I’m Chinese, but without seeing my face, you’d never know it. Hearing me on the phone, or looking at my resume and Spotify playlists, I could be Cindy from Ohio with Bieber on repeat.
In 2009, I launched a YouTube series about cooking for people who can’t cook: basically, delinquent millennials like myself who enabled the rise of Seamless. The show enjoyed some success and broadened my network, and led to new projects and even original episodes with the Cooking Channel. But when asked about next steps for my nascent “foodie brand,” I was always encouraged by well-meaning white acquaintances to rediscover my heritage and promote Asian food and cooking. I tried to explain: Look, Barbara, I can’t cook — Asian food or otherwise.
They’d look at me and nod in sympathy, but only see a missed opportunity. Maybe they were right. Promoting Chairman Mao’s red-braised pork belly would’ve been the good Asian thing to do.
After a couple of years of being told I should launch the next Yan Can Cook, I got a job working for a startup, and continued to order takeout and date white guys instead.
Fast forward to 2016, I’m married to one of those white guys now, and my sister, a 29-year-old advertising manager, will soon marry her own white dude — a Navy sailor at that.
My parents didn’t blink an eye, but the media tells me that’s unusual for immigrant parents (Bad Tiger Mom!).
In my thirty-two years, I’ve seen Asians subjected to an evolving set of stereotypes. Consistently, we’re generalized as a people who work hard, eat animal insides and do well on standardized tests. The jabs are passive-aggressive if not outright offensive. Being called an overachiever with an appetite for innards is kind of a compliment, but the flip side suggests that we’re agreeable, subservient and lack imagination.
Today, Asians in the US are widely considered a “model minority,” taking your place at top universities, making more money than you by the hour, and opening laundromats (no, wait, that’s our parents). And the most ambitious among us are multi-hyphenated, like chef-restaurant-owner-celebrity David Chang and lawyer-turned-restaurant-owner-turned-author Eddie Huang, who’ve both convinced the masses that ramen and pork buns are best paired with fancy beer and $15 cocktails.
In entertainment, George Takei, Margaret Cho and Lucy Liu have helped normalize the idea of Asians on TV by playing lead roles, but we have a helluva long way to go. (Apparently, all Asian Americans in entertainment fit on one Wikipedia page.)
Then this year, something happened.
More Asians.
The comedy series Fresh Off The Boat is about to start its third season, for one. And seemingly out of nowhere, comic Ali Wong manifested on Netflix with Baby Cobra, her own standup special.
“You’re gonna have to do anal eventually,” she informed her mostly white audience.
“Wow, she’s funny, and not just for an Asian!” I thought, making a fist pump in my brain, while in actuality watching the show on my laptop, wearing the same clothes from the day before.
And just last weekend, Aziz Ansari and Alan Yang won an Emmy for their writing on Master of None, which Alan accepted with a funny and inspiring call to arms for more Asians in entertainment:
“Asian parents out there — if you could do me a favor — just a couple of you get your kids cameras instead of violins, we’ll be all good.”
Right, good idea, Alan. Give more cameras to Asians.
To be Asian American is to be a walking contradiction: too loud, too quiet, too white, too Asian. Which brings me to this: What does it mean to be Asian in America, or any of our adoptive countries, today? This is the question I want to explore with Bad Asian, a podcast I’m launching today on Bumpers.
Update: In addition to Bumpers, Bad Asian is now on iTunes and SoundCloud.
Like a good Asian, I was taught to honor my family and elders, so of course the first episode features my 92-year-old grandma and cousin Lily who was my first playmate and fellow Barbie fan when we were kids growing up in Brooklyn.
Upcoming episodes will feature Joann Kim, a Korean-American millennial who’s running her family’s sample factory in New York’s Garment District while launching her own fashion line. And I’ll be talking with Pok Pok chef-owner Andy Ricker — widely known as the white guy promoting Northern Thai cuisine, and doing a bang-up job of it. Plus, other Asians with opinions.
Happy listening!
