The Enclave

A month ago, one of my friends sent me this NYT Mag profile on Steven Yeun. It was a beautiful piece, Korean-American writer Jay Caspian Kang managing to discuss and relate his life to that of Yeun’s, while providing a nuanced perspective of growing up as a third culture kid and a review of Minari. I hope to be able to write something comparable one day. A passage near the middle stood out to me:

But it wasn’t like Los Angeles or Queens, where the enclave can contain your entire life — where you grow up around your kind, you go to school with your kind, you play youth sports with your kind, you end up dating and marrying your kind. “I remember when I first went to L.A. and saw these totally free Korean dudes,” Yeun said. “They weren’t weighted down with all that same self-consciousness. They even walked differently.”

I grew up in a multicultural ethnic enclave, and for the most part, did everything with my kind. Sixty-percent of the town’s population was a visible minority when I was in high school, and half of that was Chinese-Canadian, like myself. In my high school, the numbers certainly felt even more skewed towards the Asian: a quick scan of my yearbook shows six Zhangs and eight Kims in my graduating class of four hundred.

Consequently, I never felt out of place growing up, and Asians at least, were never bullied because of their race. In retrospect, I can remember times when other minority groups have been made acutely aware of their ethnicity; never maliciously, though often very insensitively. Admittedly, there were lines drawn…