“My racial awareness mediator is smart,” he said. “I’m learning a lot.”

“Good,” I said.

“He told me how minorities can’t be racist against each other.”

“That’s bullshit,” I said with a sharp laugh.

“Are you calling my racial awareness mediator a liar?”

“No,” I said, “he could just be misinformed.”

“He also said Asians are next in line to be white,” he said, crossing his arms. “What do you think about that?”

“I think you need a new racial awareness mediator.”

“It’s not true?”

“I’m afraid not,” I said, turning away from him.

“Why should I believe you?”

“What?”

“My racial awareness mediator teaches this race stuff all the time—why should I believe you?”

Patiently educating a clueless white person about race is draining. It takes all your powers of persuasion. Because it’s more than a chat about race. It’s ontological. It’s like explaining to a person why you exist, or why you feel pain, or why your reality is distinct from their reality. Except it’s even trickier than that. Because the person has all of Western history, politics, literature, and mass culture on their side, proving that you don’t exist.

In other words, I didn’t know whether to tell this guy to fuck off or give him a history lesson. “We were here since 1587!” I could have said. “So what’s the hold up? Where’s our white Groupon?” Most Americans know nothing about Asian Americans. They think Chinese is synecdoche for Asians the way Kleenex is for tissues. They don’t understand that we’re this tenuous alliance of many nationalities. There are so many qualifications weighing the “we” in Asian America. Do I mean Southeast Asian, South Asian, East Asian, and Pacific Islander, queer and straight, Muslim and non-Muslim, rich and poor? Are all Asians self-hating? What if my cannibalizing ego is not a racial phenomenon but my own damn problem? “Koreans are self-hating,” a Filipino friend corrected me over drinks. “Filipinos, not so much.”

    It’s a unique condition that’s distinctly Asian, in that some of us are economically doing better than any other minority group but we barely exist anywhere in the public eye. Although it’s now slowly changing, we have been mostly nonexistent in politics, entertainment, and the media, and barely represented in the arts. Hollywood is still so racist against Asians that when there’s a rare Asian extra in a film, I tense up for the chinky joke and relax when there isn’t one. Asians also have the highest income disparity out of any racial group. Among the working class, Asians are the invisible serfs of the garment and service industries, exposed to third-world work conditions and subminimum wages, but it’s assumed that the only group beleaguered by the shrinking welfare state is working-class whites. But when we complain, Americans suddenly know everything about us. Why are you pissed! You’re next in line to be white! As if we’re iPads queued up in an assembly line.

* * *

—

    I suppose, then, a history lesson is called for, a quick rundown of how the Chinese were first brought in as coolies to replace slaves in the plantation fields after the Civil War or how they drilled dynamite and laid out the tracks for the transcontinental railroad until they were blown up by dynamite or buried by snowstorms. Three Chinese laborers died for every two miles of track built to make Manifest Destiny a reality, but when the celebratory photo of the Golden Spike was taken, not a single Chinese man was welcome to pose with the other—white—railway workers.

I have to confess, though, that I have a hard time embracing the nineteenth-century history of Chinese America as my history, because my ancestors were still in Korea, doing what, I don’t know; those records are gone too. I suppose I look like these Chinese men, but when I gaze upon those old photos, I see those Chinamen the way white settlers must have seen them, real funny-looking in their padded pajamas and long weird braids, like aliens photoshopped into a Western. I reason it’s because there are so few surviving firsthand accounts of their daily lives. Their meal plans, their exhaustion, their homesickness—most of that went unrecorded. The first Chinese women in this country had it even worse. I cannot even fathom being a fifteen-year-old girl from China abducted and smuggled to this wild barbaric country, locked in a boardinghouse to be raped ten times a day until her body was hollowed out by syphilis. After that, she was dumped out on the streets to die alone.

Bare life, writes Giorgio Agamben, is the sheer biology of life as opposed to the way life is lived within the protections of society; where the person is “stripped of every right by virtue of the fact that anyone can kill him without committing homicide; he can save himself only in perpetual flight.” I cannot imagine a body reduced to biological fact, like a plant or a hog. If a prostitute died alone without anyone as witness, did she ever exist?

    If there was a time machine, only whites would be able to go back in time in this country. Most everyone else would get enslaved, slain, maimed, or chased after by feral children. But I would risk it, for a day, just to witness the fear of living through the anti-Chinese campaign after the mid-1800s where Chinese immigrants couldn’t even leave their homes without being spat at, clubbed, or shot in the back, a campaign culminating in the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, the first immigration law that banned a race from entering the United States, after legislators and media characterized the Chinese as “rats,” “lepers,” but also “machine-like” workers who stole jobs from good white Americans.