As an Asian-American dude, I can relate.

Even having grown up in Silicon Valley, alongside a very prevalent Asian community, I felt that the bad/stupid/asinine/ill-considered/dorky/nerdy/whatever thing that another Asian person did reflected poorly on me (William Hung, for example). And I always felt that I needed to be 100x more brash, arrogant, self-assured, put-together, charming, intelligent, and so on to even begin to compete with my white peers.

Even now, when I’m out running on the streets of Boston, if I space out and nearly run into a crosswalk when the Don’t Walk is blinking back at me, I wonder if everyone around me is thinking, These damn Asians know fuck-all about traffic laws. Or if I’m absent-mindedly rude to someone, or if I can’t find exactly the right thing to say when someone says something to me, or whatever, it bothers me for the rest of the day.

It’s been a competitive advantage for me, a net positive. But it’s a draining, heavy advantage to always be toting around. Somedays, I’d rather be horribly average than feel this need to compete and prove myself, over and over again, to a group of people who probably don’t ACTUALLY THINK the things I believe they think.