Identity, history, community, and the ideas shaping how Asian Americans understand themselves and are seen by others. From debates in group chats and at family dinners to the longer arc of Asian American history, this is where those threads come together.
Asian American code-switching is the practice of adjusting language, tone, behavior, and self-presentation depending on the social context. For many Asian Americans in professional environments, it is not an occasional adaptation but a constant, exhausting performance — a daily recalibration of how much of themselves to reveal, suppress, or amplify in order to be read…
Somewhere in the last five years, “Wasian” entered the cultural vocabulary. The portmanteau — White and Asian — started as community shorthand, became a TikTok phenomenon, and is now a lens through which American media is being read and reread. The celebrities claimed as Wasian: Olivia Rodrigo, Lana Condor, Keanu Reeves, Awkwafina’s characters, the entire…
The perpetual foreigner stereotype is one of the most persistent forces in Asian American life. Despite generations of American-born Asian Americans — families that have been here for five or six generations — the question “Where are you really from?” remains a fixture of daily life for millions of people. The perpetual foreigner experience tells…
The Asian American independent voter is a growing reality that defies easy categorization. For decades, Asian Americans were treated as a monolithic voting bloc — first assumed to lean Republican due to small-business ownership and social conservatism, then reliably Democratic after the 1990s. Neither assumption was ever quite right. And today, as the Asian American…
Asian American leaving religion is happening across communities — quietly, incrementally, often invisibly. Asian Americans leaving their parents’ religions rarely do it dramatically. The conversation usually doesn’t happen all at once. It happens in small defections — skipping the service, not correcting someone who assumes you still practice, giving vague answers when relatives ask about…
Asian American mental health is a crisis hiding in plain sight. Asian Americans have the lowest rates of mental health service utilization of any racial group in the United States. This is not because Asian Americans have fewer mental health needs — the data suggests the opposite. It is because of a specific set of…
Saving face Asian American culture imposes a specific burden that is rarely named directly. For Asian Americans, saving face is not just a social norm — it is a moral framework and, often, an invisible tax. There is no exact English translation for “saving face.” The closest approximation is something like “preserving one’s dignity in…
The model minority myth is most often encountered as a compliment. Asian Americans are hardworking, they’re told. Academically successful. Quiet, law-abiding, professionally accomplished. The model minority. What’s the problem? The problem, it turns out, is everything — and it starts with where the myth came from, which has almost nothing to do with Asian Americans…