Asian-ness

I started my weekend answering written questions about my associations with the word "Asian", a response to a biweekly mailblog I receive from Jeff Yang, a columnist for SFGate.com. He was asking his readership to tell him what "Asian" meant to them, and here is an excerpt from my candid response:

1. Do you think of yourself as Asian? Why or why not? Do your parents? When was the first time you referred to yourself as 'Asian'?

"I don't think I ever refer to myself as Asian except in jest, as in, "Well, *I* can say that because I'm Asian," or more commonly, "That's SO Asian," but I've not found many other occasions to really to identify myself or anything else as Asian, at least verbally,

"I feel a certain amount of guilt (now "guilt," THAT is "Asian" for you) about not using the term more often, given that I've spent the last three years trying to cultivate a more multi-cultural post-graduate persona for myself. The fact of the matter is, though, that when you are surrounded by non-Asians all day, at a school, or at work, at home, you don't think about the area of the world from which you come, all that much,

"Come to think of it, in my adult life, I think I use 'Asian' most frequently when my friends and I have the distinct sense that I'm being courted because I am Asian-looking. I believe 'Asian persuasion' is the term for a man who finds himself in the custom of only dating or pursuing young Asian things, and of course there's also the more racially-loaded, 'Yellow fever.' I hear it, and prescribe it to myself, quite often. It's a painful insecurity, and in the past I have been skeptical of any person's motives, if they are perfectly nice, if they've dated someone Asian directly before seeing me."

2. Stream of consciousness: What ideas immediately come to mind when you think of the word Asian?

"My idea of this had changed a great deal since spending actual time on the continent of Asia. Before, I'd probably say it reminded me of crowded market streets, bargaining, the white noise of Cantonese and Mandarin, thriftiness, queue-cutting, spitting, red envelopes, lazy susans, wedding banquets, white rice, cheong-sams, porcelain, mishandling chopsticks, my gambling grandfather, one-room tenement apartments, hand-me-down children's clothes and black-and-white photos,
"Now, I'd say it reminded me of the different shades of brown -- no, not yellow -- that Asians get in the sun. It reminds me that it's normal in Asia to keep one's skin as pale as possible by exhaustively using parasols and wearing full-length jeans on the beach in the summer. It makes me think of linen, bicycles, bicycles, bicycles, grime, smog, minibuses, overcrowded train cars, chicken bones, rice paddies, terracotta shingles, woven baskets, gorgeous flight attendants, orchids blossoms, cherry blossoms, temples, mosques, incense, banyan trees, deserts, fortresses and animal intestines soaked in brine."

I've added a couple of photos I took while I was away in Asia, the first during Songkran (Thai New Year) of a boy at the Royal Palace in Bangkok, and the second of young boys outside Jama Masjid (Old Mosque) in Delhi, India.