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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again everyone. With me now is the New York Times Jay Caspian Kang, who has a sweeping new personal and political essay in the magazine section on the web, that's adapted from his new book that comes out next week called The Loneliest Americans. It's so sweeping. It even includes why he takes Bruce Springsteen more seriously than he used to. Jay also wrote a very thoughtful take recently on questions that society isn't asking enough about education in the suburbs. We'll touch on that too, as Jay Caspian Kang joins me now. Hi, Jay. Thanks for coming on. Welcome back to WNYC.

Jay Caspian Kang: Hey, thanks. It's great to be back.

Brian Lehrer: You write near the beginning of the magazine article that you don't find your own family's narrative to be particularly sympathetic, even though it begins with all four of your grandparents being refugees from North Korea, you do find your family story to be the fruits of assimilation. Would you give our listeners a short version of that narrative from your grandparents to you today to start, and then we'll dig into the context that you see for New York and the United States and Asian Americans today.

Jay Caspian Kang: What I was trying to talk about in that section was how we tell immigrant stories and what details we choose. What was interesting to me was that, I could definitely tell a story in which my parents indeed were refugees from North Korea. Many of their relatives were killed, they grew up in a war zone, and they immigrated to the United States in search of more opportunity. Then when we first got to the United States, we lived in very, very modest housing, and then in Cambridge, Massachusetts, we lived in what is a housing project. I think that there's a way to tell that story, and say, "Look, this is like the come up, this is the way that America can still turn out opportunity."

Yet at the same time, I think that telling that story only in that way is a bit dishonest and that we should talk more about our place in America and certain advantages that we might have, certain disadvantages that we might have, that we shouldn't just turn it into a story about, "Oh, am I sympathetic because my family has suffered?" We should actually look at the details of what that suffering is and try and make a more accurate picture of it. Go ahead.

Brian Lehrer: You use these phrases, the fruits of assimilation and the spoils of assimilation to frame some of that, what does the spoils of assimilation refer to?

Jay Caspian Kang: I think it's that my parents went from that area where my mother was a nanny to a lot of professors' kids in Cambridge, Massachusetts. My father was in graduate school and then they entered the upper-middle class by the time I was in college. I think that that really took them, I think a lot of effort on their part to- I think in a lot of ways move away from the Korean community, even the Korean immigrant community here in the United States, and to just spend a lot of their time making sure that they and their children would try and figure out how to operate in this country and that if we think about it, there are ways in which we can say that that's a betrayal and that I think a lot, it's almost fashionable now to say we need this cultural authenticity.

I suppose one of the things that I bring up in the essay, and one of the things that I ask in the book, which is just, what do we mean by cultural authenticity here, and what is the value of that if we can even define it?

Brian Lehrer: That even gets to your Bruce Springsteen thing, that you didn't consider him someone you could culturally authentically identify with, and then that changed over time?

Jay Caspian Kang: When I first heard Bruce Springsteen, I don't know if I thought about it very much, but like everyone else, I would see these huge stadium shots of him doing shows, I don't know, like in New Jersey somewhere and maybe where the Giants used to play and there would be tons of people pumping their fists and being excited. I think that at some point when I was younger, I didn't really think very much about how I was like racializing, and so I was just like, "Yes, that would be fun." Then at some point, something happens in your brain where you just try and think, "How would I actually fit in that scene?"

I think that that does create a distance and that I think it's a natural thing. I think it's a thing that happens. I think it's a thing that people should be sympathetic towards. I do wonder if that's the thing that is occupying so much of your brain, then perhaps you can't enjoy things like Bruce Springsteen. That part of the essay is just about how when I was driving around Brooklyn for a long period of time, I came to grips with that, actually, I can enjoy this thing, and it's okay.

Brian Lehrer: Related to that in the same section, you look back with embarrassment on your argument with your college friend Nasim, who is Palestinian and a singer-songwriter, and you wanted him to write songs explicitly about being Arab, which he wasn't doing so much. You look back on it now as what you call a bold vision of identity that you had, what is this bold vision?

Jay Caspian Kang: Nasim and I graduated from college right after 9/11 and he wanted to be a singer-songwriter and he still has a band and they tour. He's done that. At the time, he really was a huge accolyte of Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen in the way that many people in small New England liberal arts colleges are. I never quite understood it because I was like, I don't know, it seems like kind of white. I think that was my mentality at the time. After 9/11 I was like, why isn't this guy writing about fear he feels, the fear he feels for his family?

I think that that is a bold vision of identity, that is a prescriptive vision of identity. I think that sometimes we get trapped into that type of thinking, and I do think it's harmful because I think it basically funnels people into one type of expression only. I think that if you ask him Nasim now about his songs, he'll say. "Yes. Like that stuff is in the songs. It's just not explicit in this way that I would never want to do." I look back at the time in my life and I just think I don't know if that was the right way for me to be thinking about the world in my own writing, which I was 23, 24 years old, so I wasn't writing anything particularly good, but I was trying to figure out who I was as a writer. I don't know, I think that trying to somehow mutate out of that is important for people, and it feels like we're still stuck in that way.

Brian Lehrer: Let me ask you to talk about how you use the word assimilation in that context, which is prominent in the magazine article, as we mentioned before, if your family has financial success, and so you live in the nice buildings and send your kids to the upper-middle-class schools, as you described, why is that assimilating into something white rather than just being financially successful? Maybe a lot of successful people in South Korea or wherever else live like that too, and it may present class questions, but it's just financial success, it's not necessarily something white. What's the assimilation part of that as you're describing or experiencing it?

Jay Caspian Kang: I think that it runs in a lot of different ways in that it's an extremely complicated process. I think that part of the thinking around the book is based on a man who used to be my mentor, who passed a couple years ago, Noel Ignatiev wrote the book, How the Irish Became White. it was a history about how the Irish, who I think most people know were not really considered white when they came to the United States, places wouldn't let them in, how they ultimately gained passage into whiteness. The book is a question about will Asian Americans become white? I think if you ask some people, they would say, they're white adjacent, which is the term that you hear a lot or basically white.

I don't know, I think the answer to that is extremely complicated. I think that yes, from a financial standpoint and from an educational standpoint where you go to school, these things are very important, but there is a type of elite Asian American who does seem to take up most of the narratives around this stuff who might get somewhere close to that. Then at the same time, if you go down to like Sunset Park in Brooklyn, or if you go out to Flushing or if you go out to, even to Chinatown in Manhattan and you look around, are those people who seem white adjacent to you?

You know? I don't know, I think that if you're hearing my voice or if you met me, you might think, that person speaks English and they seem to be well educated or whatever, maybe that means white. I don't think that there's any monolithic way that you can think about it. I think part of the book is grappling with that.

Brian Lehrer: My guest, if you're just joining us, is Jay Caspian Kang, opinion writer for the New York Times, including the magazine where he has a major new piece called the myth of Asian American Entity and it's related to his book that comes out next week called The Loneliest Americans. We can take some of your stories, listeners, and questions for Jay, 646-435-7280. Are you Asian American of any kind and relating to this? Tell us something about how you see your own family's immigration narrative, assimilation narrative, if that's how you see it, political evolution longer-term or as affected by the pandemic, which we'll get into or the George Floyd civil rights area which we'll get into, or for that matter, how you relate or not to Bruce Springsteen.

646-435-7280 or tweet @BrianLehrer. Jay, you note that the origin of the term Asian American was political in the late 1960s. I think a lot of our listeners would not know that, though it has largely lost its politics today. What was that origin and evolution?

Jay Caspian Kang: It started at UC Berkeley actually in a house that I could probably walk to in about 10 minutes from where I am right now. It was a group of Asian students who had been in the United States- most of whom had been in the United States for generations. The Japanese American students had lived through internment. They were seeing everything that was happening on campus. These were consciousness movements that were happening, the anti-war movements that were happening. The development of the Panthers out in Oakland, which is obviously nearby. A lot of them tried to join up with a lot of these different other groups.

Like whether Chicano groups that were forming, black groups that were forming and they were experiencing a little bit of awkwardness. Sometimes just rejections, saying like, "Go make your own group." What happens, these two students went and they formed something called the AAPA and the term Asian American, they famously according to legend coined at the first meeting that they have. It was meant to be this political term that would say that we are everything that everyone else is not and we'll stand in solidarity with one another. Now I think that that term, if you say the word Asian American now, nobody thinks about that.

The part of the book is really interested in figuring out, look, if we define this thing politically in the 1960s, and then about five years later, millions and millions and millions of new immigrants come in and they have no idea what this history is, they don't have any position in America that they would've gone through like internment, which would teach them about their place in America.

Then does it really make sense to try and connect this political history with these millions of people who have no idea what that political history is? I basically just argue that it's really not a political term in any sort of way anymore. It's not even a demographic term Asian American, because nobody can agree what it means. Do you include Indian American people or not? That seems to be like a big question that you should resolve but nobody has resolved that question.

Brian Lehrer: People from Indonesia and the Philippines and Vietnam and Cambodia, so many different countries.

Jay Caspian Kang: Pacific Islanders, do you include Pacific Islanders? One thing I've always noticed is that when people use the acronym AAPI, which is Asian American Pacific Islanders and they say, "We're doing a conference of AAPIs." I don't know if I've ever seen a Pacific Islander at one of those things. There is this way in which I think East Asian Americans, which is like mostly Korean, Japanese, Chinese, have tried to make the term broad while also not actually making the term broad at all. There's just a lot of confusion I think in this way. I think one of the solutions that I suggest here is that perhaps we should just not use term anymore. Perhaps we should disaggregate people into their actual countries of origin or maybe just not talk so much about identity at all.

Brian Lehrer: You frame a political difference between Asian American immigrants whose families came to the US before the big immigration reform of 1965. This is one of my favorite topics by the way, the immigration act of 1965. I love to geek out on it because it changed our country so much. A lot of people don't even realize how much of a dividing line that was between the past and the present. In the context of your article, you frame a political difference between Asian immigrants whose families came to the US before 1965's law and those families who came after, when so many more were allowed in. Can you describe the different patterns of those before and after 1965 years?

Jay Caspian Kang: If you were here before 1965, most likely you were fifth-generation, fourth-generation Asian American. Your parents might have come over to work the railroads or they might have come over, not your parents but your descent or I guess ancestors might have come to work on railroads. They might have come to work in the gold mines. That is a very different and there are much much fewer of you. There were not that many Asian Americans at that time. If you're Japanese American, then you came over your agricultural worker, usually a farmer and then you were interned.

Those types of experiences are so different than coming over here post-1965, whether through a skilled worker visa or through chain migration. Then setting up these enclaves where you don't have too much interaction with the people outside of that enclave but also you have absolutely zero interaction with other Asian Americans who have been here forever. In fact, like they might even be stranger to you than the other Americans that you come across because it's almost impossible for you to fathom the way that they came about.

I think that what's happened is basically that we try and define Asian American through things that happened to the first generation or the first iteration of Asian-American. We say that moment where they define the term Asian-American is very important in terms of Asian American studies or the Chinese exclusion act is very important in terms of Asian American studies. You try and create this big history that now is supposed to also have a lot of relevance to somebody like me, whose parents came post-1965. Part of what I argue in the piece and in the book is that we got a separate these two out.

If you ask my parents like who is Vincent Chin, they'll have no idea or if you ask them, "Did you know that Asian American's a political term that started the University of California Berkeley in 1968?" "I don't understand what that means." That is very different for example black history, where I think that if you talk about the Montgomery bus boycott, you talk about lynchings during reconstruction. There is a direct pathway through people's families, through people's lived experiences to that history. For immigrants here in the United States, Asian immigrants, there is not a direct link to any of that history. I think that the way that we define these things, the way that we talk about them is just a bit off.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take a phone call. Christine in central Pennsylvania. You're on WNYC with Jay Caspian Kang. Hi, Christine.

Christine: Hi, Brian. Hi, Jay, first-time, long time here. My story, I'm in my late 20s, I'm a first-generation American. My parents moved here from China in the late 80s. We grew up in Brighton Beach Brooklyn. We were very, very poor. I remember the importance of learning. As you can tell from my name, Christina, my parents decided, "We want our children to assimilate quickly. Let's give them familiar names." What happened was my mom had pushed us myself and my sisters to go to college, get a good education. That's the way you pull yourself out of poverty.

Now we're all in our early to late 20s and we still live with our mom because they do in Brooklyn. Now that we've pulled ourself out of that situation, we're slowly ascending the financial ladder here. I feel more and more like we're almost losing our identity. Honestly, I don't know why that is. I noticed that partly when I moved out to Pennsylvania for graduate school and now that I've graduated and I have a job, I almost don't know what it's like to be Chinese anymore, outside food.

Brian Lehrer: What else would be part of that identity that you feel like you're losing? Can you put it in words, Christine?

Christine: Part of it is absolutely the language and the culture. I'm not around Cantonese speakers or Mandarin speakers as often as I was when I'm growing up. Just meeting old-world people, speaking old-world language that almost felt like I was-- I definitely feel more comfortable when I hear Cantonese when I hear English.

Brian Lehrer: Jay, you can relate right?

Jay Caspian Kang: For sure. I feel emotional just hearing about it. For me, so yes, I don't know. You enter these workplaces and you feel like that's what you're supposed to do. Then you also feel a deep sense of alienation that you probably, I don't know how you grew up, but certainly, I would just assume that perhaps you, it sounds like maybe you are too, you're trained to just ignore. One of the things that I think that there's this easy way to moralize about this and say that we should never ignore that and that if you ignore that stuff you're a sellout, but I don't know.

I guess I'm not so interested in making those types of determinations. I just think it's like something that is unavoidable and this feeling like, "Okay, I got to stop feeling this deep alienation from this thing that I'm supposed to have wanted." At the same time, I assume that you're just not, it's not like you're going to go back, nor should you, it's just that climbing your way out to stuff is always going to lead to that type of departure, I think.

Brian Lehrer: Do you think about doing anything specific about these feelings, Christine?

Christine: Oh, recently I started looking at YouTube channels and there's one specific channel that started during the pandemic. I noticed that the parents in this channel, so it's run by a son and his parents.

Brian Lehrer: Whoops, did we lose you?

Christine: Hello?

Brian Lehrer: Yes. We lost you for a second there. You were watching this YouTube channel that what?

Christine: Sure. It's a YouTube channel that just talks about Chinese cooking and hearing the father speak Cantonese and hearing the father give instructions on how to prepare this type of food or why it's important you use a knife this way. That's made me feel like I'm learning the stuff that I almost am forgetting as time goes on, just because I'm so far detached from the culture.

Brian Lehrer: Christine, thank you so much for your call, Jay, the exchange that you just had with Christine and her own story, does this exemplify why you titled the book The Loneliest Americans?

Jay Caspian Kang: Yes. I hadn't even thought about that, but yes. There's no way to express those thoughts without becoming extremely upset because you feel like those feeling, I think it's similar to what Cathy Park Hong, the writer called Minor Feelings. Like you don't know if these things are real or not, and you have no idea how to express them. I think that does lead to a deep loneliness and a lot-- I also sometimes deal with it by watching cooking stuff on YouTube. There's part of you that just thinks, "Wow, this is so sad." That this is what it's come down to. The same time, I don't know, it works but yes, that's part of this experience I think.

Brian Lehrer: Chris in Manhattan, excuse me, you're on WNYC. Hi, Chris.

Chris: Oh, hello.

Brian Lehrer: Hi there.

Chris: Hi, I've been listening to your show for a while, so I'm a little bit shocked that I'm actually on it at the moment.

Brian Lehrer: Glad you're on, Chris.

Chris: I don't know if you had anything but specific you want to discuss, but some of the things that Jay was talking about particularly the white adjacency resonated with me. I'm Korean American who was born in Houston, Texas, to immigrant parents. My father was a physician and came to this country, I think in 1959. There was a large wave of foreign medical graduate immigration that happened around that time because the US government did a study, that was a time of specialization in medicine. They did this strange study where they were concerned that because there were all these specialists, there wouldn't be GPS to take care of regular patients.

They came to this dramatic conclusion that within a few years we were going to run out of doctors in this country. Prior to this, it was almost impossible to immigrate into of this country as a foreign medical graduate but my father was allowed in because of this. As a result, I was born in this country and to Jay talking about white adjacency, I have an Ivy League education, I'm a doctor myself and all this stuff. I have some white friends who sometimes ask why I consider myself a minority and then I tell them about all the racist experiences in my life and then they're shamed by their question, but it's just something that I find slightly offensive, but it's not meant to be offensive by the people who ask me that. I just find that amount of white adjacency for Asian Americans to be interesting.

Brian Lehrer: Chris, thank you so much, please call us again, Jay, what are you thinking as you hear Chris?

Jay Caspian Kang: Oh, yes. I think that I have had similar experiences too, and you hear it in most that you hear this term in education talk. Where, and ways in which- and trying to create equity programs around education and in that place, it's always white and Asian. A lot of times they say minorities or people of color, and then the other categories, white and Asian, and sometimes they even drop the Asian part and they just say white. There's a consulting group that was brought in by Richard Carranza. He used to be the chancellor of New York City public schools who gave this presentation in which they didn't even mention Asian people at all.

Even though I think Asian kids are about 20% of the New York City public schools. When asked why they had not brought up Asian kids in the presentation, they said, "Well, these kids are white adjacent." I think that does make people upset because like, once again, you go to Sunset Park and see these people who live in poverty and many of them dishwashers, many of them undocumented. See their children, the conditions in which their children live, oftentimes like several families to an apartment. They just tell those people that they're white adjacent, there is something offensive about it and there is an objection that you give.

I think more importantly, it just like goes against people's general understanding of the world. I don't know, I think even racist people who don't like Asian people would at least say like, "Well, they're not white." Those people who are living in Sunset Park are not white. Yes, I don't know. I think that for people like me and the caller, that maybe we get neurotic about it. Our neurosis I don't think necessarily matters so much because like we, what matters is that there are tons of people who are not white adjacent in any way, and that perhaps, we should talk more about them.

Brian Lehrer: One example from your article that jumped out at me was that through a class-based lens, and maybe you're using Sunset Park in that way, you write, "If assimilated Asian Americans, meaning those fairly well off, were being attacked in the pandemic, the lower-income folks like delivery drivers must be getting it much worse." Let's end with this. You write about a moment in the first days of the George Floyd protests in Oakland, where you're living now out in California, seeing a young Asian couple holding a sign that said yellow peril supports black power.

Despite the cross-ethnic solidarity of that term, you found it nostalgic and inert, your words. Can you talk about the history of the phrase yellow per supports black power and why it seemed nostalgic and inert to you last year and what would be more real and then we're out of time?

Jay Caspian Kang: Yes. The phrase comes from a sign that was held up by Richard Aoki, who was the one Asian American Japanese American member of the Black Panthers. He was at the free Huey Newton protests at the Oakland courthouse and I think that's where he was photographed with that sign. There's many reasons for it. First of all, Aoki was a FBI informant. He ultimately betrayed the Panthers, but the other reasons why I think it's nostalgic is that, we look back and we see somebody wearing like the uniform of the Panthers, the beret, and we see that that person is Asian American. We want to live in that type of radical politics. If all it is a set of phrases in a costume.

That doesn't really mean anything. If the core of your politics are ways in which people like myself are upwardly mobile, Asian Americans process politics, which is, a lot of stuff in the corporate workplace, a lot of microaggressions. In that, if you want actual radical politics aside from just scanning the words or putting on different types of clothes, what you have to do is that you have to create a radical politics. That the only way in which I think Asian Americans can create a radical politics is to be very concerned, not with Hollywood representation or with microaggressions when your coworker and at your bank mistakes you for another Asian person.

I think that all of the politics need to be sent around those poor people, like the poor immigrants among us, the people who are less fortunate of our kind. Then until we do that then there isn't going to be real solidarity with anybody because I think that our concerns are a little bit hard to sympathize with at times. If you say that the real problem in Asian America is that we're not that Scarlett Johansson keeps taking our roles in Marvel movies. That is not really something that you can build a lot of solitary around with a lot of people, I don't think, because most people don't care about that.

Brian Lehrer: Jay Caspian Kang, his new essay in the New York Times magazine. It's up on the web now, I guess it'll be in the print edition this coming Sunday. Right?

Jay Caspian Kang: Right.

Brian Lehrer: It's called The Myth of Asian American Identity. It's an adaptation from his book, which is released next week called The Loneliest Americans. Jay also hosts a podcast called Time To Say Goodbye. Time to say goodbye, Jay.

Jay Caspian Kang: Thank you. 

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