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asian americans
What does it mean to be Asian
American?
Marq Hwang, the Ill-informed
Like all stories about Americans, it's kind of long. It's kind of
confusedly muddled. It's kind of wonderful.
It's a story about loss, about disconnection.
Traditions are the first to go. Born here, raised here, half a
world away, your parents try to keep as many as they can,
but it's a losing battle. What holiday is this? 추석? Well, we're
not going over there. Mom's too tired to make the traditional
foods, whatever they are, so let's just go out to dinner. Maybe
call 할머니. Then, later in the year, maybe the next, you fly
home, across the Great Flat ocean, and you visit the shrine
of your ancestors. How many 절 do I do? Am I even doing
it right? Am I spelling it right? My knees are getting tired.
Why prostrate myself to these ancestors I've never met, whose
gaze of my life is so distant, clouded by time and space, whose
memory I can't even conjure?
The language is the next to go. You have a fight with your
mom about going to homecoming. You want to go. You don't
know why, exactly, since you don't care much for the football
team. You're angry all the time. Angry because they get all the
funding. Angry because all the 'traditions' that come so naturally
to others, you don't know about. Angry because the white
girl you kinda like and want to go with can trace her family
back to the first settlers, and you don't know anything past the
hint that your grandfather might have been in the Resistance.
Angry because of hormones. Your mom yells at you, demanding
you study. That you stay home and spend time with your
visiting relatives. She shouts in Korean at you. And instead of
shouting back in Korean, you yell back in english. You slam
the door to your room, cursing in english. Years later, in a
college class you picked because you thought it would be cake,
you realize the only Korean you know comes from the few
movies you watch, what you learned at home, and how you
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