asian

Be the beating myth to his tin man chest. Be sesame oil to his white bread.

Most Americans know nothing about Asian Americans. They think Chinese is synecdoche for Asians the way Kleenex is for tissues. They don’t understand that we’re this tenuous alliance of many nationalities. There are so many qualifications weighing the “we” in Asian America. Do I mean Southeast Asian, South Asian, East Asian, and Pacific Islander, qu

I found the Vietnamese in America both intimate and alien, but Vietnam itself was simply alien.

Before the door shut behind him, he bellowed, “I don’t open doors for chinks!” My sister burst into tears. She couldn’t understand why he was so mean. “That’s never happened to me before,” she cried. I wanted to run back into the mall and kill him. I had failed to protect my younger sister and I was helpless in my murderous rage against a grown man

I bring up Korea to collapse the proximity between here and there. Or as activists used to say, “I am here because you were there.”

Fighting rednecks because you were a punk was far better than fighting because you were Asian, and fighting with allies was far better than fighting alone.

Uncle: Military service. It was so easy to get the crab. There were no bathrooms, only hole in the ground. We had to shave so we had no hair down there. A terrible time. Once we tied a man to a tree and left him there.

I sometimes avoid reading a news story when the victim is Asian because I don’t want to pay attention to the fact that no one else is paying attention.

The wretched of the earth know this candy. Hershey’s doled out after a firefight, M&Ms handed out before a raid. Americans sprayed Dum Dums lollies from a fighter helicopter and the children of Afghanistan ran after the chopper with their arms raised. Sometimes candy was used as a trick. In Vietnam, bored guards planted candy under barbed wire