Discarding Social Conditioning
By wchung | 22 Feb, 2025

Part 2 of the journey to becoming a confident, secure Asian American.

You’ve recognized that becoming a secure Asian American isn’t a birthright but a struggle, and that the struggle is shared by all Asian Americans as they leave behind childhood platitudes. By then years of social conditioning have led you down the road to the belated recognition that your identity is derived from roles assigned by the white majority (i.e., you’ve been “whitewashed”), leading to a sense of alienation. Welcome to the club.

Claiming Your Own Perspective

Growing up in a predominantly white society it’s all too easy to fall into the habit of seeing yourself as a substandard white person. Your hair isn’t light enough, your eyes aren’t set deeply enough, your nose isn’t pointy enough, your mom packs you odd lunches, your dad doesn’t know how to throw a football right, your house smells funny. Without being conscious of it, at some point during your childhood you fell into the habit of seeing yourself as a second-class white person instead of a first-class Asian American.

That kind of perceptual impediment can give anyone a severe and debilitating identity crisis.

The fact that there are so many well-adusted, happy and even spectacularly successful Asian Americans proves that this early bogey can be overcome, even turned to advantage. But first you must claim your own perspective. Imagine trying to navigate an obstacle course while seeing through the eyes of another person driving another car. That’s exactly what many young Asian Americans try to do, and it’s a prescription for a lifetime of calamities.

So recognize that you have your own unique life made up of a unique cultural heritage, unique family background, unique inherited and acquired abilities and weaknesses, and last but not least, a unique social context.

An important corollary to this eye-opening is recognizing that even the WASPiest of white people are a collection of individuals each with their own unique set of issues. In this regard, the fantasy images projected nightly on American TV have probably done more to create insecurities among young people than any other single factor.

Take a moment to flush out of your mind all those images as happy nonsense. I can’t think of a single TV series I grew up with in which the central themes and issues even remotely reflected the problems of real people — white, black, Hispanic or Asian. The shows typically contrived situations in which the central characters get to spend a half hour or an hour facing the kind of problems most people fantasize about having — i.e., choosing between two incredibly beautiful members of the opposite sex, choosing between true love or fame and fortune, dealing with the grief of having an incredibly beautiful girlfriend or boyfriend die of some exotic disease.

The reality is that problems are far more mundane for everyone — rich white, poor white, rich Asian, poor Asian — money worries, fear of failure, fear of rejection, the tedium of work. There you have it — the sum and substance of everyday life — and no one is immune, except those creatures dreamed up by roomfuls of not-so-well-paid TV scriptwriters.

So having flushed the waste products of poorly-fed, overheated imaginations down to the sea, you can begin the challenging but very rewarding effort of building a perspective befitting a self-aware and courageous Asian American determined to build life on bedrock. We’ll begin that leg of your adventure in my next column.