The Making of Asian-American Identities

Jay Caspian Kang’s recent New York Times Magazine feature on Steven Yeun is not really a story about Steven Yeun. It is an exploration — through the medium of a famous body — of what it means to be an Asian-American in the United States. It is a slog through what Kang refers to as “prismatic neurosis”, a mild, yet controllable, disorder that he equates with our immigrant identity.

This slog feels apologetic, though nestled in the folds of the New York Times Magazine. Kang refers to his endeavor as “narcissistic self-exploration of an upwardly mobile immigrant”, something he believes no one else cares about, even as I scrutinized every word. He asks Yeun whether he wants to talk about “Korean stuff” and assume the risk of being seen as “some Korean guy”, as if that is somehow negative. It is a self-conscious, public conversation between two men discussing the intimate plight of identity and ambition under the gaze of unknown faces whose political existence may contribute to the construction (or destruction) of those identities.

On one hand, this exploration is a protest. It is a protest against the type of immigration story often associated with us. Of stories defined through the lens of others, where we play the good ones needing redemption, where we don’t exist on our own but only in relation to the white majority, where we are placed into cookie…