May is AANHPI Month, a time dedicated to celebrating the rich and diverse experiences of Asian American and Pacific Islander communities. From personal narratives to movie critiques, written in both prose and poetry, our writers shed light on the multifaceted nature of AANHPI identity.
Kayalani: Torn.
Growing up, I didn’t feel Asian. Whenever someone asked me what I was, I typically just said “guess”. I’m used to the plethora of responses, none that were ever quite right. “I give up, just tell me.” I simply scratched my head and whispered “mixed”. Then the follow-up question emerged asking me to clarify what I meant by that for which I sighed and began my spiel.
I was always proud to be part Filipino. I loved my family, the culture, and especially the food, but I never identified as Asian… or Black… or White, just “mixed”. To be quite honest, I was hesitant to write this piece even today, afraid to be seen or rather feel “not Asian enough” once again.
Many mixed kids grow up living the same way: torn between worlds, but never fully immersed in any one. I was torn between three.
I remember walking around my local Asian supermarket, Dalat, with my grandma when I was around 12. We always went right after Costco trips, my eagerness brewing to pick out my favorite snacks that could only be found on those shelves. I had fluffy hair from my Black side, an acne covered forehead, and no knowledge of Tagalog besides body parts and days of the week. I felt different;, I was different. As I walked around the dimly lit aisles, I was conscious of everyone around. Is she looking at me? If I stand next to my grandma, they must know I belong, right? The older women knocking on melons or carefully selecting the best brand of rice noodles would always be more Asian than me, and I knew it. I felt their eyes as I waited alone near a stand of jackfruit while my grandma picked out tilapia. I started to panic, so I rushed over to her and did my best to blend back in. She looked at me with surprise. She could never understand what I felt because to me, she fit right in. She looked like everyone else, spoke like everyone else, was like everyone else. I’ve never felt more out of place than in a homogenous setting.
I only had one Asian friend during grade school and every Filipino I knew before middle school shared my blood. Still, I never shunned my Asian side, I just didn’t feel fully a part of it. I grew up in White Orange County and technically, I am part White, but no one would ever believe me unless they saw my father, for whom no one ever believed was my father. I remember being asked if I was adopted by my sister’s friend right as I was going away to middle school. I tried to shake comments like those off, but after a while, they started to get to me. I have the same eyes, same flat nose, same smile as my mother and the same dry sense of humor and wit as my father, but it seems that Orange County could never look past skin differences.
Every New Year’s Eve, my grandma and mom make an array of Filipino dishes after shopping at Dalat. My mom rolls the lumpia and my grandma carefully stirs pancit noodles at a low simmer. Every year, they ask me to cook with them and every year I say no. But that doesn’t stop me from sitting at the counter, mentally noting measurements of broth and taking in pieces of my culture from a distance. Why is it that I feel out of place in my own home? I am Filipino, it doesn’t matter the percentage, my hair, skin complexion, or language. Out of fear, I say no and I’ve done it every time. By shying away from aspects of my culture, I have directly perpetuated the standards I feared others would place on me. By hiding, I’ve let my worries of outside judgment seep into my perception of myself and I’m tired of posing as that image.
There is no one way to be Asian or Pacific Islander, just as there is no one way to be mixed. Even if my blood is genetically just a fraction of some of my peers, my experience is mine nonetheless. By pushing past my apprehension and completing this piece, I hope to gain not a sense of clarity, but rather a promise in my identity. I am so fortunate to be immersed in so many cultures, rich in tradition, and I’m now empowered to take it all in and learn as much as I can. This New Year’s Eve, I will grab the spoon and stir for myself.
Neel: Monkey Man: We are Living in a Cultural Revolution for the Brown Identity
I just watched Monkey Man, Dev Patel’s directorial debut, the other day. I wasn’t sure what to expect—I had seen a lot of hype surrounding the film on social media and I’m a fan of Dev Patel’s earlier work. How would his acting experience translate to the driver’s seat? When I see actors foray into the role of a director, I see a personal passion project, one that often embraces the nontraditional. John Krasinki’s A Quiet Place is a 90 minute stroll of suspense with only 25 lines of dialogue. Michael B. Jordan’s Creed III takes the classic Rocky formula but imbues it with anime-inspired action choreography. What I love about an actor’s journey into the directorial space is the immersion of the film in the personality and ambition of the actor—actors many of us have grown up watching. For me, Dev Patel is one of those actors.
Monkey Man is not only an incredible revenge film, dare I say on par with films like the John Wick series, but it is a cultural revolution. Patel not only demands the audience to challenge their preconceived notions of the Brown identity, but transform them.
This conversation around South Asian stereotypes has been going on for some time now. Beginning in 1990 with Apu Nahasapeemapetilon (whose last name is a bastardized re-spelling of a real Indian name), the trajectory of male Indian representation in popular media was doomed from the start. A caricature of the Indian immigrant identity, Apu is a convenience store owner with a painfully strong accent voiced by Hank Azaria, a White man from New York City.
Apu is a walking stereotype steeped in deep irony that cannot be reconciled. Large-scale South Asian migration to the UK started in the 18th century following the British occupation of the subcontinent, but it picked up speed in the 1960s. Following mass expulsion and political conflict not only in South Asia, but in many places of the South Asian diaspora in East Africa, South Asians of all identities came to the UK seeking to settle down. The majority of the East African South Asian diaspora were entrepreneurs, owning different businesses and stores across the coast. So of course, coming to the UK, many of them sought to rebuild the same type of livelihood. However, amid extreme xenophobia and racism in the UK, the “Paki shop” was born. Regardless of ethnic origin, Pakistani or not, these South Asian owned convenience stores and gas stations became the subject of extreme racial discrimination, stopping no less of physical brutality from White British folk. And so, Apu’s caricature was born out of violence. Yet, mainstream media forcefully but unsuccessfully tries to reconcile this with the identity of the intelligent, high-achieving South Asian. Apu canonically has a PhD in computer science from the fictional Calcutta Technical Institute, yet continues to work as a convenience store owner. Media continues to justify the portrayal of South Asians as intelligent because it is a “positive” quality, but it is clear that this stereotype only exists as the sardonic butt of a joke—otherwise wouldn’t we see Apu working at Google or Microsoft?
The forced caricature of South Asians in media continued with Baljeet from Phineas and Ferb and Karan Braar’s various racist depictions during his career. I vividly remember the first time I saw this pattern of emasculation challenged—Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay. The film follows Harold Lee and Kumar Patel on their way to Amsterdam to surprise Harold’s love interest in Amsterdam. But their trip goes awry quickly when Kumar is accused of being a terrorist on the plane and they are both sent to Guantanamo Bay. Already, this movie sounds like it’s taking advantage of an incredibly racist trope, right? But the way this film navigates these racial stereotypes, while not perfect, opens the space for South Asian representation to be something other than a socially inept nerd or convenience store owner. Kumar is a raging stoner and pre-med track drop-out. In fact, Kumar’s father and brother are both successful neurosurgeons who urge him to follow in their footsteps, but Kumar actively resists. Kumar not only resists his family’s unilateral expectations, already revolutionary for the son of immigrants, but he resists the predominant stereotyping of Indian-Americans. Kumar is no role model by any means—he’s lazy, somewhat selfish, and really has no ambition for the future. But all of these qualities is what makes him such a powerful character, by dismantling the model-minority trope while making the holes in existing stereotypes blatantly obvious.
The long-running journey of South Asian representation in media now takes us to Dev Patel. From Skins in 2007 to Lion in 2016, Patel’s portrayal of being Indian is the most genuine depiction I have seen as an Indian-American. As a teenage boy trying to navigate his early sexual life in Anwar or as a lost boy struggling to come to terms with his heritage and forgotten family in Saroo, Patel has shown the diversity of experience that comes with being Indian that does not fit in a box. But even with Patel pushing these boundaries, resistance comes from all sides. In fact, before he came up with the idea of Monkey Man, Patel has said in a Men’s Health interview that he has always wanted to play a role in an action movie, having grown up with the genre. But in every single role he auditioned for, he was only offered the sidekick or the tech guy.
The popular perception of who is allowed to be the superhero has never included South Asians. Kumail Nanjiani broke boundaries with his portrayal of the superhero Kingo in the 2021 film Eternals. Although his performance was great and provided some much needed representation, he still occupied the role of the jester—he was the sidekick with a very specific role that was far from the center of the film. Iman Vellani, who played Ms. Marvel, also shattered expectations of what a South Asian—and female—lead can do as a superhero. But at the same time, her character as a high school student was relegated to the geeks and the unpopular that South Asian portrayals reek of.
Ironically, if you watch any Bollywood film, there is an extreme hyper-masculinization of the lead. Somehow, despite hordes of bad guys bulldozing toward the main character, you can bet that they will all be thrashed in an out-of-world fight scene. The Bollywood lead is a “hero”, not just a protagonist. Yet, this has never been the case in Western media, until now. Dev Patel has done something nobody else has done before—he has brought the Bollywood hero to the Western audience. Monkey Man not only does this with a heart-felt portrayal of the hero, Kid, but with a story that creates a multitude of experiences that celebrate the Indian identity while making a poignant critique of the Indian government itself. Patel was never given the action hero role in Hollywood, so he decided to make it for himself.
Monkey Man’s world-building, although a slightly exaggerated dystopia, is an homage to the current landscape of India, raising the voices of some of its most marginalized people. Dharavi, one of Mumbai’s largest slums, is one of the most densely populated areas in the entire world. The hijra people, an ancient group of third-gendered folk, are actively excluded from current socio-political spaces in India. The caste system still operates in so many parts of India as a de-facto hierarchical system of power. The predominant nationalist party of India leans on Hindu-supremacist and right-wing rhetoric as they consolidate their power. All of these very real themes intersect in Dev Patel’s world to create a setting unlike anything I’ve seen in Hollywood. The Hindu epic of the Ramayana and the story of Hanuman—the monkey warrior who breaks free from a tortured curse to save the goddess Sita from the demon Ravana—is used as an allegory for Dev Patel’s story, constructing a hero that not just happens to be Indian, but whose identity has to be Indian.
Every single character in Monkey Man spits on the portrayal of Indians in Hollywood. Rana, the vicious and morally corrupt chief of police, is a villain on a perpetual power-trip. Queenie is a powerful symbol of greed in the film that steps on others to maintain her status quo among the ravenous elite. Alpha is a healer that sidesteps traditional portrayals of the Hindu ascetic in favor of a focus on community resisting oppression. Baka Shakti stands the most defiant against these stereotypes, as a Hindu spiritual guru with a tyrannical capitalist project that dispossesses land from the country’s forest-dwelling folk. Hindu mythology explores so many of these themes and characters, yet we never see raw stories like these exposed. Dev Patel did the impossible by bringing the multidimensionality of trauma and violence in Indian society—from the scripture to current society—to life.
Monkey Man is far from a perfect film. I wish it explored the identity of the hijra community more closely. I also wish it explored the intersectionality of characters like Sita, whose gender subjects her to a different kind of subjugation in this dystopian society. But it does so many things right. Growing up, the representation for Indian-Americans was so abysmal that at the time it felt like irreparable damage had been done to the Brown identity. But Dev Patel has convinced me that this is really not the case. In fact, I have immense gratitude that the next generation of Indian-Americans growing up have access to media that does not disparage their self-perception, but empowers it. Common to the child-of-immigrant experience is a resentment for their identity, especially when that identity becomes centered in negative stereotypes. Right now, we are seeing a massive shift in the dominant narrative that says who can be a hero. The Brown identity in America is experiencing a monumental revolution, and middle-school me couldn’t have dreamt of it.
Chloe: Toast Box
I watch the soft-boiled egg slip
Out of its shell into the white dish.
Toast, perfectly white, perfectly square,
No crusts, kaya and margarine,
Dipped routinely, habitually.
It brings them comfort.
To me, it brings fascination and the feeling of not being enough:
The feeling of not being able to speak to the cashier to tell her I am allergic to milk
(She repeatedly insists I take the free cake).
The uncle behind me speaks for me, sensing my inadequacy.
The flies laugh in my ears,
For they know this country better than I ever will.
I pay with cash because I don’t have a local card,
Not knowing what the coins are when they hand me my change,
Not knowing what half of the food is,
Where to pick it up from,
Or where to drop it off.
I anxiously wait for my order.
I eat quickly,
So quickly that the jagged edges of my half-chewed sandwich prod my gut, along with the guilt of not knowing my mother tongue.
The food tasted good, I think –
I ate it too fast to tell
And it was not home.
It was not habitual. It was not comfort.
Singaporeans live by routine, but theirs is not mine.
I get up,
Return my tray,
And leave with unchewed food still in my mouth.
Charlie: some background
i know her voice
and those fleeting syllables
i can’t recreate
i see those marks
and i trust in their meaning
but to me, they’re an unfamiliar coast
and i am lost in those dark cliffs and sweeping waves
i believe in her tales
and i have faith in their beauty
but i can’t shake the feeling that they don’t fit me
and these strange and storied fabrics can’t stop slipping off
a tiger never tried to devour my moon, or my sun, after all
i navigate these waters with a borrowed map
gifted to me by my mother
and even while my mind can’t remember her stories
and even while my hand can’t craft her letters
and even while my ear can’t catch her words
i’ll swim towards that distant shore anyway
…
in the water’s reflections, along that unfamiliar coast
i begin to see the shapes of home
