The Asian-American Renaissance

I deliberated for a while before starting this week’s blog. The hesitation stemmed mostly from a reluctance to reduce my blog to one focused on Asian-American identity by starting with a flurry of pieces on the subject. But I realized that this was important to me, and when a man starts out to build a world, he starts first with himself. I’ll be sticking to the definitions of Asian-American identified in my last article Asian-American identity contrasted through film: East Asian and Southeast Asian, and inclusive of Asian Canadians as well.

The Asian-American Renaissance, as I’ve decided to call it, is my idea that the Asian-Americans were starting to waken to their idea of a shared identity, and consequently would grow not only as a political-economical force, but also as an artistic one. The moniker is derived from the momentous Harlem Renaissance of last Twenties.

The first paragraph of the Wikipedia page on the Harlem Renaissance does a good job of summarizing what it’s all about, and the article is a reasonably short read as well. If that is too much work, know that simply put, there was a proliferation of not only African American arts during the 1920s, but an increase in mainstream acceptance and distribution. This led to an amplification of the reality of simply being African American, and many writers like Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston emerged from this movement. It’s not unrealistic to think that the larger civil rights movements a few decades later were aided by this flourishing of the arts.

Equating the conditions for African Americans that gave birth to the Harlem Renaissance to the conditions that Asian-Americans live in now (or have ever), is tenuous at best. At the risk of sounding tone deaf, it’s likely that the more oppressive climate led to the more subversive and innovative works, something that the Asian American Renaissance might never achieve. Nonetheless, the importance of the Harlem Renaissance was the creation and distribution of this art, leading to a greater sense of consciousness in the marginalized group.

This idea has been percolating in my thoughts since October 2018, over two years ago. Looking back, a declaration of an Asian-American Renaissance was premature at that point, but I felt the energy. I believed. I started telling my friends in the usual manner I conveyed my hot takes: vehement assertions and unnuanced support. Prior to this, there were three events that came together that autumn that led me to recognize this phenomenon.

The first was the success of Crazy Rich Asians. Though not an artistic triumph, it was perhaps more importantly, a commercial one, leading to more coverage and investment in more Asian-American media. As I had mentioned in Asian-American identity contrasted through film, there was a paradigm shift, where Asian-Americans were no longer limited to the token-accented-comedic-sidekick and moved into leads in romantic and action movies, previously limited to WongFu. There was a widespread hope that this would change perceptions of Asian-Americans in society at large, or at the very least, lead to more of this type of representation.

The second triggering event was the emergence of Subtle Asian Traits, a Facebook group started for the children of First-Generation Asian immigrants in September 2018 which quickly exploded and is now almost two million members strong. Ironically, the group was launched in Australia, which fits the archetypal mold of Asian-American as a Westernized Asian group but is geographically too isolated to phonaesthetically incorporate into the name I had decided on.

Asian-Americans everywhere found solidarity in the similarities of their experience, through internet memes, effectively little pieces of pop art. I loved this group, and though the novelty eventually wore off, I knew that I was not the one who would derive the most value from it. I constantly thought of the Asian-American teenager whose parents immigrated to Springfield, Tennessee, instead of Flushing, New York. I grew up in a cultural enclave and all my friends were Asian because everyone was Asian. But the girl in Franklin, New Hampshire who was one of five Asians her age in a hundred kilometer radius might get a little more from this group.

The event that really sparked this idea for me was a personal experience. Throughout that summer, a few friends (Asian) and I fell into a routine of Friday night clubbing at The Fifth Social club, a bar notorious for its heavy Asian patronage on Friday nights. Then in the morning, no matter how hungover, we would wake up, pick up a few stale buns from Chinatown, and head over to the Harbourfront Court. This basketball court was, to a lesser degree, the Rucker Park of Toronto.

It was always 4v4 games to 11, full court runs, winner stayed on. We typically arrived around nine in the morning and left at ten, ushered off by the unreliable arrival of the sun and the reliable arrival of the better teams. Teams that outweighed ours by a couple stone a person and were my height on average. At little over six feet tall, I was the tallest player on our team.

We could get a game or two in with the better teams, often splitting our group up, but there was no point of waiting to play a third or fourth when there were five teams on deck that we had little chance of beating. One time, we thought we would have a chance to play again when the team to whom we had lost left, but their captain had simply taken a break to buy water, emerging from the drugstore a few minutes later with a crate of thirty plastic water bottles under his arm.

In one of our last runs that summer, we showed up to the court at nine after consuming our standard breakfast of pineapple buns. We played twos for an hour. When more people showed up like clockwork at ten, we played a game and lost as usual, but stayed because there were only two other teams waiting that day. The two games took a while, and then we went back on, playing against a group of regulars who had just won.

Then something miraculous happened. We were playing on par with this team. Our shooters’ shots fell the way they were supposed to. Our forward’s post moves somehow moved his man. I managed to set the right screens and grab the right boards. The score inched up, point by point, up to elevens. Tie game, win by two. And the score kept rising, basket by basket, until we were in the mid-twenties. The number of teams on deck grew and grew, newcomers restlessly asking “Who’s got next,” and “What’s the score?” But when they were told of the score, they became quiet and watched the game as well. They watched as a team of gangling Asians held their own against the winning team.

There were no heroics in the final. We barely won the game, 27–25 off a blessed two-ball, and handily lost the next one. Chalk it up to fatigue and luck running out, but I went home feeling more accomplished than I had ever felt after a game of basketball. Whenever I retell this story, people who are familiar with the court doubt me. They say “no way,” or insist that “they were going easy.” But I knew. Everyone on the court knew. And everyone watching that day knew.

That day, I felt the energy. That entire fall season, I believed. Asian-Americans were going mainstream. Not only in professional circles, but also in creative ones, in their own rights, without leveraging identity politics. David Chang. Steve Aoki. Ali Wong. Kazuo Ishiguro. We were on the precipice of something historical. Then somehow, nothing.

So where are these works? Where are the artists? Where was the explosion that I had so eagerly anticipated?

It’s not that all the Asian-Americans are busy pursuing their parents’ ideals of success, and becoming doctors and engineers. Asian-American artists have existed since before the railroads were built and will persist for many years to come. A common leftist idea is that the upper-middle class Asian lacks meaningful issues around which to convene, leading to apolitical masses, and art, real art, comes as an act of rebellion against the powers that be.

Is not it possible to have artistic triumphs and identity epiphanies originate with commercial blessing? Langston Hughes was published by Knopf and Duke Ellington recorded for Columbia. Better representation in mainstream media is a path to more meaningful art and simultaneously reaches more people. CRA led to more discussion about Asian-American identity, and as superficial as the portrayal was, it provided a better depiction to internalize than Mr. Yunioshi.

CRA was a start, but not the spark. The hotbed of coronavirus racism might drive some further from their comfortable proximity to white power, but pushes no one over the edge. I had written more past this point, but it veered towards didactic and precisely the type of tone about race issues I wanted to avoid in my blog. So I’ll leave you with these nice quotes I found while researching the Harlem Renaissance.

In The New Negro, Alain Locke writes “Lacking self-understanding, we have been almost as much of a problem to ourselves as we still are to others.”

In the Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance, Price writes “It [the Harlem Renaissance] was a time of black individualism, a time marked by a vast array of characters whose uniqueness challenged the traditional inability of white Americans to differentiate between blacks.”

And the poet laureate of the Harlem Renaissance, Mr. Hughes, writes that “The only way to get a thing done is to start to do it, then keep on doing it, and finally you’ll finish it.”