On January 30, 2023, my students at Dartmouth College organized a candlelight vigil as a response to the Monterey Park shooting, in which a gunman stormed a packed dance hall on New Year’s Eve to kill 11 people before killing himself. In the vigil, the students took turns speaking about the tragedy and community, and how the deaths felt like a death in their families. At the end of the ceremony, in the chill air of January in New Hampshire, they read aloud the names of the victims, in English as well as in eloquent Cantonese.
The shooting was, needless to say, a tragedy. The dance hall was located at the heart of Monterey Park, CA, also known as “the first suburban Chinatown.” Both the perpetrator of violence and the victims were immigrants, most from China. They came from different places and held varying immigration statuses but were united by the fact that they were getting old in the country in which they were not born. Anthropologist Engseng Ho defines “diaspora” as a community bound together by a yearning for return to the place of origin, if not in lifetime then in death. According to numerous media accounts, the dance hall was where the victims sought such return to the home they had left behind, but on that New Year’s Eve, their diasporic journey was cut short unexpectedly.
The tragedy notwithstanding, the vigil reminded me of a conundrum we face when we speak of “Asian American.” Not only is Monterey Park three thousand miles away from Hanover, New Hampshire, but a deep social divide exists between the victims and my students. My students are highly educated and speak fluent English; most of them were born and raised in the United States, and those who are not American citizens attended international schools and had few issues navigating the American environment. Their immediate surroundings, in a New England college town, have minimum overlap with Monterey Park. Nevertheless, the students feel connected to the first-generation immigrant world, and they saw their parents and grandparents in those victims. Even though they face different opportunities and challenges from those of first-generation immigrants, they still feel as if their fates are linked by way of a shared experience. Both groups live in a country that has often betrayed the promise of equal treatment and belonging for people like them. In other words, the conundrum of “Asian American” stems from the tension between socio-economic distance and sense of belonging. My students and the victims live in vastly different social worlds, but those worlds are connected through the portal of shared historical experiences.
This tension in the category of “Asian American” is not lost among contemporary commentators. Cathy Park Hong, in her critically acclaimed book Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning (Random House 2021), invests many pages in detailing her traumatic relationship with a Korean international student in her college, given the dissonance between their shared identity and the fact that the two women could not be any more different. In his memoir Stay True (Penguin Random House 2022), Hua Hsu also pays careful attention to the distance between his second-generation, ethnic enclave upbringing and that of his best friend Ken, a seemingly more assimilated third-plus-generation Japanese American. More explicitly, in The Loneliest Americans (Penguin Random House 2022), Jay Caspian Kang goes so far as to argue that “Asian American” does not exist—according to Kang, it is a made-up label that cannot properly account for class and political heterogeneity among the many peoples grouped under the category. Author and Pulitzer Prize winner Viet Thanh Nguyen (login required) calls the label a “beautiful” but “flawed fiction,” proclaiming that the category can only be justified when it opens itself up to “further solidarities—with everyone else shaped by colonization’s global impact, its genocide and slavery, racism and capitalism, patriarchy and heteronormativity.” While this is a noble vision, one cannot help but wonder whether there is any point in even speaking about “Asian American” when it can open up to embrace so many things.
Recognizing Common Ground
When the term was first conceived and taken up, there was a practical necessity, even urgency, to speak of the peoplehood. In 1968, a group of students self-identifying as Third World Liberation Front occupied a building in San Francisco State College (now San Francisco State University), criticizing the Eurocentric curriculum and calling for more professors and students of color on campus. During the occupation, Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino student activists felt the need for a common name: a sort of flag that would unite them and present them as a political force to be reckoned with. The term “Asian American” was born in this urgent political moment, to bring together a mosaic of peoples from different places of origin.
Until they met on the college campuses such as SF State and the University of California–Berkeley, these students lived in their own respective niches in American society, with their own unique histories. The Chinese had the exclusion act and Chinatown; the Japanese had experienced internment during World War II; and Filipinos had been colonial subjects in a country that hid its colonial legacy. At the same time, however, these student activists saw that they had things in common. They were subjects of discrimination by whites. They were against the Vietnam War. Furthermore, their family history of migration from Asia connected these two different issues, and they could see how “Asian American” could be, and should be, simultaneously against domestic racism and overseas military aggression by the U.S. empire. Hence “Asian American” became not just a label but a rallying cry for mobilization. In the following decades, the activism waxed and waned, but the moniker stuck, all the way to the candlelight vigil that I attended in 2023.
Of course, the resilience of the category does not equal its efficacy. Even in its heyday in the 1970s, “Asian American” was mostly confined to college campuses and activist circles, and if one traveled a few miles down from SF State College to San Francisco Chinatown and looked for an “Asian American,” one would encounter bewildered residents who proclaimed they were Chinese—even though they had lived in the U.S. for multiple decades. From the 1960s on, generations of immigrants and their children from Asia have led their lives in the United States untouched by the power of the category, and, as contemporary commentators recognize, the efficacy of “Asian American” is at best limited when it comes to identification.
Embracing Heterogeneity
I suppose one can make different arguments as to whether people from Asia should rally behind the banner of “Asian America” or not. The task of sociology, however, is to provide useful tools to assess the situation. With this in mind, I wrote a paper on diversity of political opinions among Asian Americans during the height of the pandemic and anti-Asian violence. In this paper, I used a series of statistical models to detect and explain the heterogeneity of policy preference among different subgroups within “Asian American.” Using the 2016 survey data from the National Asian American Survey, I showed that divides exist within the pan-ethnic group. While “Asian Americans,” on the whole, were clearly progressive in supporting public education, health care, and racial justice initiatives, they were divided on the matters of marijuana legalization and immigration policy. Noncollege educated, first-generation, and Southeast Asian “Asian Americans” were on the conservative side, opposing marijuana legalization and expressing skepticism toward accepting refugees from Syria. On the flip side were college-educated, second- and third-generation Japanese, Chinese, and South Asians, who supported both liberal measures enthusiastically.
Even as I was writing the paper, I was witnessing two different representations of “Asian American” flashing on my TV screen. One included East and South Asian doctors and medical experts delivering warnings against the coronavirus. The other took us to Chinatowns and other Asian ethnic enclaves, showing older, first-generation victims of anti-Asian violence. My analysis mirrored the divide I saw on the contemporaneous media coverage featuring “Asian American.” On the one hand, there are ultra-progressive, college-educated, second-generation East Asians who read the authors I cited previously. On the other hand, there lies a different social world, that of noncollege-educated, first-generation immigrants, likely from Southeast Asia, afraid of any threats to the modicum of security they have managed to garner in their newfound homeland. There are some important differences, but this fault line can also help explain the divide between SF State College and Chinatown in 1968, as well as that between Hanover, NH, and Monterey Park in 2023.
I initially thought of the paper I was writing as a one-off thing, an interesting but minor extension of a paper that I wrote earlier. But to my surprise, this article has gotten more traction than any other work that I have done so far. Many people told me that they learned something new, and the piece was even featured in a New York Times column (login required) about the political volatility of Asian Americans. While I enjoyed the publicity, the attention left me puzzled. Why was all this surprising? Anyone who has attended intergenerational family dinners in immigrant households should be familiar with intense political debates that progress into shouting matches. Shouldn’t the diversity be obvious, given that “Asian American” is a catchall category to begin with?
It took me a couple of years to realize that the novelty of the article came from my taking seriously the heterogeneity within the category, not between different racial categories. Even in sociological research on race and other topics, we are primed to prioritize between-group comparisons. Sociologists routinely compare differences in mortality, education level, occupational attainment, and other indicators between different racial groups, most often between Black people and white people. Then we try to explain the gap and make arguments about the status of racial inequality in our society.
I call this line of thinking the benchmark model. That is, the characteristics of the majority group—a euphemism for whites—become a standard against which other racial groups are gauged and compared. When there is a gap between whites and another group, it becomes a sociological fact to be documented and explained away. On the contrary, my article took a different approach to the question of difference. Instead of relying on the benchmark model, I focused on Asian Americans themselves, or how diversity in policy preference manifested within the larger category. That is, I highlighted within-group differences over between-group differences and tried to explore its contours rather than explaining it away with some other variable.
The benchmark model has served sociologists well for more than a century, but I am not sure whether it will continue to do so. The category of “Asian American” is a case in point. As the fastest growing demographic according to the 2020 census, “Asian American” challenges our established sociological wisdom about racial difference. Maybe we should not treat racial categories as closed-off entities that can be compared with each other. Maybe we should go beyond paying lip-service to the heterogeneity within groups and come up with new measurements and techniques to properly assess the complex reality around race. More importantly, perhaps we should document how different social worlds—such as that of Monterey Park and the Dartmouth campus—intersect and collide within a racial category, rather than subsuming them under one-dimensional indicators such as average or median. For instance, on average, Asian Americans are liberal when it comes to policy preferences. Yet when we break such results by national-origin subgroups, we discover that such characterization only conveys one side of the story. With the one-sided story, we cannot fully understand why so much Asian American writing revolves around the differences and tensions within the label, let alone the reason why family dinners always end up becoming political debates.
Beyond the Benchmark Model
Clearly, I am not the first sociologist to call for more attention to within-group heterogeneity in terms of race. Using novel measurements of skin tone differences, Ellis P. Monk Jr. has documented the heterogeneity within the people who are classified as “Black.” G. Cristina Mora and Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz, respectively, traced the social trajectories of “Hispanic” and “Latino” categories as they encompassed different groups in different contexts. Regarding Asian Americans, many sociologists have indirectly addressed the question of the heterogeneity by adhering to a less-explored corner of the catch-all category. Carolyn Areum Choi, for example, highlights the class divide within migrants from Korea and how their racialization differs depending on contexts of reception. Darwin A. Baluran demonstrates that Asian youths’ interactions with police differ based on whether they are racialized as typically Asian or not. Yvonne Y. Kwan documents how the past trauma from genocide is transferred through generations in Cambodian immigrant families. In her upcoming work, Louise Ly breaks down Asian-white couples into ones involving East Asians and South Asians to examine how racialization and associated sexualization differ between the two groups. Yang Sao Xiong (login required) analyzes the recent progress and continuing challenges associated with Hmong Americans’ educational attainment. Anthony Christian Ocampo illuminates fluctuating racial identification among second-generation Filipino Americans. There is also a recently launched podcast hosted by sociologist Yang Lor and filmmaker Jason Nou that focuses on Southeast Asian American culture and identity. Together, these scholars highlight the often-neglected heterogeneity within the category of “Asian American,” and compel us to go beyond lazy applications of the benchmark model.
The renewed focus on heterogeneity also propels us to consider different perspectives on pressing policy issues as well—for instance, the recent U.S. Supreme Court case on affirmative action in elite colleges centered on Asian Americans and the supposed discrimination they face in the admissions process. The claimants argued that race-conscious admissions policies discriminate against qualified white and Asian students in order to give a preferential treatment to Black and Latino students. Regardless of the actual merit of this argument, the lawsuit hit a nerve with some Asian parents and students who felt that they are doubly disadvantaged as a minority group who seldom enjoy the benefit of affirmative action, even as they are still being socially discriminated against by whites despite their socioeconomic standing. As Jennifer Lee has argued, while the majority of Asian Americans support affirmative action, Asian Americans are often summoned in these debates as a “wedge” to divide racial minorities and criticize race-conscious remedial policies. As a model minority who “made it on their own” without government help, the figure of the upwardly mobile Asian American is paraded around as a testament to the accessibility of the American dream in a postracial society.
The specter of “China Virus” and consequent anti-Asian violence across the country should dispel these myths. However, a focus on within-group heterogeneity gives us a different angle, one that goes beyond the consideration of affirmative action policies as operating through pan-ethnic categories. While East Asians are overrepresented in elite colleges compared to their proportion in the general population, Southeast Asians face quite a different reality. When we break down the “Asian American” category by national origin, there is a wide variability in educational outcome, with Cambodian and Hmong students lagging far behind the category’s average. Since these groups directly suffered from the legacies of the U.S. military operations overseas—most of them were refugees forced to flee their homeland due to such operations—there is an argument to be made about their eligibility for remedy through affirmative action.
Even if we do not subscribe to such an idea, these data points lead us to reconsider our entire framework around equal opportunity, social justice, and race. If we must consider racial categories as an uncomfortable but inevitable addendum to our otherwise liberal-individual society, how should we articulate group identities and political claims based on those identities? The last century’s debate about multiculturalism focused on whether we should recognize group identities at all. In the twenty-first century, we should move beyond the abstract debate about the political philosophies of liberalism and communitarianism and embark on an empirical exploration of heterogeneity, which is experienced by many but not properly represented in our academic discourse.
Rachel Kahng, Jessica Yang, Jessi Yu, Nolan Yee, Carolyn Choi, and Yang Lor provided helpful comments for this article.
Any opinions expressed in the articles in this publication are those of the author and not the American Sociological Association.
