We Gon' Be Alright by Jeff Chang

Author:Jeff Chang
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781250114792
Publisher: Picador

THE IN-BETWEENS

ON ASIAN AMERICANNESS

You went to college on the continent to become Asian American.

There were, as Jonathan Okamura once famously put it, no Asian Americans in Hawai’i. There were “Locals,” there were Native Hawaiians, and there were haoles. Locals were the mostly nonwhite, often mixed-race sons and daughters who, during the early twentieth century, had forged a political and cultural identity oppositional to haole oligarchic rule. In that way, Native Hawaiians were always Locals. Locals weren’t all Hawaiian. Some haoles were Locals. And if one had to ask, one wasn’t a Local.

You were a Local. And by the time you were growing up in the spotless suburbs of east Honolulu, the haoles your age, especially the ones not descended from missionaries or politicians or profiteers, could call you “gook” and “chink” all they wanted, and it wasn’t going to bother you. The words had no force, at least not in the way they might have to your parents or grandparents or great-grandparents. That was why haole kids had to push you around—to try to get you to pay attention.

You learned what it meant to be Asian American in Berkeley, California, where suddenly, significantly, you were a minority for the first time. When you rode home on your bike past the hippies in People’s Park, they told you to go back where you came from. On a Saturday night, frat boys swarmed you and your Chinese American friend, got in your face, ping-ponged the both of you around their circle while simultaneously shouting, “Get off our corner” and “We love you little guys.” You went with the homies to the Cineplex to see Brandon Lee kick ass in Rapid Fire, only to have an easy evening end with white guys in a pickup truck hollering, “Fuck off you fuckin’ chinks.” You went days and weeks feeling like you had never been seen. You were conspicuous and invisible at the same time.

This was hardly the kind of bullwhip-and-machete, chafed-hands-and-stooped-back racism your ancestors survived. You were not even sure you could call it racism. Maybe it had just been drugs or drunkenness or testosterone or you weren’t raising your hand high enough. But still, your body was registering a kind of a system shock. You drank, got high, talked louder and with more false certainty, overcompensated.

When your maoli forebears landed in the islands there had been no others. And when your Chinese forebears landed in the islands, the Kingdom of Hawai’i allowed any immigrant who had lived there for a year to become naturalized. There were no restrictions on who could be a citizen. Exclusion was for other countries, like the United States.

Your high school teacher Mr. Lee taught you that Chinese people had built civilizations while Europeans were still messing around in loincloths. (He was also the school disciplinarian, so you got to know each other well.) But your folks didn’t rule anything. They harvested rice and taro and watercress. They fought in boxing rings, delivered restaurant supplies, cooked for soldiers, fixed and maintained American military equipment.

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