Asian people are probably the most insecure group of people I’ve ever known. And I’m allowed to make a remark like that because I’m Asian. It’s a well recorded scientific fact that Asian people feel the need to mention they’re Asian every 5.75 seconds. This medical condition is called “having no personality,” a condition that vegetarians also suffer. I’m Asian. Really, I’m sure even a blind person never has to ask for an Asian person’s ethnicity. They’ll make sure you know. It’s a given.
Anyway. It’s always come off as insecure to me, when the Asian kid starts making jokes about being Asian. Yes, I can clearly see that they are in fact Asian. They did not need to tell me. But they’ll tell me anyway. They always say it with a fake smile and laugh too, as if it’s hilarious to them. I used to be pretty insecure about it too. When I was in elementary school. If you’re a teenager in high school still insecure about being Asian then you need to get over it already. You don’t matter that much. That’s what I would say to my Asian classmates, but I avoid most of them, so I don’t.
They make me look really bad. There’s this other Vietnamese girl in my class and if this were a movie she’d be the minority character inserted for the sake of diversity, because she will not stop saying that she’s Asian. When someone is mean to her, make an Asian hate joke. When I happen to be standing near her talking to my Chinese classmate, “Hey, look at all the Asians here!”
And I really hate that. I don’t talk to her or really know her at all. Still, I’m pretty confident of this analysis: she is insecure about her race and is constantly worried about how other people see her due to it. So instead of trying to alter the way people see her she wants to instead come off as if she’s owning the fact that she’s Asian, even if she really is ashamed of it, by intertwining her race with her personality. And be all insecure about your race all you want, I don’t care. But it affects me too, because she’s leaning into the idea that her entire character is that she’s Asian. So by extension, I’m also just “the Asian kid,” as well. I’d like to be known for something more significant.
I could have explained that a lot better, but I’m sure you know what I mean.
And I’ve always gotten the impression that Asian people try too hard to be liked by white people. To the point that I’d label them suckups. They always act like they’re trying to prove something to their white friends. I can’t really point it out, but it’s definitely there. All I’m saying is, you’ll never see another race sucking up as hard as Asians do. I’m Asian.
Actually, in my entire life, I have known only two Asian kids who were not insecure about their race. And they’re both Chinese nationalists, so they don’t count.
I remember we had to write essays about ourselves, and then other people had to peer-review them. One girl, she was Chinese, shared her essay with me. In it, she started writing about how she would always feel different from her classmates, and how she wished her name was American, and how she wished for blonde hair. The whole thing made me a little uncomfortable, and I was thinking maybe this sort of thing she should be keeping to herself, since it sounds a little too personal. I felt as if I were reading her diary. By comparison, most other people wrote about the time they got their first dog or something. Anyhow, it was a usual piece of info I stored in the back of my head, and I still think about it when I’m trying to analyze other Asian people.
But enough about Asian people. I’m bored of that.
I was talking to my classmate in photography class. I’d been thinking a lot about race recently, because we were going over the Transatlantic Slave Trade, and the history teacher was like, “This is where racism started.” Something about that made me think. Because all my life black people have been portrayed as a minority. It had never occurred to me that it had to have started due to a specific reason. Then I thought about it more and disagreed that racism just suddenly started. Personally, I think humans are inherently racist. Long before the slave trade, Asian people looked down on Europeans, and Europeans, after spontaneously growing brains around the 1200s or so, hated Asians right back, unless they were trading or something. I told my photography classmate about this. He’s a moron and not good for having these sort of discussions, but it’s the only thing he’ll talk about that’s not video games.
I told him that I thought people were inherently racist because we hate people who are different, and he said if that were true, how come we are not racist towards animals? So of course I called him a moron and stopped talking about it because he is too stupid to understand.
Another thing that my history teacher said is that we are living in a Euro-centric world. And I agreed with that, even though I had never really thought about it that way. For example, I’ve always accepted that opera is “normal,” and Mongolian throat singing is “weird.” But if you really think about it, there’s no such thing as weird or normal when it comes to people. On Youtube you see videos like, “Check out the strange traditions of this ancient tribe!” Those videos weren’t really to get a better cultural understanding. Rather, they were just something to gawk at, to say, “Wow, I can’t believe they’re so different from us.” If a group of people were left alone without having ever had any interaction over the course of centuries, they’re sure to make up their own customs. And when another group of people finally encounter them, they’re sure to think that they’re “weird.”
So yeah. We live in a world where European culture is standardized. If things had gone differently, it could be just as possible that Mongolian throat singing is normal and those wacky Europeans are around messing with the thing they call “opera.”
But to wrap this up back to my original point. Being Asian is not a personality trait. But I much prefer it to a person who always talks about his new dimmer light switch.