I remember when my dad and I went to a basketball game at the peak of Linsanity—Jeremy Lin was leading a turnaround of the New York Knicks in early 2012. The game was close — the Knicks playing the Mavericks — and Lin made clutch play after clutch play in the fourth quarter a year against the defending champions.
It was the last time I saw my dad leap out of his seat in excitement.
I rose up too in the contagious applause. It was the first time I saw someone who looked like me dominate in a pro sport in America. It motivated me to press forward in my journey as a runner, working hard to defy a stereotype that I worked against my entire childhood:
Asians weren’t athletic.
Yao Ming came before Jeremy Lin to dominate the NBA as well, but there’s a distinction between someone who’s Chinese and someone who’s Asian-American, as any person on either side of the divide can tell you.
Asian immigrants tend to be more comfortable in their own skin when they don’t assimilate but Asian-Americans are in a constant state of flux, trying to forge their own identities, whether it’s staying true to traditional morals and cultures or trying to steer clear of them and assimilating to American values.
I am part of the latter category—someone who’d always been trying to counter the mold set before me. And it wasn’t only that I saw very few representations of Asians in pro sports, but the constant steeping in narratives and stereotypes that Asians weren’t meant for sports.
I was told throughout my childhood that Asians weren’t athletic, particularly by my parents who had me focus on school much more than sports. I heeded a message that I wasn’t supposed to be an athlete or display physical prowess to any degree; I heeded the narrative that Asians were simply genetically inferior.
But I wanted to shape my body in a way that defied the well-trod cliche of the Asian nerd who only cared about school and video games.
Some argue that the absence of Asians in sports is a product of internalized racism—Asians exist in a dangerous feedback loop, where the belief that we don’t belong in the arena or living an embodied existence prevents them from pursuing sports and athletics. Thus Asians are conspicuously nonexistent from the courts and fields, and pursuing them makes you an anomaly. And around and around we go.
I can only speak for myself but I became an athlete—a runner—to be different, to flout the stereotype. I didn’t do it to be better than anyone or special, but I did want to differentiate myself from the international Asians growing up, derogatorily called FOBs (Fresh Off the Boats).
And meanwhile, my newfound activity was met with racial ugliness from another angle. I distinctly remember the primary reason why relatives urge me not to run too much:
“Ryan, you don’t want to run so much because you don’t want to become too dark. You don’t want to become too black.”
I often think of being in China — and predominantly Asian environments — and seeing people use umbrellas while in the sun. Their attempts to avoid becoming too dark—their attempts to avoid becoming too black.
I loved them because they were family, but I remember the disgust at their implication—being white was better. Being white was good.
And of course, it’s important to note that anti-black or dark skin racism isn’t simply an American or Chinese thing: it’s pervasive across the world. I remember a friend from college visiting Japan for a year, who grew completely dismayed and depressed at the anti-black racism in Japan. Anti-black racism in Brazil results in a huge economic gulf between the country’s white and black populations as well.
And it’s not solely a race issue either — despite the horribly racist detergent ad in China of a black man going into the washing machine, and turning Chinese “once clean.” To be tan in China is to look like you’ve been working the farms all day, so being too dark is just as much an issue of class.
My body has become a battleground for countering this messaging. I religiously went to cross country practice and I never used sunscreen — and I still don’t — because I operate under the assumption that sunscreen is a white people thing, and I don’t care if I’m wrong. I will stand by the symbolism and my dark-skinned pride to my detriment. To my death.
…
Over the years I’ve rarely complained about racism against Asian-Americans because I always felt the discussions to be un-nuanced and somehow ungrateful at the overall status of Asians in American society. Asians are disproportionately highly educated — they’re doctors, research scientists, and professionals of all kinds. (As but one example, the Census Bureau found that the median household income for Asians in 2018 was $78,000—exceeding all other races—and Black families by more than $40,000.) If America were truly a meritocracy, it would point to Asians as its towering paragons —living breathing examples of how working hard can grant you the American dream.
(And it certainly doesn’t help that the foremost divisive conversation among Asians is whether affirmative action is racist against Asians. My friends who engage in these discussions still go to college, and argue about whether elite institutions like Harvard or Yale discriminate against Asian acceptance.)
…
I am not Asian. I am Asian-American, and there are parts of traditional—patriarchal — Asian culture and communities l that I plan to leave in the dust, for the sake of my family and kids in the future. I refuse to abide by the standard of saving face and preserving images to avoid any sort of perceived weakness or vulnerability. I refuse to raise my kids in a house where it’s acceptable to resort to an “ends justify the means” mentality, where anything and everything is sacrificed on the altar of achieving a goal, of getting good grades, getting into an elite college.
I’m a runner as an act of rebellion against my own internalized racism, against the traditional models of what being Asian means and against the dangerous gold standard of whiteness.
I have set out to start a new standard and a new normal. And as I write this article about my body as a means of rejecting racism, I admit I don’t know exactly where I’m going. I only know I don’t want there to be any limits on what people who think like me and look like me can do.
And that’s why I decided to run.
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Previously published on Medium.com.
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