Artist Responses to Anti-Asian Racism during the COVID-19 Pandemic
- By Michael Sakamoto
I discuss here two examples of Asian American artists whose recent activities have helped to frame public notions of Asian American identity in relation to other US racial groups. As we continue to hear the stereotypical refrain about Asian Americans enjoying power and privilege in the US, due to our risk-averse, upwardly mobile, and politically mainstream status, these artists put themselves on the line to demonstrate publicly the costs of such allegedly safe passage.
Novelist, scholar, and USC English Professor Viet Thanh Nguyen is a National Book Award finalist and Pulitzer Prize winner, and he publishes regularly in major news outlets. His COVID-era articles began in April with a New York Times opinion piece examining American mythologies that prop up the economic disparities and racial hierarchies of white supremacy, and how the pandemic’s dissolution of some of these structures may hopefully give the lie to much of their power. In June, Nguyen published a major essay in Time magazine, deconstructing the Asian American model minority stereotype, and how it creates inequality, both among Asian Americans as well as between them and other non-white populations.
Nguyen also wrote a scathing review of the Spike Lee film, Da 5 Bloods, detailing Lee’s horrifically cliché and racist depictions of Asians as passive females, emasculated males, along with a politically unsavvy peasant and working class. The film’s release and Nguyen’s review came only four weeks after Hmong police officer Tou Thao’s participation in the George Floyd killing, which had added to tensions between many Asian and African Americans around anti-blackness and white-adjacent complicity. Nguyen’s calling out of Lee’s use of American imperialist tropes to prop up his restorative justice narrative about Black American soldiers getting their due was also a call for justice—one that Asian American activists and scholars have raised since the 60s. Nguyen argues that anti-Asian racism is rooted in anti-Blackness and thus requires an intersectional response, and that Asian American success is measured in countless decades of labor and class exploitation, mass imprisonment, violence, and death, as well as cultural behavior modification, rooted in pre-defined and strictly enforced social roles.
Also, Nguyen’s social media presence, especially on Facebook, is where the legitimacy of his public profile is laid bare, showing the vulnerability of his more unfiltered public persona. While some posts affectionately point to his immigrant family and daily life experiences, he also speaks as a public intellectual, both on issues of anti-Asian racism and internalized white supremacy among Asian Americans, with all the concomitant positive and negative response.
Case in point, after Nguyen’s film review was published, he immediately received both substantial praise and severe reactions, including a critique by Frank—a white American male Facebook member who lives in Vietnam, married to a Vietnamese woman—saying Nguyen doesn’t understand Vietnam or his own culture. Four posts detailing his exchange with Frank yielded an increasing avalanche of responses, many of them instigated by Nguyen over the following two days, with no less than 1,390 comments of all stripes.
Alternatively, for two decades, Chinese American performance artist Kristina Wong has employed a self-deprecating, autobiographical character in performances that unravel everything from the patriarchal oppression of women of color, to the racialized and gendered stigma around mental health, to neoliberal globalization in postcolonial settings, and more. With the shutdown of live venues, Wong has turned to virtual tours for her two current shows.
Structured as a political election rally, Kristina Wong for Public Office takes the audience on a wild ride through Wong’s story about what it means to run for local office, about the history of voting and suffrage, about the impact artists can have on democracy, and about how a crazed LA Koreatown neighborhood councilmember—Wong herself—can, through trickster-like and shamelessly racialized performance of everyday life, magically get voted in and then get her constituency to vote to abolish ICE.
Most recently, directly in response to the pandemic, Wong is developing Kristina Wong, Sweatshop Overlord. Here she tells the real life story of how she developed the Auntie Sewing Squad, a network of volunteers sewing masks for marginalized and at-risk communities nationwide. The show is structured as moments out of her daily life, hunched over her Hello Kitty sewing machine, handing armloads of masks to PPE-deprived frontline workers, packing vanloads of supplies for the Navajo Nation, and other travails in the life of an unpaid, non-governmental privateer, contracted by no one.
As always, Wong’s identity and body are on the line, blurring the stage and real life, as when her character states:
I swear to god, the next global pandemic, i’m going to be the one binge-watching Netflix while the rest of you sew masks.
I didn’t actually wear a mask in February because I was trying to protect myself. Not from the virus, but from being the target of harassment and assault.
It doesn’t matter if I’m a third-generation Chinese American. It doesn’t matter that this virus was caused by a bat and doesn’t have a nationality.
Perhaps ironically/not ironically, this project is shaping up to be one of the most successful of Wong’s career, at least in notoriety, with appearances on CNN, Good Morning America, and other outlets, plus a book deal with University of California Press, and a film commission from the renowned music group, Kronos Quartet.
In conclusion: Both Nguyen and Wong are respected figures, and yet they still enthusiastically allow themselves publicly to embody a wide range of racialized perceptions and projections of Asian American identity. Perhaps they do so precisely because becoming the raw object itself of beauty and horror may be one of the only effective ways to reveal and problematize the chaotic public discourse by which stereotypes and racism are perpetuated.
Michael Sakamoto is Director of the Asian/Asian American Arts and Culture Program and Interim Director of Programming at the UMass Amherst Fine Arts Center.
