Dear Reader,

Before I ever stepped foot in my freshman dorm, I had already followed every iteration of leftist activist groups at Princeton. From my living room, I watched how the university handled the Gaza solidarity encampment, I read reports of the 13 students arrested for occupying Clio Hall, and I stalked who followed the sjp.princeton Instagram from the class of 2028 page. Prior to even knowing what classes I was going to take, I knew I wanted to be involved with campus activism. I did not know how alone I would feel in that pursuit.

Growing up in a predominantly white town, part of my Asian American experience was feeling othered. Like so many, I came to college wanting nothing more than to find a community that finally understood my cultural background. Naively, I thought that growing up Asian American naturally meant that we would care about the same issues. Instead, when I tried to explain why I was advocating for a current cause, like why the University should divest from weapons manufacturers, I was often met with confusion and apathy. Over time, my disillusionment compelled me to search for the source of this divergence.

Despite its current ubiquity, some don’t know that “Asian American” is a contemporary label that originated with an inherently political purpose. In 1968, student activists Yuji Ichioka and Emma Gee founded the Asian American Political Alliance at UC Berkeley, coining the term as a means to replace “oriental” in the American lexicon. Subsequently, multiple Asian diasporas were able to organize under one umbrella with greater political power during the height of the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War protests. In this era, to claim the Asian American identity was to be part of a greater movement for social change—I believe that today we have largely diverged from this original purpose. So how did Asian American shift from a political to a cultural identity?

A new wave of Asian immigrants to the United States started in the 1990s. Immigration policies like the F-1 and H1-B visa program, which favor those seeking higher education or already with professional degrees, shifted demographics of Asian immigrants away from the hard laborers and refugees of earlier generations. Assuming careers like engineers, academics, and doctors, Asian immigrants who took this newly crafted path to citizenship have, by most definitions, achieved the American dream. This is the context in which many second-generation Asian American children were born. Their pedigree is an American success story.

If Asian America is united by anything these days, I’d argue it’s our shared experience of “success debt”. The 2nd gen Asian American identity was born from the home, not a deliberate political movement. Whether it is consciously drilled into you by your parents touting how much they suffered and sacrificed to give you the comfort of an American life, or subconsciously developed by watching your parents come home late from long days of work, we develop an obsession with repaying our parents by achieving success. Across ethnicities, “the children of immigrants” occupy a cultural milieu that encourages individuals to prioritize their own success before considering anything beyond their household. 

What does this mean for the Asian American at Princeton who has, by all popular metrics, “succeeded” and paid back this debt to their parents? At a predominantly white institution like Princeton where Asian Americans have seen success, I think there is an attitude among some that they worked harder and are more deserving of their place here. They don’t want a proximity to whiteness because it would nullify the idea that they worked harder to get to where they are. This entitlement mirrors the rhetoric used in the Students for Fair Admission v. Harvard affirmative action case. If you asked any Asian American at Princeton if they ever doubted that success was an option, I think you’d have a hard time finding someone who would say yes. For this microcosm of people, working hard has been rewarded by the system. So why question it?

A key part of this puzzle is how Asian American culture attributes success. Is it from the meritocracy of the American dream or the industrious discipline of Asian parenting? In this case, I think that Asian American culture claims the latter and rejects the former. This distinction between Asian and American points to a greater phenomenon: Asian Americans don’t want to be white, they take pride in being “capital A” Asian “capital A” American.

Commitment to the establishment and faith in the system is reflected in today’s mainstream Asian American advocacy. During the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a surge in hate crimes against Asian Americans, particularly against elders in the community. The solution in many Chinatowns across the country was to call for more police presence in order to “protect” us. This demonstrated level of belief that the system will protect us is a caveat of the culture—work within the system, not outside of it. Just a few months ago, ICE raided a Hyundai plant in Georgia which employs predominantly Korean immigrants. But even when subjected to blatant discrimination, the community remains mostly silent. Unfortunately, it seems like more often than not, children of immigrants would rather stay silent than risk jeopardizing their own family’s safety and reputation.

How long can we keep our heads down and ignore the U.S. government kidnapping our neighbors, bullying professors to suicide, and using our community to scapegoat a “great replacement”? I would argue that fighting for justice requires an intentional return to embodying a political existence. Our identity as Asian Americans can no longer be constrained to the household. By applying lessons from our own political history, I hope that more students are inspired to see themselves in a lineage that stretches back beyond just one generation.