Asians in the Oscars (and in Life)

In the end of February, a few things were on my mind: Millennial complaints, the Peter Liang rally and then the Oscars (especially Chris Rock and Sasha Baron Cohen aka Ali G). They all have one thing in common and that’s about the Asian/Asian-American experience.

Chris Rock and the Sasha Baron Cohen’s Ali G persona took made jokes at the expense of Asians using stereotypes. Chris Rock made the nerdy and technology connection while Sasha Cohen kept it physical about yellow men and their small apparatuses. He claimed to have been referring to minions, with a sly pause and a wink-wink, but what does that say about Asians being made a parallel to minions?

The most disturbing of the two comics though was Chris Rock. By taking three Asian-American kids, with one of them having a Jewish surname, Rock was making a statement. That Asian kids are nerds. That Asian kids make all that technology. That Asian kids are practically like robots. All because they work hard or maybe it’s in the genes.

I’m so disturbed.

Just a few weeks ago, there were posts about Talia Jane, a 25-year-old millennial who wrote an open letter to her Yelp CEO about how her job barely pays a living wage (and how she got fired over it in a matter of hours). I would probably have ignored this because I was too busy mulling over the Peter Liang rally over the week-end, if not for my Facebook feed from my Asian-American FB friends showing posts of a “29 year old millennial rips 25 year old over her salary”. In their posts, they highlighted these words:

Work ethic is not something that develops from entitlement. Quite the opposite, in fact. It develops when you realize there are a million other people who could perform your job and you are lucky to have one. It comes from sucking up the bad aspects and focusing on the good and above all it comes from humility. It comes from modesty.

Stefanie Williams’ sentiments hit a nerve with a lot of people. Many agreed that work ethic comes from hard work, from “sucking up the bad aspects” and just being humble and modest. These millennials and their feelings of entitlement. Just suck it up.

I’m sick and tired of hearing this.

Some critics have already said that we live in a different time, that 2008 is different from 2016, that it’s disingenuous to make the comparison. After all, we have people like Martin Shkreli running the world, making deals that kill people because his first priority is to make money for the board members.

It’s not just a matter of having a work ethic. If you’re fundamentally the bottom of the institution for the institution to work, it’s a flawed system to begin with. There’s race and class to address, the cogs and wheels that make the machine run.

If working hard was just the answer to all ills, why is that the majority of African Americans during the New Deal didn’t benefit from New Deal programs? Just read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ essay on this. Or if you’re too lazy because you have to go do something more important like watch the next reality show, then you can read this sparknotes version of Coates’ point. Or how about that 40 acres and a mule during Reconstruction?

If working hard was the answer to moving up, why do Asians and Asian-Americans, whether they are first, second, third or fourth generation, have to work harder than most people? We have to suck up so much we can barely breathe. We’re put in a model minority pedestal so high that it makes us dizzy to look down and all we can do is keep looking up. How is it that Asian-Americans must work so hard when ivy-league institutions will only take a percentage of us? Suicide rates are high. In fact, when I worked in a test prep center in Brooklyn that catered to the Chinese-American community, I used to get stressed so much from watching 4th graders beat themselves up because they didn’t do well in the state-mandated test preparations. A ten-year-old student had a tick and moved his head uncontrollably especially when he was stressed, which was often. His mother would repeatedly ask me how he did in class and didn’t believe me when I said that he did well. She said that he didn’t work hard enough.

The struggle starts in the cradle.

So, when the Asian-American but especially the Chinese-American communities came out in support of Peter Liang, I understood it even though I didn’t agree with some of the sentiments not to indict him. It’s about the community being tired of just sucking it up. It’s not about wanting him to get off the hook, because he is still a cop who decided to call his union before calling an ambulance when his bullet ricocheted and killed Akai Gurley. It’s about having people with a badge accountable when they put themselves above the law regardless of their color not especially because of their color. 22-year-old millennial Jess Fong said it best when she said that it’s not about aligning ourselves with white privilege, but we don’t want to be scapegoated either because the system is not working to begin with.

This is the new millennium. It’s not just about our lack of wages or that millennials have a very real problem of not having careers. It’s about our value as human beings. We can’t just grin and bear it. We’re not robots. We’re not minions. Something’s got to give.

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