The state of our community is so politically ambivalent: some of us want to assimilate and be colorblind and take up positions of power and oppression; others of us want to attempt to radicalize and be in denial of the privileges that we’ve gained and problematically equivocate the (very real and very severe) racism we’ve experienced with the racism against, say, the Black community. I’m guilty of having been part of the latter, but I definitely think that the Asian American community, in its project of myth-building, requires a nuanced take on things. And our list of radical heroes is growing thin. Hell, with this recent Richard Aoki business, it’s even more depressing; one of our great figures of solidarity turns out to have been a traitor to the Black community, after all. My work—indeed, my next play—deals with this kind of soul-searching of Asian America.

In any event, I do think that Asian America needs to commit itself to an anti-racist, anti-sexist, intersectional politic that does not take only the internment, railroad labor, and immigrant grit as its primary loci of political reference. Our mythology is stuck on the American Dream, that whole hard-work-should-lead-to-success narrative. The logic of tragedy of the internment, for example—and don’t get me wrong, it was indeed downright evil—is caught up in the sense that Japanese Americans “worked hard” and “didn’t bother anyone,” “didn’t deserve it,” et cetera. This discourse always implies that there may have been someone who did deserve it, who didn’t “work hard enough.” Often, the internment narrative subtly reinforces model minoritarianism, which indirectly justifies oppression of Black people, for example (“they don’t work hard enough, so they deserve incarceration”). Why not overturn incarceration period, or war period, or barbed wire period, state violence period? I was furious that at the last Manzanar retreat I went to, no one wanted to talk about African American reparations for slavery, and many behaved as if the internment was the highest crime the USA has ever committed. And then later, I visited the Japanese American Museum in San Jose, our tour guide ridiculed the Native criticism that the camps were luxurious compared to the rez’—I think that’s something to think about rather than to dismiss. And again, it was terrible, but let’s never forget slavery or genocide. Obviously, as Asian Americans we are racialized, oppressed, subjected to immense violence (which is the subject of so much of my work), but it is absolutely imperative that we not be myopic or oversimplifying in our analyses. I think Asian Americans must be on the front lines of every form of anti-oppression work, even if it does not directly reflect Asian American self-interest, and we also need to be honest about where we’re at. That means that the leftist activist born and raised in a rich suburb in Connecticut with two doctor Korean parents needs to acknowledge that he’s had privilege, indeed even benefited from institutions of whiteness, and that that’s okay.