This is a stage in a triumphal narrative, and it is a narrative that is much shorter than many remember. They earn a higher median family income than any other ethnic group in America, including whites. What could be wrong with that pursuit? Asians graduate from college at a rate higher than any other ethnic group in America, including whites. Doctor, lawyer, accountant, engineer: These are good jobs open to whoever works hard enough. I understand the reasons Asian parents have raised a generation of children this way. Fuck earnest, striving middle-class servility. Let me summarize my feelings toward Asian values: Fuck filial piety. On the other hand, it also seems to me that there are a lot of Asian people to whom they apply. On the one hand, it offends me greatly that anyone would think to apply them to me, or to anyone else, simply on the basis of facial characteristics. I’ve always been of two minds about this sequence of stereotypes. Not just people “who are good at math” and play the violin, but a mass of stifled, repressed, abused, conformist quasi-robots who simply do not matter, socially or culturally. An icon of so much that the culture pretends to honor but that it in fact patronizes and exploits. A conspicuous person standing apart from the crowd and yet devoid of any individuality. Here is what I sometimes suspect my face signifies to other Americans: an invisible person, barely distinguishable from a mass of faces that resemble it. And although I am in most respects devoid of Asian characteristics, I do have an Asian face. But while I don’t believe our roots necessarily define us, I do believe there are racially inflected assumptions wired into our neural circuitry that we use to sort through the sea of faces we confront. You could say that I am, in the gently derisive parlance of Asian-Americans, a banana or a Twinkie (yellow on the outside, white on the inside). Though I am an immigrant, I have never wanted to strive like one. I have never called my elders by the proper honorific, “big brother” or “big sister.” I have never dated a Korean woman. I, for instance, am the child of Korean immigrants, but I do not speak my parents’ native tongue. But every self-estranged individual is estranged in his own way. Millions of Americans must feel estranged from their own faces. But what I feel in these moments is its strangeness to me. I’ve contrived to think of this face as the equal in beauty to any other. An expression that is nearly reptilian in its impassivity. A pancake-flat surface of yellow-and-green-toned skin. Sometimes I’ll glimpse my reflection in a window and feel astonished by what I see. Grooming by Reneé Majour for Orlando Pita T3/Jump.
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