self-advocate, and an enduring “intergenerational negotiation between mourning and melancholia” that plagues immigrant families and their children.21
racial placelessness is not aesthetic and that’s great
Acceptance by White society should not be our goal, because White America will always dictate the terms of our assimilation. Either we sacrifice our Asianness for the “greater good” of the progressive-left, or we sacrifice other people of color to the logic of capitalism or meritocracy.
As Mabute-Louie writes, becoming unassimilable starts with asking: “What if we disavowed America and owned our diasporic sense of racial placelessness? What if we created belonging in the diaspora by claiming one another?”22
In a series of Instagram Stories in April 2024, author Ocean Vuong asserts that he wants to write:
“…whatever that’s important to me…Yes, I want both the mango and the sad, lonely mist of New England. And I want them in the same work, on the same line.”
The mango and the New England mist do not contradict each other, even if they aren’t printed on the same Asian American sticker sheet. Racial placelessness is not aesthetic and that is great. Culture is not only communicated through obvious aesthetics and simplified ethnic iconography. Culture is embodied. Diaspora culture exists because Asians everywhere exist in relation to and because of each other.
The following is kind of an afterword to this essay, where I rant about annoying contemporary manifestations of Boba Liberalism and Asian American Exceptionalism:
Asian American Food As Identity, the consequence of prioritizing economic validation from White America
Asian American Sad/Chill/Melancholic Music, the manifestation of repressed mourning and melancholia for the sake of “compliance”
1/ food as identity
In their journey to claim recognition via economic legitimation in lieu of cultural significance, Asian Americans have pursued so many cringeworthy ventures to brand, own, or sell Asian American identity via consumption of Asian food or language.
For example, Asian American capitalists attempted to trademark names of extremely common Asian foods like “chili crunch” (David Chang / Momofuku) and “mochi muffin” (Third Culture Bakery in Berkeley, CA) and send cease-and-desists to other minority-owned businesses or home cooks making similar products.23 For some, sharing the joys of Asian American Food is just a shameless excuse to pander to White people.
Other business owners have also realized that the aesthetic of Asian American Food sells best when exaggerated. The rebranding of a San Francisco bar, Trade Routes, into an neon-sign-filled, orientalist, night-market fantasy called Polkcha is an embarrassing example of Asians facilitating the commodification of Asianness.
In 2021, two Asians opened Trade Routes on Polk Street.24 Trade Routes was very clearly inspired by the global spice trade. With nautical decorations, a light-up map of Asia, Africa, and Europe on display behind the counter, and drinks incorporating cinnamon, pandan, coconut, and tea flavors, the Asian influence was evident. It felt comforting to be patronizing an Asian business that wasn’t trying to hit you over the head with Asianness.
My happiness was short-lived. In 2024, the owners reopened the bar as “Polkcha” – inspired by Korean food and drink street stalls called “pocha.” They updated the cocktail menu, but more significantly, they redecorated the interior with bright cyberpunk murals, neon signs in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean (the only languages spoken in Asia), lanterns, and dragon decorations.25 Evidently, you can’t just be Asians owning a bar — you need to be an Asian Bar to be taken seriously.
2/ music & melancholia
The tendency towards sentimental or melancholic music seems a natural consequence of what Eng and Han name as an Asian American-specific “racial melancholia” and “racial dissociation” from the “sustained losses attendant to processes of immigration, assimilation, and racialization for Asian immigrants and their second-generation children” and the “depression and self-annihilation that emerge from this psychic state.”26
I’ve noticed Asian American musicians are almost exclusively doing some laid-back-indie-bedroom-R&B-soul-alternative thing. For example, Mitski, Japanese Breakfast, Tiffany Day, beabadoobee, Laufey, Jay Som, NIKI, Raveena, SATICA, Lucy Park, mxmtoon, thủy, keshi, Joji, Yeek, RINI, DPR IAN, Dhruv, etc.27
I can only name a few Asian Americans/British Asians brave enough to raise their voice — the Linda Lindas, Ashrita Kumar of Pinkshift, and P-Lo,28 maybe REI AMI, Rina Sawayama, Olivia Rodrigo, Audrey Nuna some of the time.29 If Asian musicians want to raise their voice, they’re often based in Asia itself.30
A side note on EDM: Given the huge role EDM plays in Asian American culture,31 it’s notable that so many popular EDM artists are White. Listed first in the screenshot of the Spotify tapioca playlist above is Porter Robinson (a White man with an Asian wife), who also sells merch of his very obviously Asian-inspired mascot Potaro.32
More egregiously, bands such as Kero Kero Bonito, which stars Sarah Bonito, a half-Japanese woman, and two White men, clearly draw inspiration from Asian aesthetics. In fact, the White guys, Gus and Jamie, recall that they knew they “wanted to do something with someone who could speak Japanese, because the sound of that language really appealed to us…but really it would have been really difficult to do something with someone who didn’t speak English.”33
Finding Sarah through an expat posting board was key to fulfilling their fantasy, because “Sarah meant we had both [languages].” They wanted the “cute” and “futuristic” vibes of Japan…just not so Japanese that two White guys would actually be out of their own comfort zones. Sarah Bonito is an aesthetic, playing her role in the group as the exotic (1/2) Asian, and she knows it.
When you just take a look around, you can really find so many examples of White people’s obsession with Asian aesthetics and some Asians’ willingness to pander to them. At best, Asian Americans are exploiting cultural “appreciation” for commercial success. At worst, Asian Americans are perpetuating orientalism, while pretending that it is empowerment because at least we’re the ones doing it.
Up next, the West’s suspicion and fetishization of those “other” Asians from Asia, and how that plays out in characterization of Asians and Asian Americans in contemporary films:
just put the fortune cookies in the bag bro
(pt 5) unfeeling, empty asian labor in fashion knockoffs, olympic swimming, severance, past lives, perfect days, and netflix's 3 body problem
In October 2024, 2 white people pitched their embarrassing Bobba business and Simu Liu pushed back. Asian America was super angry and praised Simu Liu for his courage. This isn’t the first time this has happened; refer to Better Boba.
First of all, while it’s not my #1, no Quickly’s slander is allowed.
Also, fuck Boba Guys. When that story broke that were being anti-Black and union busting, I emailed them and the co-founder Andrew Chau actually responded, saying “You seem to have been a fan and I'm reaching out to a select few to engage, despite my legal team's best wishes” and offered to meet me privately at a store to have (boba and) a conversation to clear the air. Like okay so you have time to talk. Have that conversation with your own employees then.
Just an example: On Waverly SF
The subtle asian traits facebook group peaked in like 2018 or something
I’m talking accessible illustration-type art, not fine art.
Also, I think Stephanie Shih’s work, both their ceramics and mutual aid in Palestine is great. But there’s a reason people were foaming at the mouth for their pomelos specifically!
As Tony Tulathimutte writes in Rejection, one of the four Asian survival strategies is (the other three being assimilate into second-class citizenship, appropriate a more popular minority culture, or self-ostracize):
“…this sort of cosplay of one’s own heritage, expressed in the consumption of its exports, ramen and roti, boba and bhangra, mochi and manga, an auto-orientalism that, sincerity notwithstanding, only affirms ideas of inherent racial traits, and sometimes devolves into reactionary fake nostalgia” (Page 177).
I had meatloaf for the first time last week.
Asian Americans in an Anti-Black World, Claire Jean Kim - Page 19 (emphasis mine)
In the (now offline) 2020 Monitoring Student Growth Report, North Thurston Public Schools separated “White/Asian Students” from “Students of Color.”
Unassimilable, Bianca Mabute-Louie - Chapter 2 “PWI-WAA (Predominantly White Institutions with ‘A Lot’ of Asians)”
Ibid.
The Twilight of Equality?: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy, Lisa Duggan - Page 71
Also the name of a great essay collection, Carceral Capitalism, by Jackie Wang
Affirmative Action: In the case of the 2023 landmark case that overturned affirmative action, Students for Fair Admissions vs Harvard, Asian Americans had teamed up with conservative activist Edward Blum beginning in the 2010s. Blum’s experience attacking race-conscious laws informed a meritocratic, “American Dream” narrative for the plaintiffs’ complaints of racism.
By upholding a policy of “deservingness,” the Asian plaintiffs actually accept the dominant (White) culture’s “refusal to see anything but the achievement of autonomous individuals,” implying that the oppressed Asian needs to “separate from the people with whom [they] identify in order to ‘make it’ in a White Anglo male world” (Justice and the Politics of Difference, Iris Marion Young - Page 167).
Ultimately, this was only a win for White people who finally got to claim reverse-racism under the sympathetic guise of defending the POC that the left had abandoned.
Stop Asian Hate: In this essay, Dylan Rodriguez goes into great detail about how Stop AAPI Hate (formed in 2021 as a response to hate crimes and COVID-19 induced anti-Asianness) “advocates a form of populist criminology that calls for an inclusive, aggressive, equity-oriented response from the domestic warmaking state.”
While the intention of exposing the insidious anti-Asianness in America was an honest one, the focus on criminal data collection and the state’s obligation to protect has only “re-legitimate[d] antiblack, colonial, carceral state violence in a moment of crisis.” By positioning the state as an “arbiter, protector, and militarized authority figure,” Stop AAPI Hate suggests the solution to Asian hate crime is equitable law enforcement, a politic that requires us to both pledge loyalty to the state, and assert the unworthiness of other groups that may be collateral damage.
This phenomenon is clearly replicated in local politics — in San Francisco, it is clear that many Asian elders and Asian-owned small businesses support tough on crime policies (Propositions E and F, which were passed in 2024). Many times, politicians scrounge for Asian votes by weaving carceral policies into anti-Asian hate narratives, as if they really care about the Asian community specifically.
Racial Melancholia, Racial Disassociation, David L. Eng and Shinhee Han - Page 46 (emphasis mine)
Ibid - Page 47
Unassimilable, Bianca Mabute-Louie - Introduction
San Francisco’s Newest Cocktail Bar Transports a Late-Night Street Market to Polk Gulch
Here are photos of Trade Routes before the makeover. Here are photos of Polkcha and their social media post-makeover.
Racial Melancholia, Racial Disassociation, David L. Eng and Shinhee Han - Page 29 (emphasis mine)
“asian-american young woman of color from the suburbs group therapy”
Also, just because I list artists here doesn’t mean they’re not on my playlists.
All In My Head, The Linda Lindas
i’m gonna tell my therapist on you, Pinkshift
For more on Filipino American DJs’ unique contributions to the West Coast music scene, see Legions of Boom: Filipino American Mobile DJ Crews in the San Francisco Bay Area, by Oliver Wang.
And Eric Reprid, if we ignore that he just released a song called “Like a Ch*nk B*tch” a homage to Far East Movement’s “Like a G6.”
Chris Jesu Lee writes about this phenomenon in movies, where Asians are allowed to be psychotic but Asian Americans aren’t.
Related: Coping with Acculturative Stress: MDMA Usage among Asian American Young Adults in the Electronic Dance Music Scene, Michelle Stephanie Chan
babe this rocks and I’m so glad you wrote it— I didn’t finish yet but ran here because i just remembered that years ago when chloe zhao nomadland won for best picture I wrote in my notes app: is this even a win for asians bc her identity(whatever that is) is incidental to the movie…she won via a film that could not be more legible/palatable to the white votership of the academy. striving for that legibility is so lame lmao.
"I’ve noticed Asian American musicians are almost exclusively doing some laid-back-indie-bedroom-R&B-soul-alternative thing."
it's interesting because at first this was considered pretty subversive. Asian representation in Pitchfork as a form of empowerment-kind of thing. I think being an Asian-American in a white dominated media space was the most an Asian-American artist could really aspire to in the 2010s. the approval of a different flavor of white person, i guess. I think the attainment of cultural capital has been considered "the final frontier" for Asian-Americans. Especially given that kpop is the most popular form of music created by people of Asian descent, I imagine that there was this desire to prove themselves as "deep" and "legitimate" and "anti pop." Rina Sawayama doesn't really seem to have that baggage; she's well-versed in pop tropes and uses that to her advantage.
I'd say at the very least, Mitski's quite experimental in her form and the whole "white sad girl" scene she got lumped in with is was reductive. She is no gracie abrams lol. I didn't consider her music to be the kind that fetishized its own melancholy. But there definitely is something quite restrained and sparse about her songwriting style if you compare her with the white guys of 2010s indie rock (considering the verbosity and wordplay of arctic monkeys or vampire weekend). oof, is this a "high context" vs "low context" culture thing lol? [also maybe a gendered issue, because i notice a similar sparseness with phoebe bridgers]
anyway, lots to chew on, as always! <3