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.
Don't qualify me or hyphenate me as an American
Within the world of financial reporting, the audit firm usually expresses what's called an "opinion". This is a letter to shareholders and others that appears at the beginning of a company's financial statements, and the opinion can come in two forms: One is an "unqualified opinion", which means that the investigation has yielded that the numbers and figures accurately reflect, in all material respects, the health and status of the company. The other is the dreaded "qualified opinion", which means that the statement must be qualified, as in, these numbers are accurate, with the exception of such and such. It's this usage of qualified that I reject in the context of identifying myself.
I don't identify myself as "Chinese American" or the grammatically incorrect non-adjective compound "Chinese-American" because I'm not aware of any reason to use the term that wouldn't be a pretext for division, submission, or tacit acceptance of myself as a permanent "Other". Similarly, while I use the term Asian and East Asian to describe myself quite a bit in a racial sense, I never use the term "Asian American" to identify myself. What use does it have other than qualify me as an American. As in, "yes I'm an American, buuut an Asian one... not full American, not real American".
Now, I'm fully aware that most of the time, if someone is asking me if I'm "Chinese American", they're probably not LARPing as Gestapo, asking me for my papers. They're probably curious about my ethnicity, and that's fine. Thing is, while some anthropologists might make a case for "Chinese American" as an ethnic group (I personally feel it's much more nuanced) it certainly is not my ethnicity.
Would I feel differently if more people called themselves European American? I don't know, since that's not the world we live in, but probably not. The world in which we live have basically dictated by default that European American will henceforth be "American". And for those who mindlessly follow an extremely outdated notion of political correctness might feel pressured to say Asian American or African American or Latin American. The latter, an unfortunate reality when the United States just decided to co-opt "America", previously denoting two entire continents, to itself. Well, who wanted to be "South American American" anyways?
Outside of the US, it's more overtly insulting
I think we all understand how we got here. Save our mostly WASP Founding Fathers, immigrant groups start out in a new country as guests, and frankly they've got more important things to worry about than wax philosophical about identity terminology. Doubly so when you're swimming in a new language. It's easy to simply accept what others call you.
Now, I have to give mainstream society a bit of credit here. There are older, more outdated terms for almost every group affiliation for which derogatory doesn't begin to scratch the surface. That growing awareness and change over time — the political correctness, if you will — led to an effective ban of such descriptors some ignoramus could use to describe me in the 21st Century, like: Chink, Gook, Oriental, Chinaman, Ching-chong, and so forth. But please don't stop there. If anything, keep on going. Think more, and think harder. The fact that terms like Chinese American and Asian American seem more acceptable is exactly the reason I'm doubly weary. It's as if a more innocuous vehicle were carrying the same old biases, or rather, a new way to accomplish the same age-old task of isolation and exclusion.
And what is the view of those outside of the country? Anyone with connections to Chinese community will already be familiar with the term ABC, for American-born Chinese. Perhaps things will be different in the future, but in the past and present, it's not a very flattering term. To me, the term itself connotes someone who has ignored or forgotten their cultural heritage, or perhaps presents only a thin veneer of it. In any case, it doesn't even describe me, as I wasn't born in this America. But I have always strived to stay away from even the stigma of presenting as an ABC. Have European roots? Ask a German or Italian or Swede what they think of you calling yourself by those terms, either standalone or in conjunction with -American. They'll probably wonder if you speak the language, know their history, practice their social habits in any significant way.
Just call me yellow
As some sharper-eyed readers may have noticed from my post in 2020, I have no qualms about using a particular color to refer to myself: a yellow person or Yellow American. The color itself is charged term, yes, but in my opinion (and we're all floating in subjectivities anyway) having a color descriptor still feels like much more equal footing. The usage of white and black, or Whites and Blacks, is standardized. Brown is catching on quickly. It's not like anyone is colorless, in the same way as many are simply American. And connotations both positive and negative abound in all colors. There's no reason why I can't take that small, partial ownership in the color yellow. In fact, choosing between AAPI, Asian American, Chinese American, and Yellow American, yellow the one word someone could call me that I'd take least offense to. Unfortunately, the one term a stranger is least likely to use among these in 2025.
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In part 2, I'll be writing a bit more on the constant confusion between nationality, ethnicity, and race, and why inclusivity in terminology can't be the answer.
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