By An Angry SE Asian

The history is skewed to the side of the victors. It is known, and it has been established that what we know to be true is on the bias of the victorious. We are not privy to the knowledge of the forsaken, the ones who were forced to flee. We are not privy to the side of the people whose cultures were cut and slashed, thrown into a puddle to be picked up and pieced haphazardly by the next generation.

This is the Southeast Asian experience.

We are one of the smallest minorities in America. We are lumped together into the term “Asian” as a monolith, and it is infuriating, frustrating, to see all cultures pushed into the same category as “Asian”.

Please, tell me, what is Asian? What are the things that come to mind? As humans, our experiences are valid. However, when cultures are smashed together to create something as unknown and stereotyped, it paints a false picture of the experiences of those who experienced differently.

My family has been a puzzle to me. I grew up in Thailand, and then in America. I knew the Vietnam War affected my family in some way. I knew my mother and her family had to flee Southeast Asia. I knew the stories--that they had to cross the river by boat, while bullets were pelted at them. I knew they lost their eldest sister. I knew my mom and her sister had to ration off one packet of ramen for a meal for the entire day, breaking off piece by piece because they had no money.

I was the only one with those experiences, and they lumped me with the term “Asian” and questioned my authenticity when I was not the same. I was not white, or East Asian.

I looked around saw no one that looked like me. Everyone was East Asian. People asked if I was truly Asian, something I didn’t know had to be marked in a list of criteria of what it means to be Asian.

I started to question why my family was not as successful. I interviewed my grandparents, my uncles. I asked their experiences, their tragedies, the reasons, all the while thinking that we were less--less, because my family was less educated. Less, because my mother barely graduated sixth grade. Less, because I did not have the same experiences or those same stereotyped “skills” as “Asians” had in East Asian culture. Why were they pitting me against people that were not the same as me? The “model minority” stereotype painted me in a dark light against others who fit in.

My grandmother came to the United States with a broken family. She worked as a cleaner in a hospital, and then later established one of the first Thai restaurants in Alaska. My uncle worked for the U.S Navy while in Thailand at the age of sixteen. My grandpa was a C.I.A operative, working as an airplane mechanic during the war.

I used to ask why they never spoke of their experiences. Now I know it’s because no one cared enough to ask.

My uncle was imprisoned by the communist regime during the war, barely escaping with his life. He explained that the prison was a concentration camp with hundreds of teenage boys and girls in the middle of nowhere, with the forced labor of stripping trees, surrounded by rivers. Guards were deposited everywhere, with guns pointed at them at all times.

Why do we not hear about this in history?

He escaped. Twice.

My family has never received reparations for working with the United States during the war. They had to move in secrecy, fearing death and destruction. They came here with nothing, struggling to make a name for themselves while the greatest country in the world had profited off of their labor. My story is not the only one. Hundreds, thousands, of people share similar tales, but it’s easier to forget we exist.

And yet, they have claimed their culture, their values, and their history. We are so desensitized to the nature of war that all we think is destruction and death, and we do not spend enough time wondering about the aftermath of the surviving.

To see college admissions, workplace surveys, healthcare questionaries lump all groups of “Asian” together is a mind-boggling atrocity. At least understand what Asian means when you ask what we are.

I am not just Asian. An East Asian person is not just Asian. We have our own experiences, and we are not a monolith of one race.

I am Southeast Asian, I am Thai. To discredit my ethnicity by placing me in a monolith that is wildly disproportionate in terms of economics and numbers, is devaluing my experience and my struggles as a Southeast Asian person, and as a human.