Don't Call Me Chinese American, Pt 2: Asking and Defining Identity

Continued from Pt 1

Remember back in high school, when there were different "groups"? You may have called them cliques or crowds. Some were preps, some were jocks (many were both). To my memory, hipsters were not a thing then, but goths were. I think emo, too? And at a magnet school I always felt that nerds got a lot more respect than Hollywood ever depicted. There were studious Asians and lots of gangbanging Asians, too. That was K-12 life. In adult life, we still have crowds, and I see a ton of confusion on an almost daily basis that surrounds the usage of which group someone belongs to. But set aside the groups themselves, even the nomenclature gives us trouble.

Don't Call Me Chinese American, Pt 1

I can't remember when exactly but it must be over 20 years ago, I was watching a news program on ABC (it would have been Diane Sawyer's Primetime or Barbara Walters' 20/20) whose topic of the week was ostensibly on race relations. An interviewee spoke about her decision not to use the term "African American" to refer to herself. It's been a long time (back when John Stossel was still a credible mainstream journalist) so I'll do my best to paraphrase, but it was to the extent of "I don't have any real connection to Africa. I've never been there. No one I know has ever been there. Just call me Black." It stuck with me in ways that have only multiplied since I first heard it. In the years since, I've decided to take a similar position with respect to the term Asian American, and by extension, Chinese American.

On the In-N-Out Heiress Being the Bigger Person

Knowing that I'm a sucker for any news about In-N-Out Burger, mostly coverage on when locations around Portland are finally going to open, Google News offered me an article that hit me from a different direction: [Fortune] Heiress Lynsi Snyder became President of In-N-Out aged 27. She’s been betrayed by colleagues but refuses to have ’emotional distance’ with her team

The clickbait portion of the article obviously emanates from the word betrayed. That's what caught my eye. After all, scandal remains the most effective dog whistle for readers of "journalism". And the why? Like many others, I've been betrayed at the workplace — it's still pretty fresh for me.