essay about being asian american

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How identity shapes the well-being of asian american youth, two new studies reveal the diversity of asian american paths to health and resilience..

Like many kids growing up in the United States, I came of age straddling two cultures: that of my family’s country of origin, and mainstream/majority American culture.

There was a significant Asian American community where I grew up, and among my friends I saw many ways in which families negotiated these two cultures. Some families spoke their first language at home, some didn’t. Some ate their heritage foods for all their meals, some only for special occasions. Some made annual trips to their country of origin, while others never or seldom visited. Mixed into these everyday practices, parents modeled attitudes about race, racism, and the majority culture, verbally and nonverbally.

All of these ingredients in an upbringing make up what social scientists call the ethnic-racial socialization of children—and as two new studies suggest, those choices have consequences for the health and well-being of young people.

“Asian American youth are quite different from each other,” says Tiffany Yip, a psychologist at Fordham University and coauthor of one of the studies. “There are very different ways in which Asian youth form a sense of who they are and how they make sense of the world.”

Can values foster well-being?

In a study published by the Journal of Counseling Psychology , Annabelle L. Atkin and Hyung Chol Yoo at Arizona State University surveyed 228 Asian American college students about the racial-ethnic socialization they received from their parents, their understanding of their own racial-ethnic identity, and their feelings of social connectedness.

Using latent profile analysis—a method of identifying subgroups based on certain variables—Atkin and Yoo identified three patterns of parental racial-ethnic socialization:

• Guarded separation. This group was by far the smallest, at a tenth of those surveyed. These students were encouraged to maintain ties to their heritage culture, and were also told to avoid people of other racial-ethnic groups. They also received few messages about adapting to mainstream American culture, respecting other cultures, and treating people equally.
• Passive integration. This group received frequent messages about staying connected to their heritage culture, but received few other socialization messages with regard to other racial ethnic groups or being American. They were 43% of those surveyed.
• Active integration. Almost half of the students also received frequent messaging about preserving their heritage culture, and received fewer messages about avoiding out-groups. However, this group was distinguished by the frequent messages students received about treating people equally and respecting diversity.

Findings in the study showed that the “active integration” group reported the highest scores of clarity and pride in their racial-ethnic identity, as well as the strongest feelings of social connectedness. This result suggests to the authors that therapists, social workers, teachers, and others who work with families might encourage bicultural socialization, low avoidance of out-groups, minimization of race, and promotion of equality and cultural pluralism as a way to support the resilience and mental health of Asian American youth.

The authors further note that the patterns of parental socialization identified in these profiles are in and of themselves significant, and emphasized the importance of looking at these multidimensional profiles holistically. Their findings indicate that “despite engaging in the same amount of socialization in several domains, if parents differ in how they engage in other socialization domains, their children may report different outcomes related to racial-ethnic identity and adjustment.”

For example, the “guarded separation” group had the lowest racial-ethnic identity scores (cognitive clarity, affective pride, behavioral engagement) even though it received the most frequent messages about maintaining ties to their heritage culture; this group also received the most frequent messages about avoiding out-groups and the least frequent messages about cultural pluralism and equality.

These findings suggest that Asian American children grow up hearing many kinds of messages about their heritage culture and becoming American, further complicated by the inclusion of messages about race and racism, and that all of these messages function synergistically in the formation of one’s racial-ethnic identity.

There’s no one path to wellness

In another study published last month in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence , researchers from Beijing Normal University and Fordham University surveyed 145 Asian American high school students about their “ethnic-racial knowledge.”

As in the previous study, the researchers asked the students about their parents’ socialization practices and their sense of their ethnic-racial identity—but this study also included questions that measured to what extent these students had internalized the “model-minority narrative,” the myth that Asian Americans are successful by virtue of their race/ethnicity. Their latent-profile analysis also identified three groups:

• Salient. This was the smallest group, at 13% of respondents. They reported high levels of ethnic-racial identity, greater cultural socialization, and relatively low levels of preparation for bias, and moderate internalization of achievement orientation.
• Moderate. At 72%, this was by far the largest group—and its members reported moderate levels of all indicators.
• Marginal. Fifteen percent reported relatively low levels of ethnic-racial identity, less cultural socialization, and comparatively high levels of preparation for bias and slightly less internalization of achievement orientation.

The researchers also collected data related to these students’ duration and quality of sleep, their psychological well-being (depressive symptoms and measures of self-esteem), their academic performance (grades and school engagement), and delinquency.

In this study, in contrast to the one by Atkin and Yoo, the researchers found no clear benefits to one group across any of these measures of health and well-being. For example, in the areas of self-esteem and school engagement, the salient group scored higher than both the moderate and marginal groups, but neither of the latter groups scored better than the other. The marginal group scored the highest in depressive symptoms, but neither the salient group nor the moderate group scored better than the other. Each group scored higher in some aspect of sleep quality, but no one group had the clear advantage in sleep quality overall. 

“If you look at the adjustment outcomes for all of these profiles, some profiles do better on sleep indices, some profiles do better on socio-emotional outcomes,” says Yip, the study’s coauthor. “That’s the power of this study, that we have multiple dimensions of health and well-being.”

The complexity of the findings, she says, “underscores the importance of a really nuanced approach to thinking about Asian American youth and their development.”

Like the authors of the previous study, Yip says that regardless of the findings related to the outcomes of these profiles, identifying their patterns is a crucial result of the study, because it reveals the diversity of experiences that Asian Americans bring with them into adulthood. As these profiles illustrate, not all Asian American youth relate to their racial-ethnic identity in the same way.

This may be “a little bit less obvious to people who haven’t really stopped to think about what these model-minority perceptions do in terms of homogenizing the Asian American experience,” says Yip. “So I think it’s incredibly important to show that there are Asian kids for whom their ethnic identity is not that relevant—they don’t think about it, they don’t care about it, it’s not important to who they are. That’s the marginal group.” And then there are some kids, like those in the salient group, for whom their Asian American identity is “really, really important.”

Then there’s the moderate group, at 72% of those surveyed. “What’s interesting,” Yip says, “is that middle group that’s sort of average on everything—that’s actually the biggest group. I think there’s a tendency for non-Asian people to see Asian people as only Asian, but these data are telling us that there are Asian youth for whom being Asian is like, meh. It’s part of who they are, it may not even be that important.”

This is an important thing to understand, she says, not only for clinicians, but for anyone who interacts with Asian American youth “on a daily basis, in their role as educators, neighbors, friends, sports coaches.”

So how can Asian American parents optimize the health and well-being of their kids? Which families of my childhood were getting it right? As both studies show, when it comes to racial-ethnic socialization, there isn’t just one prescription, or pattern of messages, that best serves all or most kids.

And as is true about most aspects of parenting, it’s important to keep in mind that every child is different, says Yip—even when it comes to teaching about racial-ethnic identity. She continues:

As parents, it’s really important for us to recognize what our child brings to their own socialization and to be flexible and adaptable enough to use that individuality that they’re bringing, to tailor our parenting approaches, whether it’s around issues of culture, ethnicity, race, discrimination, whatever it is, that we have some tools that allow us to be adaptable and responsive to the unique needs of each child.

About the Author

Shinwha Whang

Shinwha Whang is a writer in Richmond, CA.

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What does it mean to be Asian American?

The label encompasses an entire continent of different cultural roots. Does it speak to a shared experience?

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The label “Asian American” is almost comically flattening.

It consists of people from more than 50 ethnic groups, all with different cultures, languages, religions, and their own sets of historic and contemporary international conflicts. It includes newly arrived migrants and Asians who have been on American soil for multiple generations. Depending on visa types, immigration status, and class, there are vast differences even among those from the same country. In fact, the income gaps between some Asian American groups are among the largest of any ethnic category in the nation. Yet these differences are rarely explored and discussed.

With the recent rise in anti-Asian attacks, however, Asian Americans have found themselves in a rare moment in the national spotlight. For many, it has led to a renewed sense of solidarity as well as confusion about what the Asian American label means or if there really is a unifying experience attached to it.

It also inspired Vox to post a survey asking Asian Americans to write in and tell us how they’re feeling right now. The rise in violence — especially the shootings at three spas in Atlanta that left eight people dead, including six women of Asian descent — haunted the responses. One major theme emerged: Why did it take such an extreme act of violence to get America to care about its Asian communities?

“It frustrates me that the anti-Asian sentiments popularized by Trump had to be escalated to media-worthy violence and mass shootings in order to be elevated to mainstream discourse,” one person wrote from California.

“We’re trending today, but I bet we’ll be forgotten by next week or month,” wrote another from Michigan.

Other persistent issues emerged from our survey, too. Many responded that they didn’t quite know how to talk about cultural identity or racism with their parents or their children. The experience of growing up in non-diverse areas versus immigrant- or minority-dense enclaves — and how different it felt when moving from one area to another — also kept coming up. People with roots in South and Southeast Asian cultures wondered how they fit into an ethnic category so commonly associated with East Asians. Many questioned what the label Asian American really means and what purpose it serves in the larger American conversation around race.

In a series of stories publishing throughout this month, we will explore some of these questions and shared experiences, in a time when many Asian Americans are experiencing a sense of alienation not only from the nation at large, but also from the label “Asian American” itself.

The pitfalls — and promise — of the term “Asian American”

The many Asian Americas

by Karen Turner

In many Asian American families, racism is rarely discussed

by Rachel Ramirez

Seeing myself — and Asian American defiance — in Gilmore Girls’ Lane Kim

by Sanjena Sathian

The Asian American wealth gap, explained in a comic

by Lok Siu and Jamie Noguchi

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• HISTORY & CULTURE
• RACE IN AMERICA

'I've walked between two worlds': What belonging means for Asian Americans

Asian American families across generations reflect on the ways they hold on to their cultures while finding a place in America.

For most of my life, I hated my name. Before I was born, my parents, who had come to the United States from China a few years before, had chosen to call me Elaine, but my mom’s sole white friend at the time told her that it was an old-lady name. She suggested Alyssa instead.

My dad didn’t know how to spell that, so when the time came to register me, he sounded it out, figured “Alyssa” sounded like “eleven,” threw in a couple of S’s for good measure, and there I was, hours old and legally bound to this strange portmanteau, Elessa.

I still ended up going by Elaine, perhaps because my parents wanted me to use my Chinese name, Yilan. When I arrived in school, no one could say it and Yilan gradually became Elaine.

It didn’t matter much to my parents, who never use either of these English names for me. But it mattered to me. I hated Elessa, hated the question mark in the teacher’s voice on the first day of school, hated never finding it on a keychain or magnet, hated that it wasn’t “real.” I wasn’t even like the other kids who went by their Chinese or Korean names. My immigrant parents had done the most embarrassing thing possible as far as I was concerned: make something up. Elessa was proof of assimilation gone wrong, evidence that we didn’t belong.

I made everyone call me Elaine, I told this story like it was a big embarrassing joke, and when I turned 18, I changed my name legally. When I saw my name written on my college diploma, I hardly remembered there had ever been a different one. I was Elaine now, fully assimilated Chinese American, and no one could question where I’d come from.  

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Elessa, and how that name made me feel, has come back to me recently with the sharp rise in anti-Asian hate crimes across the U.S. during the COVID-19 pandemic. Though Asian Americans are now the country’s fastest-growing racial or ethnic group, watching videos of elderly people being attacked in broad daylight—worrying that my parents could be next—reminds me that even if we change our names, even if we see ourselves as Americans, others may not see us that way .

In light of the March spa shooting in Atlanta that killed eight people , six of whom were of Asian descent, I sought to understand how people in a city where the most high-profile hate crime against Asians had occurred, felt about their place in America and what it means to them to belong.

What’s in a name?

On a recent spring afternoon, DD Lee, a 39-year-old woman who moved from China as a child, is laughing over Zoom, remembering her 12-year-old self. Living in Kentucky and in need of a new name, she picked “Annette” out of a book. She tried it on for a couple months, then went with Dina in high school before a friend suggested DD, the initials of her Chinese name, Dan Dan.

“There was literally an identity crisis when it came to the name part of things,” she says.

Lee was one of many Atlantans who shared a story about their name, and how it represented a fundamental question of who they were in this country. They remembered childhoods spent figuring out how to fit in, of striking the right balance between Asian and American, of holding onto their families’ cultures without feeling like an outsider.

Shawn Wen, 39, also didn’t have an English name as a kid. His father, who emigrated from Taiwan, didn’t give him one because he wanted his sons to find their names for themselves. He went by his Chinese name, I-Hsiang, at school, and was bullied for being “the smallest Asian kid” with a “horrible” name. At home he struggled with his parents’ expectations and joined the military out of high school to prove his father wrong.

“I’ve walked between two worlds: Having to balance the expectations of my cultural community while also confronting the realities of American society and its expectations of me as an Asian American,” he says. “Sometimes I haven’t felt like I’ve belonged to either.”

He chose the name Shawn in middle school but changed it again as an adult after making peace with his father. After many years of struggling with his identity, he says he’s found his name, and with it, where he belongs: “My Asian American name is Shawn I-Hsiang Wen.”  

Reminders of home

Many of the people I spoke with remember being the only Asian family in town, the only Asian kid in school. They sought refuge in food, in the ingredients of home. When they couldn’t find them in the one Asian store within driving distance, they grew their own.

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Hannah Son and her family would drive an hour and a half from Macon, Georgia, to Atlanta every Sunday after church to load up on Korean groceries for the week. When they moved to Gwinnett County, a suburban part of Atlanta with a larger Asian American population, it was “a big culture shock for me,” she says. “I didn’t know there were other Asian people in Georgia.”

Ruth McMullin, whose Black GI father and Vietnamese mother fled Vietnam in 1975, remembers the pride her mother felt about her bitter melon crop. A world away from her homeland, she grew these spiky, green reminders of Vietnam in the small Alabama town where they settled. “Everybody who came over thought that was the strangest thing,” McMullin says. “But she was pleased as punch.”

As a biracial child growing up in the Deep South at a time when there were very few kids like her, McMullin was picked on and felt like she didn’t belong to any group. Even today, she carries a photo of her mother as “street cred at Asian markets” because people don’t believe she’s of Vietnamese descent.

“If I had a sense of belonging, I wouldn’t have to pick one culture or the other. A lot of times society expects you to pick,” she says. “Why would I? It’s all of me.”

Who gets to belong?  

For Mila Konomos, 45, being around the foods and norms of Korean culture made her feel even more confused about herself. She grew up on U.S. military bases as part of a white family that adopted her from Korea when she was six months old. Other kids in the predominantly white community, including her brothers, bullied her for her looks, and made her hate being Asian, she said.

When the family moved to California when she was a teenager, she met other Asian American kids and made friends, but they didn’t accept her either. They didn’t understand that she’d never had kimchi before or would make fun of her when she tried to speak Korean.

“I received a lot of shaming from Asian peers and the Asian community, you know, being called a twinkie or a banana—as if I had any choice in my situation,” she says.  

Listening to Konomos, I felt ashamed of myself. I wanted to apologize to her even though we’d never met. I grew up in Southern California in a tightly knit Chinese community where 99 Ranch Market replaced Ralph’s as the go-to supermarket and entire shopping complexes were filled with all-you-can-eat Korean barbecue, boba shops, and tofu houses. My parents and their friends constantly compared us kids to each other, engaging in a complex psychological game of reverse one-upmanship. “No, your kid’s Chinese is so good.”

My friends and I judged other ABCs (American-born Chinese) who couldn’t switch between Mandarin and English seamlessly or who shamed their parents by using forks. They weren’t as good as us, couldn’t handle their bifurcated identity. We also looked down on kids who were, as we called them, “FOBs” (fresh off the boat), the ones who wore socks with sandals or whose haircuts looked like our grandparents. Somewhere between the twinkies and the FOBs was a place for us, the well-adjusted immigrants, the ones who really belonged.

Konomos would have been one of those kids we judged, and weeks later, something she said has stuck with me.

“For a long time, I felt like I had to become Korean,” she says. “What I realized is, no, I am Korean. Even if I don’t speak the language, even if I don’t celebrate all the traditions, even if I don’t always eat all the food, I’m still Korean, and Koreans need to expand their idea of who is allowed to be Korean.”

As a child, I came to understand that there are many ways to be American, just as there are many ways to be Asian. But as I listened to people share their stories at a time when our belonging is being challenged with violence, I realized I had had a very specific idea of how to be Asian American: It was to be Elaine—when, actually, Elessa is just fine.

Elaine Teng is a writer and editor at ESPN. ESPN and National Geographic are both owned by The Walt Disney Company. Follow her on Twitter at @elteng12 .

Haruka Sakaguchi is a Japanese freelance photographer based in New York. See more of her work on her website or by following her on Instagram @ hsakag .

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The Difficulty of Being a Perfect Asian American

College admissions makes people do strange things. This was one of the takeaways of the Varsity Blues scandal , in 2019, which uncovered an admissions consultant and a network of coaches and administrators who helped wealthy and famous families essentially bribe their way into selective colleges. The scandal seemed to be the twisted, if logical, end point of all the credential-stacking and résumé-padding that has become part of the process. Yet there was something reassuring about the scandal, too: the conclusion that the admissions system is rigid enough that people with means, even Hollywood A-listers, would feel the desperation to game it. They may have believed that their children were entitled to a place at a prestigious school. But they couldn’t breeze right in. By some measures, it is twice as hard to get into élite colleges and universities than it was twenty years ago. Their desperation was warranted.

These anxieties about status are acutely felt among a cohort for whom going to college can seem a foregone conclusion. Asian Americans are often held up as a “model minority,” a group whose presence on campuses like Harvard or M.I.T., where forty per cent of incoming first-years self-identify as Asian American, far outpaces their percentage of the U.S. population. The figure of the model minority emerged in the fifties, a reflection of Cold War-era policies that were designed to attract highly educated immigrants from Asia. Over time, this stereotype ossified. American meritocracy held up the immigrant as proof that its rules were fair, and many high achievers were flattered to play along. Even though many of the gains for Asian Americans could be explained through policy—and even as studies showed how entire swaths of the community were left behind in poverty—the experience of being Asian in America has been rigidly defined by a framework of success and failure. As the scholar erin Khuê Ninh argues in “ Passing for Perfect: College Impostors and Other Model Minorities ,” it’s a framework that has been internalized, even by those who resist it.

Ninh’s fascinating book tells the stories of scammers, grifters, and impostors—Asian Americans following the high-pressure, expectation-heavy paths that can lead down darker alleys of faux accomplishment. There is Azia Kim, who masqueraded as a Stanford undergrad for months, even persuading two students to allow her to share a dorm room. Elizabeth Okazaki did something similar there, posing as a graduate student, attending class, and sleeping at a campus lab. Unlike the students caught up in the Varsity Blues scandal, these young people gave exhausting performances that weren’t going to result in a diploma or job. And, in the case of Jennifer Pan, who spent years tricking her parents into believing that she was attending the University of Toronto, the subterfuge resulted in tragedy. In 2010, she hired hitmen to murder them.

What compelled these impostors? To what extent were their actions driven by a need to keep up an illusion of excellence? Ninh, who teaches at the University of California, Santa Barbara, explores these stories not to rationalize them but to point out how they suggest a mood, a limited set of emotional possibilities for Asian Americans. “What if what seem to be outlandish and outlier behaviors are instead depressingly Asian American?” Ninh writes. Being a model minority, she argues, doesn’t require one to believe in the myth. Ninh asserts that a relationship to high achievement is “coded into one’s programming” as an Asian American, and that “its litmus test is whether an Asian American feels pride or shame by those standards.” Whether you are Amy Chua, extolling the virtues of being a “ tiger parent ,” or someone making fun of Chua, you are perpetuating the success-or-bust framework. A joking dismissal doesn’t debunk the stereotype so much as it signals the impossibility of living outside of it.

Ninh offers compelling evidence that adherents to the model-minority myth come “from an implausible multiplicity of life chances and immigration histories.” She cites the scholars Jennifer Lee and Min Zhou, who found that Southeast Asian refugees and wealthy, cosmopolitan transplants from China alike were “keenly aware” of stereotypes around Asian achievement. Lee and Zhou write that “for no other [racial] group is the success frame defined as getting straight A’s, gaining admission into an elite university, getting a graduate degree, and entering” into a coveted profession; in contrast, other groups balance grades with an investment in classroom behavior or how well they fit in with others. Ninh cites a 1998 study of perceptions of Asian Americans, based on interviews conducted with seven hundred college students of all races. A sense of Asian Americans as somehow exemplary permeated this student body; notably, the Asian Americans who took part in the interviews perceived themselves to be “more prepared, motivated, and more likely to have higher career success than whites,” even though their actual grades didn’t reflect any superiority.

Of all deceits, Ninh wonders if there is “something quaintly bookish, faintly charming about the academic grifter.” What drew Kim, Okazaki, Pan, and others to lie wasn’t a predictably ascendant path. Pretending to be students was a holding pattern, perhaps until a better answer presented itself. As Ninh points out, “The shortest route to mad bling does not run through four years of coursework. Money, then, would not appear to be the primary driver for our scammers— status is, arguably, and self-identity.”

Ninh feels enough sympathy for her subjects to probe their ambitions, their potential, the unnoticed mental-health struggles that led these people to take such immense risks. “Even when we have come to know our social formation as harmful to us,” she writes, “a life worth wanting may still be trapped in its terms.” The scammers and grifters might be viewed as people who allowed the expectations of Asian American identity to metastasize into something perilous. Ninh’s book is at its best when she seems to level with her subjects, to read them against their contexts: high-pressure parents, suburban milieus where value is doled out in how many colleges you get into, a national myth where you are both an undifferentiated mass and living proof of the American Dream. It’s a lot of work to pretend you are perfect—even more so when you know it is an illusion. Studies show that Asian Americans are the racial group who are least likely to seek help for mental illness, with much of it remaining undiagnosed. In 2018, Christine Yano and Neal Adolph Akatsuka published “ Straight A’s: Asian American College Students in Their Own Words ,” a collection of reflections from Harvard undergraduates. The achievements of these students aside—these were young people who, by traditional metrics, had done well—it was striking how each one navigated expectations of success and feelings of invisibility. Many lamented how the quest for excellence came to feel like a trap, ultimately leaving them unfulfilled. Even a drive to pursue unconventional paths, like art or writing, was cast as a rebellion against STEM stereotyping, not an expression of authentic desire.

“Passing for Perfect” is a tricky, unpredictable book, toggling between broad social analyses and sensational outliers, with close readings of reportage and court documents alongside Ninh’s bemused, occasionally exasperated commentary. Her shifting tones convey what it feels like to live inside a stereotype—to realize that even reasoned disavowals will never make it go away. She wonders whether it is possible to tunnel your way free from an imposed identity you know to be unhealthy and false. Stereotypes winnow down our imaginations or make us feel inadequate in the present; they also stifle a vision for the future, frustrating us, as our attempts to deny them only make them grow stronger.

The challenge, Ninh acknowledges, is to talk about success in terms that don’t merely reify the myth of the model minority. The starting point is to imagine other models of teaching, assessing, or assigning value. For the individual, resisting the myth requires more than merely becoming a “bad Asian”—for example, by rejecting the stereotype that Asians are good at math and violin by opting for art and football. Her book ends with a consideration of “Better Luck Tomorrow,” a film, from 2002, that drew on elements of the 1992 killing of Stuart Tay, a teen-ager from Orange County. Tay was killed by five students from a competitive, affluent high school. Tay and his eventual killers—four of whom were Asian American—were plotting a robbery, and his conspirators became convinced that he was going to betray them. Three of Tay’s killers were honor-roll students, leading the press to refer to the event as the “honor roll murder.”

In the movie version, the culprits’ murderous success burnishes the model-minority image; they excel at their studies as well as their criminal dalliances. As the movie ends, it is possible to believe they got away with it. But, in one of the most harrowing parts of “Passing for Perfect,” Ninh discusses the movie with two of Tay’s killers, Kirn Young Kim, who was paroled in 2012 and is now a prison-reform activist, and Robert Chan, who remains incarcerated. They lament that the characters in the film essentially win, rather than, in Ninh’s words, pull up short and offer “a cold, hard look at what all the work is for.” She notes that Chan has spent his time in prison unlearning the anger and “hypermasculinity” that defined his high-pressure teen years. And yet, in his mother’s home, a framed letter hangs on her bedroom wall. It is an invitation from the Harvard-Radcliffe Club of Southern California to interview for admission.

From the distance of middle age, the pressure to achieve looks like a race toward a false horizon. Of course, this isn’t how it’s experienced. Debbie Lum’s recent documentary, “Try Harder!,” offers an absorbing exploration of the pressures internalized by today’s high-school students. It chronicles a year at Lowell High School , a public magnet school in San Francisco that was, at the time Lum was filming, roughly fifty per cent Asian American. (Up until recently, students had to test into Lowell. As a result of a 2021 change to the school’s admissions, the demographic is expected to shift.)

Lowell is one of the top public schools in California, and therefore the nation—the type of place where even those with astronomical G.P.A.s and perfect SATs feel intense worry about their futures. The type of place where a kid who rallies his wallflower friends at the school dance compares himself to an enzyme.

Students talk about a “war on two fronts,” the competitive environment of the school itself and the pressure they feel from their families. For many, the only way to cope is to joke about how impossible it is to truly measure up. As “Try Harder!” begins, there’s a whimsical quirk to Lum’s storytelling. A charismatic Chinese American student named Ian cracks that he is “not even close to the best of the best.” He is self-effacing and funny. Everyone starts at Lowell dreaming of Stanford, he explains. By sophomore year, the Stanford hoodies are relegated to the closet, and expectations grow more realistic: the U.C.s. By junior year, he says, kids settle for Occidental, a “West Coast private college that’s not that hard to get into.”

Lum follows a few students through their days, which are dizzying. Lowell seems a challenging place to distinguish oneself. A physics teacher implores the students to give up their fetish for prestige, pointing out that “you are not too good for Santa Cruz, or Riverside, or even Merced,” which are often perceived to be among the U.C. system’s lesser schools. There’s no way to win. On one hand, they must excel in their local rat race. On the other, Lowell doesn’t send as many students to schools like Stanford or Harvard as you might think. The students—and at least one teacher—suspect that, for top colleges, Lowell seems too “stereotypically Asian,” a monolith of “A.P.-guzzling grade grubbers,” bereft of the well-rounded superstars who make admissions officers happy.

At times, “Try Harder!” hints at these larger stories, from the alleged prejudices that top-tier colleges harbor against the perceived machinelike excellence of Asian applicants to the racial politics of San Francisco to the uneven distribution of resources that produce élite public schools like Lowell. In February, local voters recalled three members of the city’s Board of Education, in part to protest their role in a 2021 decision to diversify Lowell by replacing its merit-based admissions system with a lottery. The recall campaign was driven by Asian American voters—many of whom presumably have little interest in following Ninh’s call to rethink paradigms of success. As one parent told the Times , education has “been ingrained in Chinese culture for thousands and thousands of years.”

Lum focusses on these pressures as they trickle down to the students, which makes for a compelling set of dramas. One of the film’s stars is an African American student named Rachael, whose sweet, aggressive modesty leads her to underestimate her own capabilities. There’s a Taiwanese American kid named Alvan who seems happiest in his dance class—only his parents would never understand. His highest and lowest moments alike are commemorated with a dab . These are all students who, in Ninh’s words, “pass for perfect.” The occasional shots of students staring off into the distance convey more than they are capable of articulating as teen-agers.

As the year wears on, they begin to feel the effects of the grind. There’s less energy for all-night study sessions; the tense, feigned smile of the after-school job is harder to maintain. Students begin wondering why they worked so hard in the first place. I want to say that I felt a familiar sense of fear as the admissions letters began rolling in, but, even though I attended a competitive Bay Area high school full of Asian kids, it was nothing like this. There was less to do, yet more possible futures to imagine. “Try Harder!” slowly shifts genres from comedy to horror. You almost stop caring whether anyone will get into their dream school, because you already recognize that we should be encouraging students to dream of something other than school. Yet you desperately want them to get in, for it is the only horizon they have ever known.

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By Jason Adam Katzenstein

What It Means to Be Asian in America

In the fall of 2021, with support from a Luce Foundation grant, Pew Research Center embarked on a project exploring the experiences and views of Asian Americans, the fastest growing racial or ethnic group in the United States. The focus group study included participants of different languages, immigration or refugee experiences, educational backgrounds, and income levels from across the country and was designed to capture the voices of many ethnic subgroups whose perspectives have not been well-represented in traditional surveys. 

Earlier this month, the Center released an interactive report with key takeaways from the study accompanied by a collection of publications that “capture in people’s own words what it means to be Asian in America.” 

Reflections from participants revealed common sentiments including:

• A complicated relationship with the pan-ethnic labels “Asian” or “Asian American”
• A disconnect between how they see themselves and how others view them 
• The negative impacts of the “model minority myth”

In a Q&A about the study , Neil G. Ruiz, associate director of race and ethnicity research at Pew Research Center, said, “We’re committed to providing a more complete picture of all people who live in the United States...We conducted this project to capture the diverse voices and experiences of Asian Americans and understand what it means to be Asian in America. This study aims to expand the depth and breadth of our understanding of racial and ethnic identity by asking Asian Americans to describe their attitudes and experiences in their own words , without preset response options.” 

Read the Data Essay

Watch the Documentary

Explore the project further at Pew Research Center

Interactive quote sorter: In Their Own Words: The Diverse Perspectives of Being Asian in America Expanded interviews: Extended Interviews: Being Asian in America Q&A: Why and how Pew Research Center conducted 66 focus groups with Asian Americans

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Coming To Terms With Being Asian American

Why it took me 25 years to come to terms with being asian american.

It was the first time that someone had encapsulated my entire personhood into one word: “Asian.”

Culture has a way of connecting us from the things we have in common to our differences. For #AsianPacificAmericanHeritageMonth we created a space for our voices to be heard and to defy (or embrace) the stereotypes that are placed on Asian Americans. We asked a few Asian Pacific American R29 staffers what their favorite thing about their culture is and discovered that the strings that attach us so closely with our culture are also associated with the memories we make with our families. The act of gathering and creating food brings us together (and something we still defer back to when we're feeling a bit homesick). Comment below with what about your culture brings you ✨joy✨. #APAHM #AcknowledgeIsPower #AsianPacificAmericanHeritageMonth A post shared by Refinery29 (@refinery29) on May 19, 2017 at 10:03am PDT

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The Picture Show

Photographer explores asian american identity in 'where we're really from'.

Brothers Hayle (left) and Henry Pham run during a game of football, as their father, Hansel, throws a ball in the air on Jan. 26, 2020. Eric Lee hide caption

Brothers Hayle (left) and Henry Pham run during a game of football, as their father, Hansel, throws a ball in the air on Jan. 26, 2020.

Photographer Eric Lee spent a large part of his childhood struggling to find his place as an Asian American — the constant to and fro between, he says, feeling "too Asian" and "not Asian enough" inspired him to visually deconstruct the complexities of his identity.

In his multimedia project, "Where We're Really From," Lee explores what it's like to grow up Asian American, through the Pham brothers, Henry, 7, and Hayle, 9. The boys are just beginning to understand and peel the layers of being Vietnamese Americans living in Gaithersburg, Md., a mostly white community outside Washington, D.C.

While Lee found his own childhood reflected in several aspects of the boys' upbringing, he also found that the social and political context of the present deeply shape their growth. Their parents, Thu and Hansel Pham, lay emphasis on concepts like consent, nonviolence and healthy masculinity. When Lee, 27, was growing up, his parents didn't necessarily think about these concepts in the conscious manner that the Phams do.

In an interview, Lee describes his background and his experience photographing the Phams, which he did for more than a year. His answers have been edited for length and clarity.

Hayle smiles after blowing out candles at his 7th birthday party on April 28, 2019. Eric Lee hide caption

Hayle smiles after blowing out candles at his 7th birthday party on April 28, 2019.

Henry Partain and Henry Pham (front left to right) play on iPads while Hayle Pham and Jack Partain play Nintendo Switch after skiing in Seven Springs, Pa., on Feb.16, 2020. Eric Lee hide caption

Thu Pham, center, encourages Henry, left, and Hayle, as they climb pull-up bars at a park on Chinqoteague Island, Md., on April 14, 2019. Eric Lee hide caption

Thu Pham, center, encourages Henry, left, and Hayle, as they climb pull-up bars at a park on Chinqoteague Island, Md., on April 14, 2019.

Artists gravitate to stories that deeply resonate with their own life and experience. What inspired you to start this project?

I attended a predominantly white private school in Brooklyn growing up. I was one of very few Asian Americans in my class and I struggled for years trying to figure out where I fit. I always wanted to learn my history as a Chinese American. In college, I produced a documentary on Asian American masculinity. It was something I thought I understood and I wanted to help uncover the growing problems of many negative stereotypes, like the model minority myth — the perception that one minority group is achieving high success and other racial groups should model after them. But the more people I interviewed and the more I learned, the less I felt ready to tell this story. In 2018, four years after those interviews, I applied to the Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington, D.C, knowing I wanted to begin exploring my own identity through my lens. I had more questions than ever about identity, but having the dedicated space, resources, and support to be intimate and open comforted me.

Hayle tackles Henry during a game of football Black Hill Regional Park in Boyds, Md., on April 7, 2019. Eric Lee hide caption

Hayle tackles Henry during a game of football Black Hill Regional Park in Boyds, Md., on April 7, 2019.

Hayle sulks and walks behind Thu on the High Line in New York City on Jan. 25, 2020. Eric Lee hide caption

Hansel Pham lifts Henry at home on April 5, 2019. Eric Lee hide caption

How did you go about building trust with Henry and Hayle? Did you know them beforehand?

I initially put a social media callout when I was searching for a family to document in early 2019. A former colleague put me in touch with the Phams, and they have always been attracted to topics revolving around Asian American identity. Building trust with the children wasn't easy. Early on, I followed their every move, often having to put down the camera and play football or tag before I could take photos. Sometimes they made a game out of leaving the frame when I would point the camera in their direction, but I played along. Knowing that this project would take time, I visited the Phams every few weeks, spending 8-12 hours with them each time.

Hayle lies on his bed after spending the afternoon alone after throwing a tantrum on Oct. 13, 2019. Eric Lee hide caption

Hayle lies on his bed after spending the afternoon alone after throwing a tantrum on Oct. 13, 2019.

Hayle and Henry look at instructions while attempting to build a Hot Wheels set in Ocean City, Md., on April 14, 2019. Eric Lee hide caption

Hayle and Henry look at instructions while attempting to build a Hot Wheels set in Ocean City, Md., on April 14, 2019.

How would you describe the boys' relationship with one another?

The boys are competitive but they always do whatever they can to support each other. At school, their classrooms share a door with a window. Hayle would peek through it every moment he could to see what Henry was up to. Even while playing or working independently, the brothers liked to keep tabs on each other, even at home. I grew up an only child with parents who worked long hours. Their brotherhood was new to me and didn't fall into the stereotypical brotherhood of teasing and bullying. The pair truly worked as a team, even when they were on different teams during football and other games. Henry gave Hayle a head start before races and gave him hints on how to win the game.

Hayle eats a corndog as Henry stacks oyster crackers on his head at Clyde's Tower Oaks Lodge in Rockville, Md., on Sept. 29, 2019. Eric Lee hide caption

Hayle eats a corndog as Henry stacks oyster crackers on his head at Clyde's Tower Oaks Lodge in Rockville, Md., on Sept. 29, 2019.

How do the boys talk about their identity?

In October 2018, I went to one of Henry's swim meets in Virginia. One conversation with Hayle struck me in particular. He lifted his index finger to his chin, as he always does when he focuses a thought.

"You know, there are only two Asian kids in my class," he says, still with his finger on his chin. He turns towards me. By then I'd been around Hayle for about seven months, photographing and observing. While he's talked about being Asian with Thu and Hansel before, he and I have never had a conversation about it.

Thu drops in dumplings for Lunar New Year celebrations as Hayle checks on the pot of boiling water on Jan. 26, 2020. Eric Lee hide caption

Thu drops in dumplings for Lunar New Year celebrations as Hayle checks on the pot of boiling water on Jan. 26, 2020.

"There's me and Taiji. He speaks Japanese to his parents sometimes."I nod. He then tells me that his parents are Vietnamese, while continuing to fiddle with his fingers. "Do you like being Vietnamese?" I ask trying to keep his attention on the topic as a new race begins behind him. "I don't know, it's kind of weird," he says."Why is it weird?" "I don't know," pauses Hayle. "I guess I don't get sunburnt though!"

I was surprised by this conversation since it was the first time one of the boys acknowledged race and ethnicity without a prompt. It made me wonder how much they thought about being Asian American and how it affected their life. It's certainly made me more aware of who I am.

Thao Nguyen gives her nephew, Hayle, a red envelope in celebration of the Lunar New year on Jan. 26, 2020. Eric Lee hide caption

Thao Nguyen gives her nephew, Hayle, a red envelope in celebration of the Lunar New year on Jan. 26, 2020.

Is there one experience or instance from this project that stands out to you?

Earlier this year, I celebrated the Lunar New Year with the Phams.Thao and Nguyen, the boys' aunt and uncle, came from Baltimore to celebrate. As we ate at the table, Hansel began asking the boys if they knew the history of the traditions they were doing. The boys replied with half-hearted answers as they ate the meal of sautéed beef and wonton soup. This conversation sparked a moment of deja vu for me. I remember doing the same thing, replying to my parents' questions about the Lunar New year with my mouth full.

After dinner, Thao called the boys. She and Nguyen pulled out red envelopes filled with money. The red envelopes are signs of good luck and fortune and are often given to children to celebrate the New Year. Watching the boys take their red envelopes with both hands and wish their aunt and uncle "happy new year" froze me again. I always saw myself in Henry and Hayle's life, but this night solidified that feeling for me, seeing how another Asian American family celebrated traditions just like mine did.

Henry watches his friends play football at Hayle's birthday on April 28, 2019 in Darnestown, Md. Eric Lee hide caption

Henry watches his friends play football at Hayle's birthday on April 28, 2019 in Darnestown, Md.

What were some of the differences you saw between your upbringing and that of Henry and Hayle?

Thu and Hansel are presented with different challenges than my parents were two decades ago, like school shootings, racism and COVID-19, and the #MeToo movement. I don't think my parents ever thought about them in such an intentional way that parents nowadays have to. Henry and Hayle had an active shooter drill at school one day, something I never experienced. Hansel likes to tell a story about them seeing Spider Man: Into the Spider-Verse , and having to leave halfway through because it was too scary and violent for the boys. He jokingly vowed to never take them to the movies ever again.

Thu and Hansel don't try to push being "masculine" on the brothers. They can pick out their own clothing, toys, and activities — except contact football, which isn't allowed at all. After Hayle and Henry's karate belt test on a Saturday afternoon, Thu took them to an Asian food hall for lunch. They were eating lunch when Henry brought up that someone tried to hug him in class. This alarmed Thu, and she began a discussion about consent.

Henry pushes a wheel as Hayle sits on it in a park in Chincoteague, Md., on April 14, 2019. Eric Lee hide caption

Henry pushes a wheel as Hayle sits on it in a park in Chincoteague, Md., on April 14, 2019.

What was the most challenging part of the project?

I began the project searching to understand what Asian American boyhood meant in terms of topics like identity, masculinity and family. These are hard topics to photograph as they're not always obvious. As I continued to make work, I made sure I kept the history in mind. The most challenging element of this project was learning all the background and figuring out how to convey the nuance of identity.

Thu helps Hayle pick up a box of Asian pears at a grocery store in Eden Center in Falls Church, Va., on Oct. 12, 2019. Eric Lee hide caption

Thu helps Hayle pick up a box of Asian pears at a grocery store in Eden Center in Falls Church, Va., on Oct. 12, 2019.

Henry reaches for a strawberry Ramune, a Japanese soda-like drink at a grocery store in Eden Center in Falls Church, Va., on Oct. 12, 2019. Eric Lee hide caption

Henry reaches for a strawberry Ramune, a Japanese soda-like drink at a grocery store in Eden Center in Falls Church, Va., on Oct. 12, 2019.

Did you learn new things about your own layered identity through this journey ?

During the project, I asked myself what it meant to be Asian American? I questioned if it was food, culture, family or solely based on what I looked like. It left me with more questions than answers.

Teased for not knowing English, my father embraced becoming American, both culturally and nationally. He played stickball in the streets, rode American-made motorcycles and often visited the American countryside. For him, the cons of being Asian American outweighed the pros.

Raising me without the "immigrant mentality" was a defense mechanism for him, and a way to protect me from the trauma he experienced.

After working on this project, I am coming to understand why my parents raised me the way they did. I'm finally seeing that they were raising me in a way that didn't have the same pain and sufferings they endured. It's taken me 27 years to finally understand my parents.

An eight-image panorama of the Phams in Ocean City, Md., on April 13, 2019. Eric Lee hide caption

An eight-image panorama of the Phams in Ocean City, Md., on April 13, 2019.

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The Anxiety of Being Asian American: Hate Crimes and Negative Biases During the COVID-19 Pandemic

• Published: 10 June 2020
• Volume 45 , pages 636–646, ( 2020 )

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• Hannah Tessler 1 ,
• Meera Choi 1 &
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In this essay, we review how the COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic that began in the United States in early 2020 has elevated the risks of Asian Americans to hate crimes and Asian American businesses to vandalism. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the incidents of negative bias and microaggressions against Asian Americans have also increased. COVID-19 is directly linked to China, not just in terms of the origins of the disease, but also in the coverage of it. Because Asian Americans have historically been viewed as perpetually foreign no matter how long they have lived in the United States, we posit that it has been relatively easy for people to treat Chinese or Asian Americans as the physical embodiment of foreignness and disease. We examine the historical antecedents that link Asian Americans to infectious diseases. Finally, we contemplate the possibility that these experiences will lead to a reinvigoration of a panethnic Asian American identity and social movement.

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Introduction

COVID-19 (or the coronavirus) is a global pandemic that has affected the everyday lives of hundreds of millions of people. At the time we write this, there have been over four million cases across over 200 countries worldwide (Pettersson, Manley, & Hern, 2020 ) . Moreover, pervasive stay-at-home orders and calls for social distancing, as well as the disruptions to every facet of our lives make it difficult to overstate the importance of COVID-19. As the beginning of the outbreak has been traced to China (and Wuhan in particular), both in the United States and elsewhere, people who are Chinese or seen as East Asian have become associated with this contagious disease. Early reports in the United States were often accompanied by stock photos of Asians in masks (Burton, 2020 ; Walker, 2020 ). Many of the first reports labeled the disease as the “Wuhan Virus,” or “Chinese Virus,” and the Trump administration has also used these terms (Levenson, 2020 ; Maitra, 2020 ; Marquardt & Hansler, 2020 ; Rogers, Jakes, & Swanson, 2020 ; Schwartz, 2020 ). News media coverage in the United States focused on the hygiene of the seafood market in Wuhan and wild animal consumption as a possible cause of coronavirus (Gomera, 2020 ; Mackenzie & Smith, 2020 ). Memes and jokes about bats and China flooded social media, including posts by our peers online. These reports provide the American public a straightforward narrative that focuses on China as the origin of COVID-19.

In this paper, we review current patterns of hate crimes, microaggressions, and other negative responses against Asian individuals and businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic. These hate crimes and bias incidents occur in the landscape of American racism in which Asian Americans are seen as the embodiment of China and potential carriers of COVID-19, regardless of their ethnicity or generational status. We believe that Asian Americans not only are not “honorary whites,” but their very status as Americans is, at best, precarious, and at worst, in doubt during the COVID-19 crisis. We suggest that what we witness today is an extension of the history of Asians in the United States and that this experience may lead to the reemergence of a vibrant panethnic Asian American identity.

Hate Crimes Against Asian Americans During COVID-19

As of early May 2020, there have been over 1.8 million individuals who have tested positive for and over 105,000 deaths from COVID-19 in the United States alone and the numbers are growing rapidly every day (“Cases in the U.S.,” 2020 ). Although researchers have traced cases of the virus in the United States to travelers from Europe (Gonzalez-Reiche et al., 2020 ) and to travelers within the United States (Fauver et al., 2020 ), some members of the general public regard Asian Americans with suspicion and as carriers of the disease. On April 28th, 2020, NBC News reported that 30% of Americans have personally witnessed someone blaming Asians for the coronavirus (Ellerbeck, 2020 ).

The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed the negative perceptions of Asian Americans that have long been prevalent in American society. Many individuals in the United States see the virus as foreign and condemn phenotypically Asian bodies as the spreaders of the virus (Ellerbeck, 2020 ). Consistent with Claire Jean Kim’s theory on racial triangulation (Kim, 1999 ) and the concept of Asians as perpetual foreigners (Ancheta, 2006 ; Saito, 1997 ; Tuan, 1998 ; E. D. Wu, 2015 ) , we posit that during COVID-19, the racial positionality of Asian Americans as foreign and Other persists, and that this pernicious designation may be a threat to the safety and mental health of Asian Americans. They are not only at risk of exposure to COVID-19, but they must contend with the additional risk of victimization, which may increase their anxiety. Historically, from the late 19th through the mid twentieth century, popular culture and news media portrayed Asians in America as the “Yellow Peril,” which symbolized the Western fear of uncivilized, nonwhite Asian invasion and domination (Okihiro, 2014 ; Saito, 1997 ) . It is possible that the perceived threat of the Yellow Peril has reemerged in the time of COVID-19.

The spread of the coronavirus and the increased severity of the pandemic has caused fear and panic for most Americans, as COVID-19 has brought about physical restrictions and financial hardships. So far, forty-two states have issued stay-at-home orders, which has resulted in 95% of the American population facing restrictions that impact their daily lives (Woodward, 2020 ). Novel efforts to end the pandemic across the states have led businesses to shut down. As a result, more than 30 million people in the United States have filed for unemployment since the onset of the coronavirus crisis (Gura, 2020 ). Because this virus has been identified as foreign, for some individuals, their feelings have been expressed as xenophobia, prejudice, and violence against Asian Americans. These negative perceptions and actions have gained traction due to the unprecedented impact COVID-19 has on people’s lives, and institutions such as UC Berkeley have even normalized these reactions (Chiu, 2020 ). However, racism and xenophobia are not a “natural” reaction to the threat of the virus; rather, we speculate that the historical legacies of whiteness and citizenship have produced these reactions, where many individuals may interpret Asian Americans as foreign and presenting a higher risk of transmission of the disease.

Already, the FBI has issued a warning that due to COVID-19, there may be increased hate crimes against Asian Americans, because “a portion of the US public will associate COVID-19 with China and Asian American populations” (Margolin, 2020 ). News reports, police departments, and community organizations have been documenting these incidents. Evidence suggests that the FBI’s warning was warranted. Based on reporting from Stop AAPI Hate , in the one-month period from March 19th to April 23rd, there were nearly 1500 alleged instances of anti-Asian bias (Jeung & Nham, 2020 ). The reported incidents have been concentrated in New York and California, with 42% of the reports hailing from California and 17% of reports from New York, but Asian Americans in 45 states across the nation have reported incidents (Jeung & Nham, 2020 ).

Reports of Hate Crimes and Bias Incidents

There have been a large number of physical assaults against Asian Americans and ethnically Asian individuals in the United States directly related to COVID-19. While the majority of Americans are sheltering-in-place and staying at home, 80% of the self-reported anti-Asian incidents have taken place outside people’s private residences, in grocery stores, local businesses, and public places (Jeung & Nham, 2020 ). We suggest that these hate crimes and other incidents of bias have historical roots that have placed Asians outside the boundaries of whiteness and American citizenship. In addition, we believe that the current COVID-19 crisis draws attention to ongoing racial issues and provides a lens through which to challenge the notion of America as a post-racial society (Bonilla-Silva, 2006 ).

One of the incidents under investigation as a hate crime includes the attempted murder of a Burmese-American family at a Sam’s Club in Midland, Texas (Yam, 2020a ). The suspect said that he stabbed the father, a four-year-old child, and a two-year-old child because he “thought the family was Chinese, and infecting people with coronavirus” (Yam, 2020a ). Police are investigating numerous other physical incidents including attacks with acid (Moore & Cassady, 2020 ), an umbrella (Madani, 2020 ), and a log (Kang, 2020 ). There have been a number of physical altercations at bus stops (Bensimon, 2020 ; Madani, 2020 ), subway stations (Parnell, 2020 ), convenience stores (Oliveira, 2020 ), and on the street (Jeung & Nham, 2020 ; Sheldon, 2020 ). Asian Americans are also reporting physical threats being made against them (Driscoll, 2020 ; Parascandola, 2020 ). Based on Stop AAPI Hate statistics, 127 Asian Americans filed reports of physical assaults in four weeks (Jeung & Nham, 2020 ), and it is likely that other Asians have not reported their experiences out of fear or concern about the legal process.

In addition to the physical attacks and threats against Asian Americans, individuals have also filed reports of vandalism and property damage targeted at Asian businesses. One Korean restaurant in New York City had the graffiti “stop eating dogs” written on its window (Adams, 2020 ). Perpetrators have also made explicit references to COVID-19 in their vandalism, where phrases such as “take the corona back you ch*nk” (Goodell & Mann, 2020 ), and “watch out for corona” (Wang, 2020 ) have been documented on Asian-owned restaurants. Some of these incidents were not reported to the police and therefore will not be investigated as hate crimes, as business owners reasoned that it would be difficult to track the vandals (Adams, 2020 ; Buscher, 2020 ). These incidents of vandalism demonstrate the association some people make between Asian American businesses and COVID-19.

Beyond the narrow definition of the incidents that can be classified as punishable hate crimes, Asian Americans have also documented a large number of alleged bias and hate incidents. Stop AAPI Hate reports indicate that 70% of coronavirus discrimination against Asian Americans has involved verbal harassment, with over 1000 incidents of verbal harassment reported in just four weeks (Jeung & Nham, 2020 ). In addition, there have been over 90 reports of Asian Americans being coughed or spat on. One prevalent theme in the verbal incidents is the linking of Asian bodies to COVID-19, where the aggressors are purportedly calling Asians “coronavirus,” “Chinese virus,” or “diseased,” and telling them that they should “be quarantined,” or “go back to China” (ADL 2020 ). In all of these incidents, the perpetrators consistently use anti-Asian racial slurs (Buscher, 2020 ; Goodell & Mann, 2020 ; Sheldon, 2020 ). This hateful language that targets all Asians (and not just Chinese Americans) demonstrates the racialization of Asian Americans.

The threat of a global pandemic to people’s everyday lives is something that most Americans have not experienced before. However, the act of interpreting the current national crisis as an external threat and ascribing this danger to Chinese bodies and more broadly Asian bodies should not surprise scholars of Asian Americans. In fact, this deeply-rooted cognitive association of Asian Americans to Asia and to disease has a long history. Hence, we examine the phenomenon of xenophobia against Asian Americans in the context of historical racial dynamics in the United States.

The Color Line and the Positionality of Asian Americans

Race has been posited as a socio-historical concept, and while many race scholars in the United States have focused on the black/white binary, others have documented how Asian Americans have also been racialized over time (Omi & Winant, 2014 ). These scholars have examined how the racialization of Asian Americans has developed in relation to African Americans and white Americans (Bonilla-Silva, 2004 ; Kim, 1999 ). One of the dominant stereotypes of Asian Americans is that they are perpetual foreigners , where individuals directly link phenotypical Asian ethnic appearance with foreignness, regardless of Asian immigrant or generational status (Ancheta, 2006 ; Tuan, 1998 ; F. H. Wu, 2002 ). This stereotype is longstanding in American history and has forcefully re-emerged during the COVID-19 crisis. The perception of an Asian-looking person as simultaneously Chinese, Asian, and foreign underscores how this racial categorization affects all Asian Americans. Thus, we suggest that the concept of Asian American panethnicity (Okamoto & Mora, 2014 ) may be particularly applicable during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The legacy of white supremacy equates white bodies with purity and innocence, while nonwhite bodies are designated as unclean, uncivilized, and dangerous. White supremacy and its tactic of othering Asian bodies has been a consistent recurrence over earlier pandemics. Dating back to the nineteenth century, the bubonic plague was framed as a “racial disease” which only Asian bodies could be infected by whereas white bodies were seen as immune (Randall, 2019 ). In 1899, Honolulu officials quarantined and burned Chinatown as a precaution against the bubonic plague (Mohr, 2004 ). In 1900, San Francisco authorities quarantined Chinatown residents, and regulated food and people in and out of Chinatown, believing that the unclean food and Asian people were the cause of the epidemic (Shah, 2001 ; Trauner, 1978 ). The history of the Yellow Peril has continued throughout the 20th and 21st centuries in the embodied perceptions of Asian immigrants as the spreaders of disease (Molina, 2006 ).

More recently, during the 2003 SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) epidemic, the discourse in the United States focused on Chinatown as the epicenter of the disease (Eichelberger, 2007 ). Studies suggest that 14 % of Americans reported avoiding Asian businesses and Asian Americans experienced increased threat and anxiety during SARS (Blendon, Benson, DesRoches, Raleigh, & Taylor-Clark, 2004 ). We suspect the negative impact of COVID-19 on Asian Americans has been far greater than the impact of SARS. In New York City’s Chinatown, restaurants suffered immediately after the first reports of COVID-19, as some restaurants and businesses experienced up to an 85% drop in profits for the two months prior to March 16th, 2020 – far before any stay-at-home orders were given (Roberts, 2020 ). When moral panic arises, foreign bodies, typically the undesirable and “un-American” yellow bodies, may be seen as a threat that can harm pure white bodies.

The cycle of elevated risk, followed by fearing and blaming what is foreign is not just limited to disease outbreaks, but also occurs during economic downturns. In 1982, Vincent Chin was beaten to death by two men who blamed him for the influx of Japanese cars into the United States auto market. Vincent Chin was attacked with racial slurs and specifically targeted because of his race. Although Chin was Chinese American, in the minds of these two men, he represented the downturn of the auto industry in Detroit and the increased imports of Japanese automobiles (Choy & Tajima-Pena, 1987 ).

Similarly, after the 9/11 attacks in the United States, retaliatory aggressions were not limited to attacks against Arabs or Muslims (Perry, 2003 ). Violence and hatred against the perceived enemy resulted in incidents targeting Sikhs, second and third generation Indian Americans, and even Lebanese and Greeks (Perry, 2003 ). More recently, the hate crime murder of Srinivas Kuchibhotla, an Indian immigrant falsely assumed to be an Iranian terrorist and told “get out of my country” before being shot to death, illustrates the association between racialized perceptions of threat and incidents of violence (Fuchs 2018 ). With the COVID-19 pandemic, violent attacks and racial discrimination against Asian Americans have emerged as non-Asian Americans look for someone or something Asian to blame for their anger and fear about illness, economic insecurity, and stay-at-home orders.

Fear and the Mental Health of Asian Americans

The current perceptions of China and more broadly East Asia as both economic and public health threats have made Chinese and East Asians in America fearful for their own safety. Some Asian Americans have made efforts to hide their Asian identity or assert their status as American in an attempt to prevent hate crime attacks (Buscher, 2020 ; Tang, 2020 ). While this tactic may be effective on the individual level, it does not modify the positionality of Asian bodies during COVID-19. The attempt to distinguish Asian Americans from Asians who are foreign nationals misses the fact that in the United States, being Asians and being foreign are inextricably bound together.

After World War II, news media and local organizations encouraged Chinese Americans to distinguish themselves from the Japanese, and similarly encouraged Japanese Americans to show their Americanness and patriotism to gain acceptance by the white majority (E. D. Wu, 2015 ). Muslim and Sikh Americans displayed American flags after 9/11 to show that they were not a threat to the United States, and more recently there has been a movement to celebrate Sikh Captain America (Ishisaka, 2018 ). Former presidential candidate Andrew Yang suggested that Asian Americans fight against racism by wearing red white and blue and prominently displaying their Americanness (Yang, 2020 ). In many of these situations, these strategies did not directly address the problems of racism and xenophobia – they simply shifted the blame towards another group.

Disease does not differentiate among people based on skin color or national origin, yet many Asian Americans have suffered from discrimination and hatred during the COVID-19 pandemic. Although the threat of the virus is real for all Americans, Asian Americans bear the additional burden of feeling unsafe and vulnerable to attack by others. The link between COVID-19 and hate crimes and bias incidents against Asian Americans is indicative of the widespread racial sentiments which continue to be prominent in American society. While some scholars have gone as far as to regard Asian Americans as “honorary whites” (Tuan, 1998 ), the current COVID-19 crisis has made markedly clear this is an illusion, at best. There are a number of reasons why the racial dynamics of anti-Asian crimes during COVID-19 should be examined more closely.

First, the majority of incidents and attacks have occurred in diverse metropolitan areas such as New York City, Boston, and Los Angeles. These are spaces that most Americans have traditionally regarded as more liberal and tolerant of difference than other parts of the United States. In New York City alone, from the start of the COVID-19 outbreak through April 2020, the NYPD’s hate crime task force has investigated fourteen cases where all the victims were Asian and targeted due to coronavirus discrimination (NYPD, 2020 ). The remarks of a Kansas governor that said his town was safe “because it had only a few Chinese residents” (Lefler & Heying 2020 ) offers one explanation for the high concentration of racial incidents in large cities with sizable Asian populations, but we think that this is not sufficient in explaining the data so far. Future research should track racial bias and hate crimes more systematically in order to further our understanding of how demography and urbanicity influence these incidents.

Second, these hate crimes have increased the anxiety of Asian Americans during already uncertain times, with many fearful for their physical safety when running everyday errands (Tavernise & Oppel Jr., 2020 ). Asian Americans are now self-conscious about “coughing while Asian” (Aratani, 2020 ), and concerned about being targeted for hate crimes (Liu, 2020 ; Wong, 2020 ). There is evidence to suggest that Asian Americans under-report crimes (Allport, 1993 ), and some recent immigrants may lack an understanding of the legal system and process of reporting crimes, particularly in the case of hate crimes. Therefore, scholars should take additional care to document and analyze these incidents and their effects on Asian American communities across the United States.

The possible upward trend of anti-Asian bias incidents and hate crimes is indicative of the growth of white nationalism and xenophobia. The image of a disease carrier with respect to COVID-19 is bound in Asian bodies and includes assumptions about race, ethnicity, and citizenship. As Vincent Chin, Srinivas Kuchibhotla, the Burmese-American family, and many others have shown us, the level of fungibility in terms of how Asian ethnicities are perceived can be deadly. It does not matter if the person is from China, of Chinese origin, or simply looks Asian – the perpetrators of this violence see all of these bodies as foreign and threatening. While there have been numerous instances of anti-Asian bias and crime, there have not been similarly patterned anti-European tourist incidents or an avoidance of Italian restaurants, suggesting that COVID-19 illuminates the particular racialization of disease that extends beyond this virus, and further back in American history.

Already there has been substantial news coverage of these anti-Asian crimes, which suggests that people are paying attention to this issue, and police departments are actively investigating many of these incidents. Activists and community organizations have started online campaigns such as #washthehate and #hateisavirus to combat anti-Asian racism during this time. The BBC has documented 120 distinct news articles covering alleged incidents of discrimination since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic (Cheung, Feng, & Deng, 2020 ). In addition, the Chinese for Affirmative Action and Asian Pacific Policy and Planning Council have created a platform where individuals can record incidents of racism and coronavirus discrimination. The reporting of hate crimes during COVID-19 is superior to the reports of these types of incidents during the SARS outbreak (Leung Coleman, 2020 ; Washer, 2004 ). Although the federal government response has been limited compared to the hate crime prevention initiatives after 9/11 and SARS, in May 2020, the Commission on Civil Rights agreed to take on the demands proposed by a group of Democratic Senators in a letter requesting a stronger response to the anti-Asian hate crimes and discrimination during COVID-19 (Campbell & Ellerbeck, 2020 ; Yam, 2020b ).

Similar to the murder of Vincent Chin, which served to ignite an Asian American activist movement, we hypothesize that the racial incidents against Asian Americans during the COVID-19 pandemic may encourage the political mobilization of a panethnic Asian American movement. At the same time, we believe that the incidents that are classified as “hate crimes” and “bias incidents” based on legal definitions do not fully capture the extent or pervasiveness of racist and xenophobic thoughts against Asian Americans. We encourage future scholars to more closely examine the culturally embedded racial logics that lead to these incidents, rather than focusing solely on the incidents themselves as the object of analysis. The hate crimes against Asians in the time of COVID-19 highlight the ways that Asian Americans continue to be viewed as foreign and suspect. This may be an additional burden on Asian Americans beyond the anxiety, economic instability, and the risk of illness all Americans have experienced during COVID-19.

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We gratefully acknowledge support from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the MacMillan Center, and the Council for East Asia at Yale University. We are also grateful for the support of the Laboratory Program for Korean Studies through the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the Korean Studies Promotion Service of the Academy of Korean Studies (AKS-2016-LAB-2250002).

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Tessler, H., Choi, M. & Kao, G. The Anxiety of Being Asian American: Hate Crimes and Negative Biases During the COVID-19 Pandemic. Am J Crim Just 45 , 636–646 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12103-020-09541-5

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National Museum of Asian Art Announces 2024 Arts and Culture Festival Dedicated to Well-Being in the Asian American Community

March 28, 2024 | National Museum of Asian Art

Part of a Five-Year Series of May Programming Sponsored by Bank of America That Celebrates Asian American and Native Hawaiian Pacific Islander Heritage Month

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art has announced its May Arts and Culture Festival. From May 10 to May 12, the museum will host pop-ups, performances, discussions and other programs that draw upon the role of the museum as a space of gathering, learning and contemplation to honor and celebrate the cultures of the Middle East, Asia and America’s Asian American communities. This is the second festival in a five-year initiative sponsored by Bank of America for annual celebrations during Asian American and Native Hawaiian Pacific Islander Heritage Month. All events are free of charge. More details on the May 2024 festival programming will be announced in the coming weeks. The public can follow #TheNext100 and @NatAsianArt for details about the events, including those that require tickets and registration.

This year, the museum will feature arts and culture programming dedicated to well-being in the Asian American community. The weekend-long festival aims to create dialogue around and bring awareness to often overlooked issues, stories and practices around mental health and wellness in Asian diasporic experiences. Activities like mindfulness practices will be integrated alongside arts and cultures resources that support mental health. Programming also includes panel discussions, interactive experiences, culinary pop-ups and art-making projects.

The museum’s partnership with Bank of America greatly expands the National Museum of Asian Art’s public programming, both within its galleries and on the National Mall, ensuring that Asian arts and culture reach the broadest possible audiences. Last year’s two-week festival commemorated the museum’s centennial and drew more than 40,000 people.

Health and Wellness Initiatives

This festival is the latest example of the National Museum of Asian Art’s portfolio in health and wellness work.

Other initiatives include:

• Free online meditation sessions every Tuesday and Friday
• “ Artful Movement ,” a virtual program developed in partnership with the non-profit children’s yoga organization Create Calm that combines mindful movement with slow looking at art for students in pre-K–sixth grade
• Yoga: The Art of Transformation
• Mind Over Matter: Zen in Medieval Japan

Bank of America is the Founding Sponsor of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art’s May Arts and Culture Festival.

About the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art is committed to preserving, exhibiting, researching and interpreting art in ways that deepen our collective understanding of Asia, the United States and the world. Home to more than 46,000 objects, the museum stewards one of North America’s largest and most comprehensive collections of Asian art, with works dating from antiquity to the present from China, Japan, Korea, South Asia, Southeast Asia and the Islamic world. Its rich holdings bring the arts of Asia into direct dialogue with an important collection of 19th- and early 20th-century art from the United States, providing an essential platform for creative collaboration and cultural exchange between the U.S., Asia and the Middle East.

Beginning with a 1906 gift that paved the way for the museum’s opening in 1923, the National Museum of Asian Art is a leading resource for visitors, students and scholars in the United States and internationally. Its galleries, laboratories, archives and library are located on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., and are part of the world’s largest museum complex, which typically reports more than 27 million visits each year. The museum is free and open to the public 364 days a year (closed Dec. 25), making its exhibitions, programs, learning opportunities and digital initiatives accessible to global audiences.

For Press Inquiries

[email protected] Phone: (202) 633-0271 Fax: (202) 633-0043

Office of Marketing and Communications

National Museum of Asian Art PO Box 37012, MRC 707 Washington, DC 20013-7012

1050 Independence Ave. SW Washington, DC 20013 202.633.1000

© 2024 Smithsonian Institution

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Mark Zuckerberg is married to a Chinese-American woman, but Meta's AI image generator can't imagine an Asian man with a white woman

• Meta's AI image generator, Imagine, has been accused of racial bias.
• The tool was unable to produce pictures of an Asian man with a white woman.
• The apparent bias is surprising as Zuckerberg, Meta's CEO, is married to a woman of East Asian heritage.

Meta's AI image generator has been accused of racial bias after users discovered it was unable to create a picture of an Asian man with a white woman.

The AI-powered image generator , Imagine, was launched late last year. It is able to take almost any written prompt and instantaneously transform it into a realistic picture.

But users found the AI was unable to create images showing mixed-race couples. When Business Insider asked the tool to produce an image of an Asian man with a white wife, only pictures of Asian couples were shown.

The AI's apparent bias is surprising given that Mark Zuckerberg, Meta's CEO, is married to a woman of East Asian heritage.

Priscilla Chan, the daughter of Chinese immigrants to America, met Zuckerberg whilst studying at Harvard. The couple married in 2012. 

Some users took to X to share pictures of Zuckerberg and Chan, joking that they had successfully managed to create the images using Imagine.

Done pic.twitter.com/Tilqw2Uwdu — Khalid Natto ☕️ Na2 Perspective Podcast ☕️ (@ChairmanNatto) April 3, 2024

The Verge first reported the issue on Wednesday, when reporter Mia Sato claimed she tried "dozens of times" to create images of Asian men and women with white partners and friends.

Related stories

Sato said the image generator was only able to return one accurate image of the races specified in her prompts.

Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment from BI, made outside normal working hours.

Meta is by no means the first major tech company that has been blasted for "racist" AI.

In February, Google was forced to pause its Gemini image generator after users found it was creating historically inaccurate images.

Users found that the image generator would produce pictures of Asian Nazis in 1940 Germany, black Vikings or even female medieval knights.

The tech company was accused of being overly "woke" as a result.

At the time, Google said "Gemini's AI image generation does generate a wide range of people. And that's generally a good thing because people around the world use it. But it's missing the mark here."

But AI's racial prejudices have long been a cause for concern.

Dr Nakeema Stefflbauer, a specialist in AI ethics and CEO of women in tech network Frauenloop, previously told Business Insider that "When predictive algorithms or so-called 'AI' are so widely used, it can be difficult to recognise that these predictions are often based on little more than rapid regurgitation of crowdsourced opinions, stereotypes, or lies."

"Algorithmic predictions are excluding, stereotyping, and unfairly targeting individuals and communities based on data pulled from, say, Reddit," she said.

Generative AIs like Gemini and Imagine are trained on massive amounts of data taken from society at large.

If there are fewer images of mixed-race couples in the data used to train the model, this may be why the AI struggles to generate these types of images.

Watch: Women must leverage the "algorithm for equality" as AI goes mainstream, says Shelley Zalis, CEO of The Female Quotient

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Lalzawmi "zomi" frankcom, australia.

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James kirby, john chapman, james henderson, uk.

JACOB FLICKINGER, UNITED STATES AND CANADA

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Biden welcomes 'global partner,' Kishida, at White House summit

U.S. President Joe Biden and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida touted increased joint military cooperation and a new missile defense system on Wednesday, strengthening their alliance with an eye on aggressive actions by China and Russia.

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2. asian americans and life in america.

Life for Asians living in the United States is shaped by the relationships they form here, their cultural heritage, and their group’s history in the U.S. Their lives in America are also shaped by the connections they have with other Asian Americans and their views of representation and politics.

For many Asian adults, where they were born shapes friendships formed in the U.S.

Life for Asians living in the United States can look quite different depending on where they were born. Those born outside the U.S. are often older, having experienced a larger share of their formative years in other places. And they often have stronger ties to their origin group than those born in the U.S. do. These differences contribute to the types of social relationships formed by U.S. Asians.

Overall, about half (51%) of Asian Americans say all or most of their friends in the United States share their own ethnicity or are otherwise Asian. The extent to which Asian Americans form friendships with other Asians is similar across most of the largest origin groups. At least half of all Vietnamese (55%), Indian (55%), Chinese (51%) and Korean (50%) respondents say all or most of their friends in the U.S. share their ethnicity or are otherwise Asian, compared with 34% for Japanese respondents.

Some of the largest differences among Asian Americans are driven by the experiences of those born outside the United States. More than half of Asian immigrant adults (56%) say all or most of their friends share their ethnicity or are Asian. Among immigrants, those who came to the U.S. in the last 10 years are more likely to indicate this about their friends than those who have lived in the U.S. for 21 years or more (60% and 50% respectively).

By comparison, 38% of U.S.-born Asian adults say all or most of their friends share their ethnicity or are otherwise Asian. Among the U.S. born, about four-in-ten (39%) who are second generation say all or most of their friends share their same ethnicity or are Asian, compared with 32% of those who are third generation or higher who say the same. Immigrants are more likely than U.S.-born adults to say that all or most of their friends are of the same ethnicity (45% vs. 19%). Conversely, U.S.-born Asians (25%) are slightly more likely than Asian immigrants (19%) to say all or most of their friends are not of their ethnicity, but still Asian.

Most Asian adults are comfortable with intermarriage

When it comes to marriage, nearly all Asian adults say they would be comfortable if a close family member married someone who is not Asian (86%) or married someone who is Asian but from a different ethnic group (87%).

Historically, Asian Americans have some of the highest intermarriage rates among U.S. adults. In 2021, 23% of Asian newlyweds were married to someone who is not Asian, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of government data. These rates have changed little since the 1990s .

Although large majorities across Asian origin groups say they are comfortable with a close relative marrying outside their racial or ethnic group, Filipino adults stand out on this measure. Nearly all Filipino respondents say they would feel comfortable with a close family member marrying someone who is not Asian (94%) or is Asian but not Filipino (93%).

Interestingly, while Asian adults born in the U.S. differ from those born elsewhere when it comes to forming friendships, more than 80% of both groups say they are comfortable with a close family member marrying outside their race or ethnicity.

Asian women are more comfortable than Asian men with intermarriage in their family, both with marrying someone who is not Asian (89% vs. 83%) and someone who is of a different Asian ethnicity (90% vs. 83%). One large gender gap is by immigrant status: U.S.-born Asian women are the most comfortable with a close family member marrying outside their race (95%), foreign-born men are least comfortable (82%), and U.S.-born men (89%) and foreign-born women (87%) are in the middle. Similarly, nearly all U.S.-born women (96%) report being comfortable with a close relative marrying someone who is Asian but of a different ethnicity, followed by U.S.-born men (90%).

Younger Asian American adults are also slightly more comfortable with intermarriage than older Asian adults, with those ages 18 to 29 more likely to say they are comfortable with a close family member marrying outside their race (91%) than those 50 to 64 (85%) and 65 and older (76%). Those ages 18 to 29 are also more likely to say they are comfortable with a close relative marrying someone who is Asian outside of their ethnicity (92%) than older Asian adults (84% among ages 50 to 64, and 76% among ages 65 and older).

Some Asians say they have hidden their heritage

An experience that some Asian Americans have in the U.S. is feeling singled out or “othered” due to their identity. In the new survey, Asian adults were asked if they have ever hidden a part of their heritage (such as food, cultural practices, clothing or religious practices) from people who are not Asian. Overall, one-in-five Asian Americans report doing so. The extent to which U.S. Asians say they have had such experiences varies across several demographic characteristics including age, nativity, education, ethnicity and gender.

Among the largest Asian origin groups, 25% of Korean adults say they have hidden some aspect of their heritage from non-Asians, while slightly smaller shares of Chinese (19%), Filipino (16%), Vietnamese (18%) and Japanese adults (14%) have also done so.

The experience of having to hide some aspect of their heritage from others is one that younger Asian adults are more likely to report than older Asians. Indeed, 39% of U.S. Asians ages 18 to 29 report they have hidden some aspect of their culture or heritage, compared with just 12% among those 50 to 64 and 5% of those 65 and older.

In addition, there are differences between men and women, with a slightly higher share of women than men saying they have had to hide their heritage (22% vs. 17%). Finally, a larger share of Asian adults with a bachelor’s (22%) or postgraduate degree (23%) report having hidden some aspect of their culture or heritage compared with those with some college (17%) or a high school diploma or less (16%).

Another large difference is among Asian adults born in the U.S. and those born in another country. U.S.-born respondents were twice as likely as Asian immigrants to report having hidden some aspect of their culture (32% vs. 15%). And one of the largest gaps between groups of Asian adults is generational, with 38% of second-generation Asians saying they have hidden some aspect of their culture or heritage compared with 11% of third generation or higher.

Reasons for hiding heritage vary by nativity

Asian American adults who said they had hidden some aspects of their culture were asked to share their reasoning for doing so in an open-ended question. The responses from those who answered the question highlighted several different situations ranging from fear of being embarrassed to wanting to avoid awkward questions or having to explain themselves, and even concern of potential discrimination.

In addition, there were differences in the words and phrases U.S.-born Asian Americans used compared with Asian immigrants. Here, pointwise mutual information identified the words and phrases more likely to be included in responses from U.S.-born Asian adults compared with foreign-born Asian adults (and vice versa). 6 Responses from U.S.-born respondents included terms such as “lack [of] understanding,” which often referred to dealing with non-Asians having a general lack of knowledge of their heritage. Other words and phrases more likely to be included by U.S.-born respondents were ones that related to fears such as “fear [of] discrimination” or avoiding other negative experiences such as being “bullied,” “teased” or “mocked.”

The reasons given by Asian immigrants for hiding aspects of their heritage highlighted similar themes in their open-ended responses but included distinctive words and phrases unique to their own immigrant experiences. For example, responses from foreign-born Asians were more likely to include phrases like “want [to] explain,” which was often in reference to the extra effort sometimes needed to explain aspects of their heritage to non-Asians. Similarly foreign-born respondents were more likely to include the phrase “American culture.” Other terms more likely to be included by those born in another country related to fears of or a desire to avoid “prejudice” or situations that would make them “[feel] uncomfortable.”

Overall, many of these open-ended responses echoed some of the experiences described by participants in Pew Research Center’s 2021 focus group research. Among the topics covered, participants shared their experiences about how they think about their identity as well as their interactions with others. Some of the themes that emerged from these focus group discussions highlighted the general lack of knowledge or familiarity during interactions with others (non-Asians and Asians alike), as well as the experience of focus group participants frequently having to explain themselves and their heritage to others.

Connections with other Asian Americans, politics and political parties

Aside from questions on personal and perceived identities, Asian adults were asked about how connected they feel with Asians living in the U.S. Overall, the majority (59%) of Asian adults say that what happens to Asians living in the U.S. affects what happens in their own lives.

National Asian connections

Across the six largest Asian origin groups, about half or more say that what happens to Asians in the U.S. has an impact on their own lives. But this view varies by origin group, with Korean (67%) and Chinese (65%) adults having a stronger sense of connection to what happens to other Asians in the country compared with Indian (55%), Filipino (54%) and Vietnamese (52%) adults.

In addition, about two-thirds (68%) of Asian adults ages 18 to 29 say that what happens to other Asians in the U.S. affects their lives at least some, a higher share than among Asians 65 and older (46%). And higher shares of those with a college degree compared with those with some college or less say what happens to U.S. Asians affects their own lives a lot or some.

Feelings about shared fates with other U.S. Asians extend across immigrant generations. U.S.-born Asian adults are more likely than Asian immigrants to say that what happens to Asians in the U.S. overall affects what happens in their own lives (64% vs. 57%). This linkage is even stronger for second-generation Asian adults, with about two-thirds saying the same (67%). However, feelings of shared fates with other U.S. Asians fall to about half (51%) among third- and higher-generation Asian adults. 

Among Asian immigrants, non-U.S. citizens (66%) are more likely than naturalized U.S. citizens (54%) to say that what happens to Asians in the U.S. affects their own lives, though majorities of both groups hold this view. This connection with other Asians in the U.S. declines for immigrants who have been in the U.S. for more than 20 years when compared with those who arrived within the last 10 years (54% vs. 60% respectively).

Need for a national leader advancing the concerns of Asian Americans

About two-thirds of Asian Americans (68%) say it is extremely or very important for the U.S. Asian community to have a national leader advancing its concerns, while just 10% say it is a little or not at all important.

Most Asian adults among all the largest ethnic groups say a national leader is important. Roughly three-in-four Filipino (74%) and Chinese (73%) adults say it is very or extremely important for the U.S. Asian community to have a national leader advancing its concerns. Majorities of Vietnamese (69%), Korean (66%), Japanese (63%) and Indian adults (62%) say the same.

A higher share of Asian American women (73%) than men (64%) say having a national leader is extremely or very important, though large majorities of both groups say so.

In addition, 70% of immigrant Asian adults say having a national leader advancing Asian community concerns is at least very important, a slightly higher share than among U.S.-born Asian adults (64%).

Asian American registered voters and political party

When it comes to political life, Asian Americans represent some of the fastest growing parts of the electorate across the country. A majority of Asian adults who are registered to vote think of themselves as Democrats or lean Democratic (62%) rather than as Republicans or Republican leaners (34%).

In contrast, U.S. registered voters overall are about evenly split between Democrats (47%) and Republicans (48%).

Across origin groups, about two-in-three Filipino (68%), Indian (68%) and Korean (67%) registered voters identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party. A slightly smaller majority of Chinese registered voters (56%) identify as or lean Democratic, while about half of Vietnamese registered voters (51%) identify with or lean to the Republican Party.

The extent to which Asian voters associate with each of the major parties also varies across other demographic characteristics such as gender, age and education. Indeed, a greater share of Asian women (67%) who are registered to vote identify as Democrats when compared with Asian men (56%). There are also wide differences by educational attainment, with 70% of Asian voters with a postgraduate degree identifying as or leaning Democratic compared with about half (49%) of those with a high school education or less.

About six-in-ten of those who have spent 11 to 20 years in the U.S. (62%) identify as Democratic, compared with 54% among those who have lived in the U.S. for more than 20 years. There also are generational differences among Asian voters born in the U.S., with a larger share of second-generation Asians associating with the Democratic Party (78%) compared with those who are third or higher generation (58%).

About one-quarter of Asian adults say they are informed about U.S. Asian history

Asian Americans have a history in the United States that spans the nation’s lifetime. This history includes Chinese laborers who helped build the first transcontinental railroad and the subsequent Chinese Exclusion Act, Japanese incarceration during World War II, as well as Filipinos entering as U.S. nationals during the exclusion era, the influx of refugees following wars in Southeast Asia, and since 1960, the arrival of more than 14.7 million immigrants from Asia.

Yet just about one-in-four Asian adults (24%) say they are extremely or very informed about U.S. Asian history, according to the new survey of Asian Americans. Half say they are somewhat informed about U.S. Asian history, while another quarter (24%) say they are little or not at all informed.

The new survey shows there are differences in Asian adults’ knowledge of U.S. Asian history by several demographic characteristics such as age, gender, immigrant status and years since arrival in the U.S.

Asian adults ages 65 and older are more likely than those 18 to 29 to say they are extremely or very informed about U.S. Asian history (31% vs. 18%). And Asian men are more likely than Asian women to say they are very or extremely informed (29% vs. 20%). Meanwhile, U.S.-born Asian adults (28%) are slightly more likely than those who are immigrants (23%) to say they are substantially informed about Asian history in the U.S. Among immigrants, how many years they have lived in the U.S. is also related to differences in knowledge of U.S. Asian history.

Three-in-ten Asian immigrants who have been in the country for more than two decades say they are extremely or very informed about U.S. Asian history, higher than the share among those who have been in the country 10 years or less (14%). And Asian immigrants who are U.S. citizens (26%) are more likely than noncitizen Asian immigrants (13%) to say they are extremely or very informed.

Among those who say they are at least a little informed about U.S. Asian history, most say they learned it from the internet (82%) or media (75%), while 63% say they learned from family and friends. Fewer Asian adults say they learned about it in a classroom setting, with 37% saying they learned in their college or university years and 33% while they attended elementary through high school.

What being ‘truly American’ means to U.S. Asians

When it comes to being “truly American,” most Asian adults agree acceptance of people of diverse racial and religious backgrounds (94%), believing in individual freedoms (92%) and respecting U.S. political institutions (87%) are important.

Meanwhile, just 14% say having been born in the U.S. is important for being truly American and 12% say the same about being Christian.

Asian Americans’ views about what is important for being truly American are similar to those of the general U.S. adult population. Almost all U.S. adults say accepting diverse backgrounds (91%), believing in individual freedoms (94%) and respecting U.S. political institutions (87%) are important for being truly American.

Still, differences between Asian Americans and the general population do emerge on other traits. For example, Asian Americans are more likely than the general population to say being able to speak English is important for being truly American (76% vs. 65%) but less likely to say that being a U.S. citizen is important (67% vs. 75%). Meanwhile, the general public is more likely than Asian Americans to say it is important to be born in the U.S. or to be Christian to be considered truly American. For example, 26% of U.S. adults say being born in the U.S. is important to be truly American. Just 14% of Asian Americans say the same.

Fewer than half of U.S. Asians consider themselves typical Americans

Asian Americans are split on whether they see themselves as typical Americans. Slightly fewer than half (45%) of Asian adults say they consider themselves “a typical American,” while 52% say they are “very different from a typical American.”

Among the largest Asian American ethnic groups, Japanese adults (64%) are more likely than Asian adults in general to say they think of themselves as typical Americans. By comparison, about half of Filipino (51%), Vietnamese (49%) and Indian (46%) adults say they think of themselves this way. And fewer than half of Korean (40%) and Chinese (36%) adults say the same. Meanwhile, about half of Asian men (49%) say they consider themselves typical Americans, a higher share than among women (42%).

Overall, U.S.-born Asians (69%) are more likely than those who are immigrants (37%) to say they are typical Americans.

Among immigrants, about half of Asian adults who have been in the U.S. more than 20 years (48%) say they consider themselves typical Americans. This is more than double the share saying this among those who arrived in the past 10 years (20%). Naturalized citizens are also more likely than noncitizens to say they think of themselves as typical Americans (42% vs. 22%).  

What do Asian Americans view as important for the American dream?

Nearly all Asian adults (96%) say that having freedom of choice to live one’s life, having a good family life and retiring comfortably are important to their view of the American dream. Meanwhile, far fewer say becoming wealthy (60%) or owning a business (30%) are important.

Compared with Asian adults, similar shares of the general U.S. adult population say freedom of choice (97%), a good family life (94%) and retiring comfortably (94%) are important to their view of the American dream.

And when it comes to the milestone of owning a home, Asian adults and the general population are just as likely to say it is important (86% each).

However, the general population is less likely than Asian Americans to say having a successful career (79%) and making valuable contributions to their community (72%) are important to their view of the American dream, though large majorities of both groups hold these views.

Most Asian adults say the American dream is within reach, but about a quarter say they will never achieve it

About seven-in-ten Asian adults (72%) believe they are on their way to achieving the American dream (45%) or that they have already achieved it (26%). Yet 27% say the American dream is out of reach for them.

Among the largest ethnic origins, Japanese adults (39%) are the only group that is more likely than Asian Americans overall to say they have achieved the American dream. Still, large majorities of each of the largest ethnic origin groups say they either have achieved the American dream or are on their way to doing so.

There are other important differences among U.S. Asians. Older Asian adults are more likely than younger Asian adults to say they have achieved the American dream. About half (48%) of those ages 65 and older say they have achieved the American dream, a higher share than for all other age groups among Asian adults. And while those 18 to 29 are the least likely to say they have achieved the American dream (8%), they are the most likely age group to say that they are on their way to achieving it (63%).

Asian immigrants are slightly more likely than those born in the U.S. to say they’re on their way to achieving the American dream – 47% vs. 41%. At the same time, those born in the U.S. (33%) are more likely than those born abroad (25%) to say it is out of reach for them.  

Among Asian immigrants, 38% of those who have lived in the U.S. for more than two decades say they have achieved the American dream, while just 10% of those who arrived in the past 10 years say the same. At the same time, 63% of those who have been in the U.S. 10 years or less say they are on their way to achieving it.

When compared with the general U.S. adult population, Asian Americans differ slightly in their views of the American dream and in achieving it. U.S. adults overall are slightly more likely than Asian adults to say they have achieved the American dream (30%) or that it is out of reach for them (31%) but less likely to say they are on their way to achieving it (37%).

• Pointwise mutual information is a method used to identify words and phrases that distinguish one group of text from another. To learn more about this method, read the Center’s post “ Analyzing text for distinctive terms using pointwise mutual information ” or this report’s Methodology . ↩

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Amid racist insults, 'Bachelor' contestant Rachel Nance won't apologize for her culture

Despite being called “jungle Asian” and other racist slurs by fans of ABC’s “The Bachelor,” contestant Rachel Nance, who’s Asian and Black, says she refuses to dilute any aspect of her heritage. 

Nance, whose mother is Filipino and father Black and Arab, was among the top three contestants of the season that wrapped up last week. The internet hate was particularly fierce following an episode in which her family shared their Filipino traditions. But the 26-year-old told NBC News this week that none of it has changed the pride she feels about her cultures. 

Nance said that while many women of color are expected to whitewash their experiences to make others feel more comfortable, she will be doing no such thing. 

“Being a woman, you’re really put in a box and being a woman of color, you’re put in a smaller box and we just can’t win,” Nance said. “It was either I honor my family and I show what I was raised with, or do I not and hold back, and then I’m sad, and I’m not honoring my family.” 

She chose the former, “and I think that’s all you can do —  you just show who you are.” 

Nance was one of 32 women who appeared on the popular show’s 28th season to vie for the heart of Bachelor Joey Graziadei. Nance said she was dismayed at comments from fans following the Week 8 episode, in which Graziadei, 28, visited the hometowns of the top four contestants. Though Nance grew up in Hawaii, her hometown date took place in Rancho Cucamonga, California, where her family introduced Graziadei to several Filipino customs, including a feast of lechon, a crispy roasted pig and tinikling, a traditional dance in which dancers jump, step and twirl between two bamboo poles that are clapped together on the ground. 

While Nance made it through to the next week, receiving a rose over fellow contestant Maria Georgas, some viewers didn’t agree with Graziadei’s choice. Others criticized Nance for questioning Georgas’ intentions in pulling Graziadei aside prior to the rose ceremony. But, as she first pointed out in a “Women Tell All” special that aired last month, an influx of social media users resorted to racial insults and derogatory comments about her skin color. Some claimed that she was “overdoing it with the culture,” Nance said. 

“I think because it’s my norm, it’s not their norm, they thought I was doing too much,” she said. “I’m so proud of my family that we still decided to showcase who we are. … And I don’t regret doing it.” 

Other criticisms, she said, centered on the interracial nature of her relationship with Graziadei. Since the episode aired, Nance said she’s come across TikToks from people expressing disgust at the pair kissing. 

“I will not change who I fall for,” she said. “My family’s an interracial couple. My cousins are in interracial relationships. I think it’s something so beautiful that my family is a melting pot as well.” 

Nance, who largely grew up in Hawaii, said she was surrounded by multicultural, mixed-race families who often celebrated their backgrounds. But when she moved to the East Coast for college, she said she began to feel the weight of discrimination. 

“It was just the little looks I would get,” Nance said, adding that her previous interracial relationships would draw hurtful comments or stares. “I remember one time I was in a grocery store and this lady was like, ‘Shame on you, that you guys are together.’ When I was a nurse’s aide, I would have people call me the N-word.” 

When the racist criticism reached a fever pitch after the season aired, Nance said she felt she had to say something. But deciding to speak up as a woman of mixed Asian descent wasn’t an easy choice to make, she said. At one point, she had second thoughts about discussing it on the “Women Tell All” special.

“Asian women, we’re taught to always apologize first. … “If I bump into somebody, I go, ‘Oh, sorry. Sorry.’ If they bump into me, I say, ‘Sorry,’” she said. “You never want to come across as too loud or you’re doing too much. And so the split second before I went on stage, I thought maybe I shouldn’t bring this up. Because what if it makes people uncomfortable?” 

However, Nance said, she wasn’t interested in maintaining the status quo. 

“To continuously be silent, it was just going to perpetuate the same toxic cycle,” she said. “I’m hoping by from what I shared, that people of color, Asian women, all of us — we won’t use discrimination and racism as a crutch, but as a catapult to push us in a direction, to chase our dreams, to take up space.” 

With fellow contestant Jenn Tran announced as the next Bachelorette — the first Asian American lead in the show’s sister franchise — Nance said it’ll be a critical moment for Asian American women. 

“We have now this huge platform. From me sharing my story and her being the Bachelorette, it’s opening more doors and people can just kind of break through those barriers in Hollywood and reality TV,” Nance said. “People will have no choice but to accept.”

Kimmy Yam is a reporter for NBC Asian America.

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How to Claim Your Part of a $45 Million Walmart Settlement

A class-action lawsuit accusing the retail giant of inflating prices of certain weighed foods and produce resulted in a settlement. Customers may be eligible for a payment of up to $500.

By Emmett Lindner

Some Walmart customers may be entitled to claim up to $500 as part of a $45 million settlement that the retail giant is paying to resolve a class-action lawsuit, according to a settlement administrator’s website .

The lawsuit, filed on Oct. 19, 2022, claimed that Walmart overcharged shoppers for in-store purchases of certain weighted grocery items, including poultry and pork, and for bagged citrus. The lawsuit accuses the company of “unfair and deceptive business practices” that resulted in higher costs than what were advertised, according to court documents .

The lawsuit alleges that Walmart falsely inflated product weight, mislabeled products and overcharged for clearance products sold by weight.

The retail giant has denied the allegations, but it agreed to the settlement. “We believe a settlement is in the best interest of both parties,” a Walmart spokeswoman said in a statement.

Think you’re eligible? Here’s what to know:

Walmart is accused of overcharging for some weighted items.

The lawsuit claims that Walmart overcharged for certain items. Prices for weighted products, including meat, poultry, pork and seafood, sometimes differed between the item labels and the labels on the shelves, and customers were charged for the higher prices at checkout, according to the settlement.

Other grocery descriptions are said to have been distorted, too. Some bagged citrus products, including navel oranges, organic oranges, organic grapefruit and tangerines, were labeled with a weight that was lower than what appeared on the shelf tags, and customers were charged for a heavier weight of the products than what they took home.

The lawsuit also included some weighted goods that were near expiration, and displayed a price that was lower than what appeared on the register.

How do I find out if I’m eligible for a payment?

Any customers who shopped in a store at a Walmart retail location in the United States and Puerto Rico between Oct. 19, 2018, and Jan. 19, 2024, and purchased the included weighted goods or bagged citrus can apply for a settlement payment through the administrator’s website or by mail.

The deadline to submit any claim is June 5, 2024.

How do I apply, and how much should I expect?

To apply, either fill out the online form on the administrator’s website , or download a form to print and send by mail to an address provided on the form. The form requires claimants to submit contact information, describe the type and number of items purchased, and select a payment option, and gives them the opportunity to upload receipts.

The amount that claimants receive, if approved, can vary. With proof of purchase, shoppers can take home up to 2 percent of the total amount they paid for weighted goods and bagged citrus, with a cap of $500.

I don’t keep grocery receipts from five years ago …

Fear not, you may still receive a little cash, though less than the $500 cap. If you submit a claim without documentation, you can receive between $10 and $25 , depending on the number of relevant items purchased.

When will I find out if I’m approved?

The final approval hearing is scheduled for June 12, 2024. If you qualify for a payment, money will be transferred to you electronically, or by check if requested. The deadline to object or comment on the settlement is May 22, 2024.

Emmett Lindner writes about breaking and trending news. He has written about international protests, climate change and social media influencers. More about Emmett Lindner

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