Asian America

I just wrote this on my other blog, but it's something I'd like to share here. It's a reflection after watching a student-written choreopoem/play by a Stanford senior Takeo Rivera. The tag line was "We've killed the heroes in ourselves"


I watched Takeo's R&L just now and I want to get down the things that are overwhelming my mind right now...

I went to a predominantly Asian, high-achieving high school in an ultra-suburban, mid/upper-class neighborhood. My father is an upper class white-collar worker, and my mother is actively involved in her own niche community. I graduated valedictorian with near-perfect SAT scores, diligently practiced violin for hours, and ended up going to Stanford University. When I left, I vowed to never look back again. I spent much of my senior year jaded about the "bubble" in which I lived, and the "Asianness" of it all. I wanted to go to a college where I'd be a minority and date hot white guys and have lots of white friends. I wanted to legally change my name to Christie S. Cho, and reduce my given name to an ambiguous initial squeezed between two anglicized names. I all but asked for a white roommate when, on the Stanford housing application, I described my high school and said I wanted "someone from a different background."

Then I came to Stanford. I hesitantly joined the Asian American Activities Center staff and found myself surrounded by - surprise, surprise - Asians. But it was more than that. I didn't see the power-hungry high school classmates I detested so much. I didn't see the catty Asian mothers who spoke about my family behind our backs. I didn't see just the future engineers and doctors (despite my complaining endlessly about their presence at Stanford). I saw leaders. I saw people. I saw my brothers and sisters who so clearly understood their identity and their world with respect to their self-understanding. I did VIA. I realized I actually did like Korean people. I, after much hesitation, joined KSA and found myself a family. I caught myself speaking in my dusty Korean, just because I relished hearing the syllables roll off my tongue. What started out as a search for community, and the struggle to define what community meant for me, ended up as a search for self-enlightenment. LEAD opened up the term "person of color" to me and helped me think of myself as one. I saw the injustice, however innocuous, prevalent in society. I saw the racism, the narrowness that sought to stifle, to quell, and to suppress me.

It doesn't matter if my world-class institution of higher learning cannot find better ways to recruit diverse scholars. It doesn't matter if frat boys shout racial slurs at the Asian American ethnic theme dorm. It doesn't matter if the Daily insists on printing self-important articles and editorials and columns that perpetuate the suppression, the subjection of MY people - of ME. It doesn't matter if, despite being an Asian history major, most of my professors have been old, white, and male (except for that one professor who decided he wanted to be "she", but that's a different story). It doesn't matter that community centers are constantly attacked for self-segregation and irrelevance.

It doesn't matter because there are the people who more than make up for institutional, societal, and individual failures. These are the writers, the poets, the musicians, the athletes, the students who challenge an externally-imposed identity and sense of self that belies ones true history and true identity. It doesn't matter because there are people who will fight for faculty/graduate diversity, a policy against acts of intolerance, write op-eds and letters in protest, and FIGHT for the community they worked so hard to build. And I know this might all sound over-dramatic with a tint of racial anger... And the fact is, I am angry. But I don't care because there are people out there who remind me EVERY SINGLE FUCKING DAY why I am here and WHY I do what I do. I'm still haunted by R&L, but I hope it continues to haunt me for a lot longer, because this is just the energy - or "the fire" - that I needed to save the hero inside.