8 Asian American Pacific Islander Creatives on the State of Representation

"I think our scattered representation is far from perfect, but it’s sweet and aching and somehow defiant progress."
Image may contain Collage Advertisement Poster Human Person Clothing Apparel Glasses Accessories and Accessory

While growing up in the American public school system, I learned certain things about Asian identity. First: that it was collapsible; other people neither knew nor cared about the distinctions between nationalities or ethnicities. Second: that the history of the region was defined solely through American colonialism or war, or otherwise as narratives condensed into a sidebar in a textbook.

But as I grew older, I began to engage with Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) history in a way that I’d never been taught. Part of this included learning about the Asian American Movement that began in the 1960s. Another part of this was thinking critically about AAPI identity in dialogue with colorism, anti-blackness, and holdover cultural conservativeness.

And yet another part was learning that AAPI heritage was already being examined in America, and celebrated during Asian Pacific American Heritage Month. I’d never grown up knowing that May was anything special for AAPI communities; it simply wasn’t taught or shared, part of a larger erasure of AAPI identity. So in celebration of APA Heritage Month, I’ve asked eight AAPI creatives to share their work, their perceptions of representation and visibility, and how their respective creative fields can improve in both regards. After all, the first step to understanding your place in the world is to see others like you, already in it.

Soleil Ho, 29, Vietnamese American, she/her, chef, podcaster, and writer

Representation is validation. Seeing yourself and your experiences reflected in culture is incredibly affirming, because then you know you’re not alone: someone else has seen what you’ve seen, has felt what you've felt.

Within the food writing world, I’ve seen so much change since I started writing eight years ago. The conversations we’ve had among ourselves about food appropriation, family histories, and immigrant and refugee narratives are now appearing with more frequency in mainstream publications. There are a lot more AAPI folks in the writing business, which means our stories have more opportunities to get told. At the same time, there are still "Asian salads” on menus across the United States; I still don’t get that.

I think AAPI people need to push for more than our own representation though. We need to make sure that, just because we get a little piece of the pie, we don’t consider our jobs done with regard to equity, with regard to our Black and brown peers who are also struggling. Because it’s easy to fall prey to the idea that just because you have some AAPI representation on a masthead or arts committee, the work of diversification is done. But the truth is that AAPI visibility should never be the sole endgame for us, because then we run the risk of perpetuating the same marginalization that we’re fighting against.

Creative crushes: Amanda Yee, the chef and writer behind the upcoming Copenhagen restaurant, The Blues Woman; Stacey Tran, poet and organizer of the Tender Table storytelling series in Portland, OR; Mazzy Chiu, the super-cute and capable toddler star of The Mazzy Show, a online cooking video series.

Ryan Lee Wong, 29, Chinese and Korean American, he/him and they, writer and cultural organizer

When people say representation and visibility, I wonder who are we representing ourselves to, and why. I suspect that a lot of times, because it is the default definition of a person in American society, "representation" means representation to a white, middle-class spectator. I'm not interested in fighting for a share of that limited market, or jockeying for a visibility slot.

I believe that there is an audience, a community, a home, for every voice, and that we don't need to rely on others to represent us. I want to be in a community that wants to see me and challenge me, and in turn talk to and inspire me. That's visibility.

For example, a lot of my work has been around reinvigorating the archive of early Asian America. The idea of Asian American (later AAPI) was actually born out of social movements in the 1960s and 70s. By organizing exhibitions like Serve the People and Roots

, I want to make more visible — to the people who need it — the story of how organizing, art, social services, and scholarship formed Asian America, to strengthen a sense of AAPI lineage.

AAPI representation and visibility in American pop culture is always changing, and it is always regressing. I think pop culture manifests underlying social forces. So, for example, the popular image of the heathen, lecherous, Chinese horde in the late 19th century reflected fears around white identity and labor shortages. The popular rhetoric and imaging today around Muslims, South Asians, and to a lesser extent East Asians reflect anxieties around white identity and labor (again!) with the added narratives of globalization and perceived terrorism.

In terms of pop culture, something unique about this moment is the fantastic cultural criticism. So, if something appalling like whitewashing in Ghost in The Shell happens, but you have a whole counter-narrative on social media and traditional media that actually has fun skewering and dismantling it. In my view, the point isn’t necessarily that the movie will be banned, or that something like this will never happen again — if I expected that to happen, I’d be exhausted. The point is to have fun conversations, and to inspire ourselves to pursue our own creative avenues.

I’ve met a lot of AAPI-identified visual artists who have a lot of anxiety around their identities. We had this moment in the 80s and 90s when “identity politics” was a major conversation in museums, galleries, and universities. The term was so confused and abused that I think it scared a lot of people away from any conversation around race, gender, class, and other power relations. That if you touch those topics, you’ll be relegated to some cultural ghetto.

To be clear: I’m not interested in “identity” as some genetic-cultural force that binds a group, e.g. Asian people. I’m interested in how history, power, migration, money, and other intricate forces like that have shaped us. To pretend those forces don’t influence us is, in fact, to reinforce their power to define and control and limit us. I think there’s a huge archive of memory, emotion, and history for AAPI artists to work through—it’s already happening, but it can’t happen soon enough.

Creative crushes: I'm constantly fascinated by Tehching Hsieh's year-long pieces —to me, they’re experiments in impossible. I love Martin Wong’s tender, ruinous paintings of New York life. I’m very happy to call the artist Tomie Arai a friend — she is brilliant at inviting people’s stories into public spaces. Writers like Ruth Ozeki and Jessica Hagedorn show how diaspora can find expression in the novel. All the poets and writers of Kundiman. And my friends — they invite me to be the fullest artist and person I can be.

Quyên Nguyen-Le, 25, Vietnamese American, they/them, filmmaker

As a filmmaker, "representation" and "visibility" are such a double-edged swords for me: On the one hand, I'm done with being "visible." Because visibility implies that the problem is not structural and it puts it on the person being oppressed to be seen or heard by their oppressors, when the issue itself is that there is oppression in the first place! And being a queer person, too, visibility can literally put your life at risk. So it's important for me to re-frame visibility with more personal agency: visible to whom? In what context?

On the other hand, representation does matter to me because media is still a big way in which people learn about ourselves and one another. I often use this metaphor: empowered people are always saying, "If you don't love yourself, how will you love anyone else?" and I'm out here like, "If no one shows you how to love yourself, if you have never seen it modeled anywhere, then how the heck are you supposed to know that it is even a possibility

Speaking specifically to Southeast Asian representation, I think nowadays there is this dangerous use of Southeast Asian refugees against newer refugees to the U.S. from the Middle East in mainstream media. We've kind of been enveloped into this larger model minority discourse of apolitical "good" refugees who have successfully assimilated to American culture in order to create an imagination of some inclusive multicultural society that doesn't acknowledge our country's role in creating these refugee situations in the first place.

I'm not really qualified to speak about South Asian, Central Asian, or Pacific Islander representation, I think. (But my buddy Conrad can speak to that last part.)

The Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival recently launched their festival with a "No White-Washing Here" slogan while also curating a lot of content that highlights the talent and diversity within Asian Pacific community as well as building coalitions with other communities, for example, highlighting Black-Asian shared history in Los Angeles' Little Tokyo.

So for me, this is an important change that I'd like to see more often: we not only react; we simultaneously uplift the content that already exists within our community and actively building bridges with others communities.

Creative crushes: Ah, so many inspirations! I really have so much respect for so many independent filmmakers who are out here making stuff despite all the racism. It's already hard to be creative, let alone when you're up against all these other things. But beyond just their amazing work as individuals, I really admire and respect artists who show up for and actively invest in building other artists: filmmaker Andrew Ahn, Poets Arianna Lady Basco and Beau Sia, Artist/Poet Jess X Snow, and of course the team at Visual Communications who put on the aforementioned LA Asian Pacific Film Festival.

Jay Som (Melina Duterte), 22, Filipino American, she/her, musician

Ebru Yildiz

It’s very important to have representation and visibility; I do tend to get boxed into the indie world of music. “Oh, she’s a bedroom, dream pop artist, and falls under the realm of indie rock.” It is absurdly white male; there’s no hiding that, it’s there. Even as a woman, you have to work ten times harder to be taken hilariously. If you are also a woman of color, there’s more to it. It’s so important for listeners to see someone who looks like them, someone who has a platform to express their art and different perspectives. Especially now, in this extremely political climate.

I recently went on tour with Mitski and Japanese Breakfast. We’re constantly compared to each other even though we’re completely different people and make different music. But we’re all Asian American women on one bill for a tour, and it’s kind of like a selling point for certain interviews and pitches. It’s hard not to feel tokenized, for this small part of why you’re doing what you’re doing. It’s not not important, but when it becomes the focal point of some story or interview, just because it’s interesting to them, it just gets a little tiring.

I’ve noticed that, specifically in the movie and TV industries, for a very long time, I grew up thinking not seeing people who looked like me was heartbreaking, and I was always wishing to see a character who was normal, who wasn’t some overly stereotypical Asian person, with a really forced accent and weird personality, which is super extra and frankly, insulting. It makes me respect other Asians in different entertainment industries even more, after what I’ve been going through lately too. It’s really hard out there!

Especially last year but mostly this year, there are more non-white males that are taking over the music industry right now. I remember reading a thing about indie being dead, and how it was alive in 2009 when Grizzly Bear, Fleet Foxes, and Animal Collective were around. Yeah, that’s because it was 2009, and now it’s 2017 with people like Downtown Boys and Priests, all these amazing queer women and people of color making music that’s political, or mundane and normal. Everywhere I see, even in concerts, there are so many bands popping up who are representing so many people. It’s honestly like a dream, and I’m so happy to be seeing that evolve. It can only get better from here too.

Creative crushes: My brother is an artist, and he works with other Pacific Islander, Asian descent because he wants to be supportive of people in our culture who live in America. I look up to my brother. I also just started thinking about him again — Eddie Huang. I really look up to him because of his book, Fresh Off the Boat. I thought it was really cool to read because like, I totally understand what he’s talking about. I hope that other people take it in.

Teresa Mathew, 24, Indian American, she/her/hers, writer & photojournalist

Representation means feeling that your stories, your family, your skin and your blood are out there in the world, mirrored. It’s not enough to stick a minority on a screen and count that as a win – and I think that’s where so many conversations about diversity fall flat.

To me, visibility is synonymous with diversity — that you’re out there, you’re seen — but I don’t want to discount the power of that. I still remember seeing Neelam Gil in an Abercrombie & Fitch ad. She’s a brown girl who isn’t a replica of the typical Bollywood archetype Americans find digestible, and I just stared at her and thought, "So we can be beautiful too?" Visibility makes you feel less alone. But representation goes one step beyond visibility. It helps you feel that your story is worth telling.

There's a wonderful recent piece from Nieman which articulates the importance of diversity in photojournalism and in photo editing, and the perspectives and framing that diversity allows. While the article mainly focuses on African-American and African communities, much of it also applies to AAPI representation.

Whitewashing is still everywhere! And each time there’s an egregious example – Aloha, Ghost in the Shell, Ni’ihau – there’s an incredible backlash. Audiences are demanding better and more representative stories. Yet Hollywood persists in casting white actors and actresses in these roles anyway, which is... well, small-minded would be a nice way of putting it. Those in the AAPI community are rarely allowed to be powerhouses in film or helm their own franchises.

There’s a small moment in the first season of Master of None where they’re talking about Brian (Kelvin Yu) having no problem getting girls, and it struck me as I watched that I had never really seen an Asian American man rendered that way on television before: as straightforwardly attractive. I do think that increasingly, when we are on screen, it’s getting better – especially on TV. Hasan Minaj just hosted the White House Correspondent’s Dinner, and Homecoming King was one of the most resonant shows I’ve ever watched. Lucy Liu is Joan Watson. Mindy Kaling is the patron saint of young brown girls. Just about every episode of Master of None is a love letter and a testament to this kind of visibility and representation.

Honestly, in the wake of November, it has felt too easy to believe that a large part of the country has no interest in these stories, or in seeing us on TV. And I think our scattered representation is far from perfect. But it’s sweet and aching and somehow defiant progress.

I’d love to see more Asian and Asian American photojournalists and photo editors. Most of the photo spaces I have worked in have been overwhelmingly white. So much of succeeding in photojournalism boils down to who you know and which editors you can connect with, and it can be difficult to have our work seen and get assignments if white editors are unwilling to look beyond people in their own circles. I remember, in college, being the only Asian-American photographer on football and basketball sidelines. I was usually the only non-white photographer and often the only female. And that was unfortunate and somewhat alienating. There should be more of us.

In journalism at large I frequently come up against two schools of thought: one that states only people from a certain minority group should be allowed to report on that group, and another that believes minority reporters would be too biased to report on their own communities. I think both stances are too rigid. But I do think that the right to shoot needs to be earned – through time spent and customs learned. It can be all too easy to turn voyeuristic, especially with a camera, especially if you’ve been raised in a society that doesn’t usually give the fullness of dignity and complexity to Asian/minority stories. That can lead to cutting India, for example, only into scenes of abject poverty or almost lurid technicolor. And I think that as our ideas of objectivity shift a little bit, we need to give people more room to report on their own culture. After all, whiteness is not a blank, objective slate; it has its own kind of bias.

Creative crushes: Writers and poets Jenny Zhang, Carlina Duan, Jennifer Choi, and Scaachi Koul. In TV and film Mindy Kaling, Constance Wu, Aziz Ansari, Riz Ahmed, and Hasan Minhaj.

Annie Mok, 29, Irish/Chinese/Colombian, she/her/hers, comic book creator and writer

Representation and visibility means Asian characters by Asian creators in comics.

I see movies like Rogue One with Asian protagonists in space, but I also see aggressive whitewashing in movies like Ghost in the Shell. I'd like to see more visibility and money for queer and trans AAPI artists.

Creative crushes: Jillian Tamaki, Larissa Pham, Sloane Leong, Michael DeForge, Maré Odomo, Kris Mukai, Elisha Lim, Vivek Shraya.

Krista Suh, 29, half-Korean, half-Chinese, all-American. she/her, writer (oftentimes screenwriter), artist

The Pussyhat Project was all about visibility, and I think it's no accident that I created it after years of being afraid of speaking up and being visible, it took a LOT of work to get to a place where I could speak up fearlessly, and I want to help other women do the same. There's a stereotype that women should be demure and quiet and put in their place. Not to mention the stereotype that Asian Americans are model minorities that excel within the system while not making waves. I got a double whammy of both types of pressures. For me, representation and visibility are a sign that society has evolved into providing safety for all kinds of people, I'm talking physical safety as well as safety of self-expression. To me, it's not true representation if we have one sole AAPI person who is not allowed to make a single mistake. To be held to perfectionism is not true representation. If we fear being seen as any less than "perfect" then we haven't achieved true visibility.

Seeing Reggie on Riverdale or the male lead on Crazy Ex Girlfriend being played by an Asian American actor — this is awesome. It shows that there are Asian American men outside the stereotype of nerd. Fresh Off the Boat has great incisive humor and shows the intricacies of a Chinese American family. I think AAPI representation and visibility on screen humaniz​​es Asian Americans in our daily lives, and reduces the sense of "otherness."

As a screenwriter, I want to put more and more Asian American faces on screen — in TV, film, and web! And I want these characters to show the broad range of being human — i.e. they are not perfect, they are not one-note.

Politically, I hope the younger Asian American generation learn they can be activists too. There is a rich history of AAPI political activists, and whether you're familiar with them or not, know you are enough, you have what it takes to speak up in the political arena. I also think any creative act by a woman or a POC is inherently radical and political because the system is out to shame and silence us — so every time you speak up, every time you allow yourself to be visible, every time you write a tweet, a blog post, a song, a story - you are being politically active and probably inspiring another person out there to speak up as well.

Creative crushes: My friends Connie Lim (who is singer-songwriter MILCK) and Yumi Sakugawa (a healer and comic book artist) inspire me tremendously. We are LA-based AAPI artists who continually inspire and support each other. Even just a regular "hang-out" becomes pretty magical. I also love buying fashion by Asian/Asian American creatives, my current favorites are Rafe and Ivy Kirzhner NY, both Filipino American artists.

Lilian Chen, 27, Chinese American, she/her, Interaction Designer at YouTube

I want to relate to a character in mainstream media and pop culture beyond just race. This means that as an added layer above identifying with someone simply because they look like me, I need to connect with their narrative. This relatability factor should hold true for others besides myself too, meaning that representation cannot just halt at one archetype because that is not enough.

Interestingly enough, I don't pay too much attention to American pop culture and I have a hunch it's at least partially due to lack of representation. It's likely improved since my childhood, but I still see displeased articles about white-washing come up a bit too often for comfort. Since my youth, I've mostly invested my time in subcultures rooted in Asian culture as opposed to acknowledging pop culture. These days, I spend most of my time absorbing YouTube content. The majority of people I subscribe to are Asian women around my age range; aka people I can relate to and identify with. This is not coincidence.

I'd like to see more diverse narratives being showcased because not all Asians are the "same." I'd like to see better education on Asian and Asian American culture. To take it a step further, I just want to see a greater tolerance and awareness of other cultures that aren't one's own. Period.

Creative crushes: I don't really idolize any Asian/Asian American celebrities from an inspirational standpoint. Those who I consider my role models are actually just extraordinary, hard-working Asian women I met working in the design/tech and gaming industries. They are role models to me because they've accomplished so much yet are relatable enough to believe that I could one day grow into similar roles.

Related: 20 Asian Actors You May Not Know About, But Should

Check this out: