I was reading this post, Identity Crisis For An Asian-American.
Your K-12 experience was very much like mine. The main difference is that I visited China at age 11 and after that I was always very aware of my identity and part of me never wanted to integrate, to this day.
Do you think there is really such a thing as an Asian-American identity?
When I try to talk about this with my Asian-American friends, they say they just think of themselves as individuals with no racial identity, or they have an identity but they don't care much about it, the portrayal of Asian men in the media doesn't frustrate them. I don't understand how they can be nonchalant as obviously being Asian has shaped their entire life from start until adulthood.On the one hand, I'm glad to see that I wasn't alone in feeling this way, isolated and confused at times as to how I fit in this predominately white society, but on the other, I'm sad that America still has a long way to go before it becomes much more integrated to reflect the often mischaracterization of a true "melting pot". I still think it's a salad bowl at best outside of California.
Hell, even our next door neighbor, "Oh Canada!" is more of a melting pot than the U.S. I haven't been to every Canadian city, but I believe my personal experience and sample size (a biased one I reckon) is large enough that it exhausts the majority of the country that allows me to come to that conclusion.
Getting back to the question of whether or not I think there is such a thing as an Asian-American identity...I would have to say I think there is. Asian-American culture is still fairly nascent, but I would contend that our history is punctuated with a distinct AA identity that spawned from the 1990s. You might ask me, "Oh yeah, like what?
