Whenever some standardized test or government form asked me what ethnicity I was, I’d always put down “Pacific Islander”. The Philippines, after all, was a set of some 6,000 islands in the Pacific Ocean. Also, we share a lot more with people like Guam than people from, let’s say, Taiwan.
But one year, I noticed that the “Pacific Islander” checkbox became
“Pacific Islander (Not Filipino)”
Someone had actually put in the effort to say “Not Filipino” in parentheticals, which most definitely meant that they had a good reason to nudge Filipinos into the “Asian” bucket.
And that, my friends, is how I became Asian.
America uses an awful lot of hyphens. In the Philippines, we’ve got the Ilocanos. the Igorots, and other groups of people.
But over here, in the States, you’re never just that one thing. There’s always the hyphens. You’re Asian-American, African-American, so on.
Hell, your grandparents’ grandparents’ could have been born in America and you might still be Asian-American if your eyes are slanted enough.
In a way though, I do appreciate the hyphens in the sense that they call out an inherent tension in Asian-American culture: we’re born in America, but none of us are truly from here.
At some point, America’s love of hyphens gave way to acronyms. Asian-Americans became AAPI. African-Americans became BIPOC.
The net effect of these acronyms is to generalize, albeit clumsily. From a data perspective, the generalization of Asians seems especially out of place, given that income inequality is higher for Asians than for any other ethnic group.
For example, let’s look at Japan and the Philippines, two countries under the AAPI umbrella term.
Is there any reason why Japan and the Philippines should be lumped into the same bucket of countries?
Filipinos are closer to Americans culturally, yet we wouldn’t dream of bucketing Filipinos into an ethnic bucket with Americans. Similarly, Japan is closer to Russia geographically, yet grouping the two countries together also seems unintuitive.
Why is that?
Despite being outnumbered 3-2, the invading Japanese forces in World War II overran much of the Philippines within a month. The Japanese forces eventually invaded San Juan, the small town in the Philippines that my Grandpa was living in at the time.
Some of these Japanese soldiers ended up staying at my Grandpa’s home, where my Grandpa lived with his parents and six other siblings.
This certainly wasn’t an ideal living situation.
Towards the end of the war, my Grandpa’s parents feared reprisals. The American victory was becoming increasingly inevitable, yet the Japanese forces were fighting to the last man, island after island.
What was to stop the Japanese soldiers from retaliating against my Grandpa’s family out of anger or frustration?
One night, after years of living with these soldiers, my Grandpa’s family escaped. Somehow, a family of nine silently crept out of the house in the middle of the night, without disturbing any of the sleeping Japanese soldiers.
I don’t think I’d be here if the floorboards had creaked that night.
If you continue to slice and dice a collective group’s identity, you get an individual.
You can extract my Asian-American identity from AAPI.
From there, you can make an incision to locate the Filipino-American in me.
With that, you can slice out the specific suburb in Los Angeles that I grew up in.
And from there, you can continue this exercise, slicing and dicing through various neighborhoods and demographics in order to finally isolate me, the individual.
Eventually, you end up with AJ, the 27-year old Catholic Filipino-American with a non-trivial amount of Taiwanese blood that came from God knows where who was raised in Glendale with two younger brothers and played a lot of tennis and basketball growing up.
Yet, with this picture, you end up with too much complexity for society’s liking. And as any decent storyteller knows, it’s hard to tell stories that are too complex.
The biggest secret in American racial discourse is that amidst all these lofty ideas about intersectionality, anti-racism, and privilege, so much of it comes down to something very simple.
Your physical appearance.
As kids, we’re told not to judge a book by its cover, but… we do it all the time. Physical appearance is literally the only reason why the Japanese and Filipinos are lumped into the same ethnic bucket.
Which is insane when you think about it. Japan is currently one of the wealthiest countries in the world with a history of being the dominant imperialist power in the region. The Philippines, meanwhile, is an underdeveloped nation that was colonized by both Spain and America for nearly 500 years.
The two countries couldn’t be further apart, yet because both groups of people “look Asian”, we ignore literally everything else about the two countries and lump them both together.
And it’s not just the Japanese and Filipinos. Look at the history between China and Vietnam. Or, the history between Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. There are massive differences in power and privilege within the massive AAPI bucket, yet for whatever reason, our nuanced ideas about race and privilege are frozen in suspended animation when it comes to the AAPI community. It’s almost as though these ideas about race and privilege only exist in relation to white people and how they process their guilt.
I’ll give some credit to American discourse about the AAPI community though: it’s relentlessly simple.
You see, the advantage of such a simple story is that it can be recycled and reused for any of the 60+ AAPI countries. The story is almost as convenient as the Common App for the college application process that all those people do so well in.