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The Term ‘Asian American’ Has an Impossible Duty
In a moment of pain, the descriptor has become a galvanizing force. But what happens when you lump together a group of people whose lives differ so vastly?
I’m not Asian American. I’m a German citizen, born to Vietnamese immigrants. You could say I’m an Asian in America, though I most often feel like an untethered foreigner who’s just gotten really good at nesting.
When I first immigrated to the United States, though, I was often assumed to be Asian American. And with that, I was assigned a culture that I didn’t recognize from my upbringing in Germany or even from having lived in Hong Kong and traveled across Asia for work. It’s a culture that America itself seems to have trouble figuring out.
The concept of “Asian American” was always a little foreign to me. This phrase was assigned the impossible duty of encapsulating the experience of people who once hailed from a continent that contains so many multitudes.
Though the term has largely become affiliated with largely a subset of that population, excluding countries like Russia and often centering around East Asians, it’s worth noting that about two-thirds of the world’s population, or roughly 4.16 billion individuals, live in Asia…
