Eric Pan: Imaging the Asian American Self

How did you navigate your Asian American identity in St. Louis? How did you get involved in Black Lives Matter activism?

I’ve lived in St. Louis for 18 years but I was born in Radford Virginia, South of Blacksburg Virginia. Early on in life I grew up in North Carolina, surrounded by Black culture and never encountered the problem of anti-Blackness in Asian communities. Moving to St. Louis I was suddenly in West County, specifically Chesterfield where it’s like 97% White. It was a jarring experience. Maybe my memory is selective because I have better memories from elementary school onwards but I remember the jokes that people made that I thought was harmless at first but that made me existential from very young. Like: “Say something in Chinese!” or “Where are you from?”. I started thinking about how I could better fit in. Regardless of whether or not someone lives in a country that is racist everyone has this early need to fit in. I have a lot of pride about my cultural heritage because it has got me through school and hard times, not trying to say that I’ve had the hardest of times but in terms of growing up and being dehumanized.

I came into this racial identity thing more during college. A big part of it started in 2014 when Michael Brown got shot. A lot of people at my school were like: “he absolutely deserved it, he’s a thug …” I was like wait a second don’t we have due process in this country? This spurred me into more self reflection, like what do I need to do here to convince them that they are not right about this. So I started going up to Ferguson and started to participate in protests. I took pictures to document and show people that what they saw on TV was diametrically opposed to what was actually happening. On TV they would see the QT on fire and rioting. But people forget what rioting is, Martin Luther King called it the language of voices that are unheard. People are anxious, afraid, and tired of tolerating this sort of treatment. Rioting has happened throughout American history. So Black people can’t demonstrate when they’ve been persecuted by the police, but when the Philly Eagles win White people can wreck the city? How can you not see the blatant double standard that one group is elevated over another?

Did you find an Asian American community during your activism work?

I didn’t see that many Asian people in Ferguson. In my experience with Asian populations in St. Louis you have two main factions: a group that is kinda quiet about our racial history and history of being oppressed, that kind of go along with things, that don’t really care about Black people, and that settle into whiteness because of their proximity to whiteness. Then you have people like me. Some Asian people might think that we don’t have it that bad but then you learn about what happened to Japanese Americans during WWII and Chinese Americans pre and post civil war. Like we were the first illegal immigrants in this country, people weren’t afraid of Mexicans back then. Yellow peril was a real thing that prevented us from being employed. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 is the first immigration act. Anti-miscegenation laws prohibited interracial marriages and reeked of an entitlement to women’s body that can still be seen today in the GOP’s regulation of women’s autonomy.

You seem to be very familiar with Asian American history. How did you gain that knowledge and why do you think it’s useful?

You have to come into it. The stuff that I studied in school was Pharmacy and had nothing to do with the activist side of me. All the stuff that I know about history was self-studied. First it was Black history and then Asian-American history. Chinese people have been here for a while and we have done things that not a lot of people mention, people have also done things to us that not a lot of people mention. For example, one of the largest mass lynching of people is of Chinese people. The Los Angeles Massacre of 1871 was when White people marched into a thriving Chinatown and enacted violence. The argument from regressive Whites is people of color should just pull themselves up by their bootstraps and stop complaining. But by studying history you see that whenever people of color or minorities do have a sure foothold White people come in and destroy it like in East St. Louis or Black Wall Street.

How do you measure impact?

That’s a hard one. I think about the Kerner commission of 1968 that was an economic study into the causes of the 1967 riots. It looked at Black wealth accumulation, levels of education, rates of incarceration, and so on. The report quantified the disparity between Blacks and Whites. Recently they conducted a similar study and found that education rates have increased and unemployment has decreased, but property ownership has stayed the same and incarceration rates have tripled. The amount of actual wealth accrued has also stayed the same. No one really thinks about how wealth begets wealth. You don’t just spring into something. Millenials make 20% less than people born forty years ago. Is this late stage capitalism? I’m not sure but what do you want us to do?

So how do we measure progress? Chris Rock said: this country gets better when White people get nicer generationally. I think the mentality nowadays is something that we can use to objectively measure progress. The wealth gap hasn’t change, but attitudes have. I have this photo from the Stockley protests that is my absolute favorite because it shows how White people are starting to hold other White people accountable. People are willing to listen to me now when I want to talk about racial oppression. When I was little, people would make jokes like “Eric you seem White” or “can I blindfold you with floss?”. If I said they were being racist they would be like “you’re pulling the race card” or “nah dude that’s just a joke”. But today I can say “stop and listen” and they’ll do it. There are still some people that won’t understand, but I live in the city that’s pretty liberal.

There’s a tendency for cities to be liberal spaces and opposite in more rural areas. Something I’ve been thinking about is whether or not we have cities with a diversity of ideologies, or if they are liberal bubbles by design.

There’s a large group of White people who voted for Trump out of fear of losing their privileged position. I think we’re in an ideological war now, a sort of passive aggressive cold war fought on the internet with alternet and left-wing news sites. When i think about the debate that we need to have ideological diversity, I understand that right-wing people have an opinion of how things should be but as a person who is liberal what merit is there in returning to a state that oppresses people based on their race and sex? We’re pushing and pulling right now. Think about what alt-right extremist are known for: guns, anti-abortion, praying in schools, Charlottesville…. That’s their extremism. If you’re a left-wing extremists all you want is universal healthcare, social benefits, and equal opportunity for everyone. People say like “what about anti-fascists?” Are such people saying that they like fascists? If not what are they trying to say? Why do they defend these [alt-right] people that want ethnic cleansing? So when we talk about ideological diverse spaces I think they are important to have as long as one person’s ideology does not harm the autonomy of another. Like you might be a Monet person but I’m more of a Renoir person, having a debate about why we like that painter more than the other will help us engage in a mature dialogue in which we both benefit from.

Perhaps the tendency of some ideologies harming the autonomy of others stems from the need to have everyone believe in the same thing?

We live in a globalized world and seem to be in this tug of war. There are White people eating Kimchi and aren’t offended because they are embracing culture and this foreword way of living. We’re all squabbling right now but ultimately we’re all going in one direction. What’s a sustainable ideologically? Equity for everyone. White people have a history that has taught them that they’ve been great and nice to everyone this whole time. With regards to Native Americans, Western expansion is portrayed as ‘manifest destiny’ or the right of Whites to take their land. A lot of money was poured into rewriting textbooks and erecting monuments after the civil war to make it seem like the conflict was about economic anxiety rather than slavery. For over a hundred years this is what White people learned and they had to go to institutions of higher education to learn to unlearn that. They have to decolonize themselves and in many ways minorities are also still in this process of decolonizing our minds.

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

Eric Pan is a pharmacist, photographer, and activist based in St. Louis.