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Neither Asian Nor American

It is often said that Asian-Americans are a “model minority”, with parents who work 18 hours a day in the family grocery and children who work with equally amazing perseverance in the classroom. At a glance, the evidence seems clear: while the first Asians to come to America lived poorly as farmers, miners and railway workers, we now enjoy one of the highest average incomes in the country. Here at Harvard, 18 percent of the class of 1996 are Asian-Americans, compared to 3 percent of the total U.S. population. We are the most overrepresented minority in the highest reaches of academia.

By focusing on this “positive stereotype”, however, one neglects the other side of our lives. For many of us—the second generation—there is something uncomfortable about being Asian in America. Although many of us appreciate the great sacrifices our parents have made, their economic success somehow represents for us an unsatisfying legacy. We suffer in particular from an endemic identity crisis. We have begun to question the accomodationist ways of our forebears, our quietly studious manner, our narrow priorities and our previous notions of success.

I can tell you of many Asian-Americans, myself included, who have gone through struggles to radically redefine our parents’ vision s of the American Dream. Many of us are running off the beaten track, turning away from the narrowly professional and technical career paths on our parents have raised us to follow. I gave up my own plans for medical school a few months ago to pursue a career in either academics or political journalism. Even now, my mother, my grandparents and several of my relatives continue to urge me to return to the fold of medicine.

Stripe on the rainbow. I believe my identity crisis derives in many ways from the nature of my Asian-Americans culture. While the white American media have for 20 years implicitly presented us as a gleaming contrast to the black Americans in the inner city, I find myself often envying blacks, who at least have a voice that constitutes a large part of the American consciousness. Rap music, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Spike Lee and, most recently, Rodney King—all represent a history and a culture that are shared and strongly felt. I have no comparable sense of “Asian-Americanness”, even with my Korean-American friends: only a dim sense of superficial solidarity based on the fact that we all look Asian, have strict parents and share a liking for home-cooked Korean food. At a time when coercively pluralistic notions of “political correctness” and “multiculturalism” are sweeping across college campuses, I feel that Asian-Americans are really nothing more than a token stripe on the multiethnic rainbow, included because we are not white, but somehow lacking in what it takes to be a “true” mino rity.

We suffer from a conspicuous lack of role models and shared causes. This is part of the reason, I think, that many young Asian-Americans continue to assimilate quietly into American society as doctors, scientists, and engineers. Our struggles are individual and familial but hardly communal or political. Ours is a frustratingly limited version of the American Dream. While I can strive for admittance into Harvard and become the talk of the Korean mothers in my hometown, God forbid that I aim much further and higher than that—toward fame and influence as a writer, an intellectual or perhaps president of the United States.