Guest Post - Angry Asian Buddhist

In response to Asian Pacific American Heritage month one of the writers I follow, Angry Asian Buddhist challenged other bloggers to celebrate this month by publishing an interview with or a guest blog by an Asian American Buddhist. I invited Arun to guest post here on DB:

Thank you, Chris, for inviting me to write a post on your blog.

For most of the time I was aware of it, Asian Pacific American Heritage Month has not been a big deal. It seemed everyone has a special “month” or “day” to celebrate their unique heritage, and then we go back to our lives as usual—if we were even paying attention. But this year was different.

At the beginning of this month, my father started emailing me popular articles about Asian Americans. First was Wesley Yang's New York Post article “Paper Tigers”—a piece accompanied by the provocative subtitle, “What happens to all the Asian-American overachievers when the test-taking ends?” Then my father sent me a link from the San Francisco Chronicle, “The league of extraordinary stereotypes” by Jeff Yang, a discussion of the pop-culture stereotypes of Asians you’ll find if you sift through half a century of comic books. My father didn’t write much in his emails, but when I talked with him on the phone, he continued to bring up the articles to see if I’d read them. He even resent me the link to Wesley Yang’s piece—just in case I couldn’t find it—and then he just sent it to me as a PDF attachment.

To give you a picture, my father is an old retiree who considers gardening his daily exercise. American-born and raised, he comes from the generation that brought us the Asian American movement. They helped craft the notion of Asian American identity at a time when doing groundbreaking Asian American research meant going to temple and just asking people about their life history. My father would read me bedtime stories about Chinese American laundries, Japanese American internment and Korean American athletes. Any PBS documentary about the Asian American experience was a “must-watch” event. That was how things were for the first fifteen years.

After I began high school, the focus on our Asian American heritage dwindled. Academic involvement and university ambitions became the main topic of dinner conversation. Once in college, it was all about challenging classes, independent research and my honors thesis. When I went back to the rural homeland to search out our roots, my father saw it as an excessive vacation. As someone who himself never had a college degree, he saw my proper focus to be on work, study and then finding even better work. By the time I had blazed my own career path, even after I started the Angry Asian Buddhist blog, we hardly ever talked about Asian American issues. It all seemed so last century.

A week passed before I finally read the pieces and called my father back. He told me, “They write about things that I had to deal with when I was working. I never talked about this.” For the first time, we talked about the kind discrimination he faced through his (extremely successful) career. I realized that for all the Asian American identity and pride my father had raised me with, he had never felt comfortable sharing this part of his struggles with me. In fact, it took these articles written by younger Asian Americans closer to my age for my father to find the words and expression that captured the sense of alienation, frustration, ridicule and determination that pervaded his working career. These articles came together because this month is Asian Pacific American Heritage Month. The simple existence of this stupid holiday set in motion a chain of events that allowed my father to find the perfect words penned by someone else to tell me about his suffering.

That realization is what compelled me to write my invitation for other bloggers to include the voices of Asian American Buddhists—emphasis on “voices.” It’s important that we speak for ourselves, not just have someone else write about us. All too often our experiences are presented through the filter of White writers’ perspectives, glossing over our thoughts, our emotions and our personal struggles. When the voices of Asian Americans are continuously denied, then I start getting the sense that our voices have no worth, that our perspectives have no value and that our stories have no place. It’s the sort of connection with these Asian American writers that brought my father closer to me in a way that completely surprised me. It’s that sort of connection that, I hope, will touch other readers in the Buddhist community—and ultimately bring our community even closer together.

Thank you so much again, Chris, for giving me the opportunity to share these thoughts on your blog.

Comments

[arunlikhati]

It’s 7:15, but I already noticed a mistake of mine—Wesley Yang’s piece was in New York Magazine, not New York Post! Thank you again, Chris. I deeply appreciate this opportunity.

[MomZombie]

This is what I love about the Internet, the endless amount of resources available to learn something you didn't know you didn't know. As the American mother of a Chinese-born daughter, I struggle to find access to her culture and her roots. But, what culture, what roots? Her China culture or what it means to be Chinese in America? Even better: what it means to be Chinese in America with Caucasian parents. Thank you for sharing a bit of your family's experiences. The more voices, the better.