Just Who's Living Out Loud?

In a Wall Street Journal article on the 1980s influx of Vietnamese refugees, Ellen Hume hails the group's uncanny ability to climb the socioeconomic ladder. What explains their success? "The values they come with-- a dedication to family, education and thrift."

Come on, you've heard it all before: thanks to our decisively Asian values, Asian Americans have "made it" as an immigrant group; we have surpassed all other minorities and, in some cases, even our white counterparts. That quiet Asian classmate of yours who spent all his time doing extra homework between Kumon and piano lessons had it right; his work ethic explains the rise of the Asian tigers, or at least it did until the recent financial crisis. A great story, a model in fact, but interestingly enough, its protagonist, the quiet Asian American, appears oddly silent.

As the Asian Pacific American (APA) community congregates this weekend at "Living Out Loud: the New Voice of Asian America," the 9th annual Harvard intercollegiate conference of its kind, I find myself considering what it means for Asian Americans to "live loudly" or to live in silence. The myth of our success as the model minority, has led to a misrepresentation of Asian Americans in the mainstream American imagination. These distortions come at great material and political costs.

Hume's claims of socioeconomic parity serve as a prime example. Her article effectively silences the hundreds of thousands of APAs below the poverty line. Nationally, 23 percent of Asian Americans, ages 25 and over, do not have a high school diploma. Compared to the highly-educated, the proportion unemployed of these disadvantaged APAs is over twice as high.

Ironically, many of these residents come from the refugee waves Hume lionizes. Clearly the policy ramifications are tremendous; if Asian Americans have "made it" in the public imagination, even if many work in sweatshops and live in dilapidated ethnic enclaves, we don't need to think about them. The quiet Asian fades into the shadows.

Looking at Asian American voice in the political process reveals similar processes of silencing. A 1992 report from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights identified numerous structural barriers to APA voting, such as apportionment schemes that in Los Angeles, for example, split APA populations across electoral districts, inadequate publication of multilingual ballots and voting literature and redistricting distortions caused by undercounting in the census. Moreover, the report identifies longstanding bias in the major parties against Asian American politicians.

So living out loud means dispelling stereotypes about APA class and education and seeking justice for communities rendered invisible by the math whiz and successful businessman who get to stand in for all of us.

Living out loud also means making sure we're counted in the political system and ensuring that we have the resources, linguistic and otherwise, to raise our voices. At the same time, Asian Americans face another, and perhaps more challenging, form of silencing: silencing within Asian America itself.

Just as certain individuals get to represent Asian Americans to the general population, certain individuals attempt to present the authentic Asian American identity to the racial group itself. Oftentimes, this identity has meant Chinese or Japanese, male, heterosexual and middle class. Because individuals matching this profile have traditionally dominated our community, APAs who don't fit so well have too often been asked to stand aside, to let their concerns be subsumed by the greater cause of group solidarity. Simply put, many APA activists have prioritized race over oppressions of gender, class, and sexuality, effectively silencing those who might question the terms of this "racial solidarity." As Jian Wan Chen's story illustrates, this silencing comes with heinous consequences.

On Sept. 7, 1987, Jian Wan Chen's husband, Dong Lu Chen, smashed her skull in with a claw hammer after she allegedly admitted to having an affair. Chen's teenage son discovered her body in the family's Brooklyn apartment. The trial judge sentenced Dong to five years probation on a reduced manslaughter charge after concluding, based on the testimony of an anthropologist, that Dong was driven to violence by traditional Chinese values.

During the trial, APA activists stormed out to support of the cultural defense as a necessary tool to protect immigrants in U.S. courtrooms.

Does this mean that Jian Wan Chen's status as an Asian sister is negligible when weighed against the call to stand in solidarity with "the race," a call that implies and obscures the privileging of a particular gender? What about the Asian American lesbian and sweatshop workers: should they also subordinate their concerns and silence themselves in solidarity with "the race"?

Living out loud consequently entails an interrogation of the silences perpetrated within Asian America simultaneous to an interrogation of the silences forced on it. Being a racial minority does not exclude anyone from systems of privilege, and we must explore the intersections of oppressions if we are to realize a true social justice agenda. Admittedly, this form of living loudly is much more difficult than the first: it's a lot easier to band together against an ostensibly white oppressor than acknowledging the inequities within your minority group itself, but we can't ask for anything less. We all deserve the right to live and shout with our mouths wide, and our voices will only be audible when we have broken the silences open.

Michael K. T. Tan '01 is interethnic chair of the Asian American Association. He is a resident of Grays Hall.