Chewing Through The Bamboo Ceiling
The struggle to find an Asian American identity.
Earlier today, Twitter burst into flames over The Hollywood Reporter’s use of the term “bamboo ceiling” when addressing the historic Oscar nominations of several Asian American folks in the film industry. I’m not gonna bother recapping the whole debacle, because much of it was white performative allyship, which helps no one. But I do want to talk about the AAPI response, which is the more important conversation here.
“Bamboo ceiling,” for those not in the know, was a term coined by an Asian American woman to define the AAPI experience of being shut out of leadership and management positions. The model minority myth and other racist fables have been hard at work for the past several decades in making everyone believe that Asian Americans are the perfect little worker bees, efficient, silent, and compliant, with no creative thoughts or dreams of their own. If you think I’m being harsh, well, I’m only describing my entire professional career. But I, for one, am a democratic socialist, so frankly I don’t care about Asian American corporate leadership. Not just because I don’t think that oppressors who look like me are going to solve any problems around racism (Audre Lorde: “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”), but also because a system specifically built to be racist will never be anti-racist. The “bamboo ceiling” (or for that matter, any other type of “ceiling”) cannot be broken, because it was never meant to be broken. White men, you must remember, control the building we live in. When we reach the top floor, they’ll respond by moving the ceiling higher. They always have.
Look, I’m not going to say these Oscar noms were completely unimportant. I’m very proud of all of the POC who were nominated for awards this year. Their artistry, of course, is one impressive thing, but I also know how difficult it is to fight the white supremacist machine of Hollywood and even get anything on the table and out the door to begin with.
But I also want the conversation about representation to go beyond just that. Representation is maybe just 1% of the racism pie. I know the percentage is that small because of the way white people love and appropriate Black culture, and yet allow the murders of Black people to happen every day in our streets just because “defund the police” sounds like harsh messaging. (It should be “abolish the police,” by the way.)
I have not yet spoken publicly about the rise of anti-Asian hate crimes in the past year, mainly because I have nothing new to say about it. Plenty of smarter, more educated people than me have already said their piece, and my only desire right now is to amplify those who are (in my individual opinion) bringing up the real important questions and issues and not simply braying loudly about attention. The other, smaller reason is that I experienced it myself last year. In the grand scheme of things, being spit on barely feels like a crime. But I don’t know what to make of the fact that my assailant was a Brown man, nor that it happened blocks away from my own home. These are questions I’m not comfortable facing yet. I’m a natural coward, I’ll give you that, but this one incident made me afraid to leave my building for months on end, and even now, I’m wary of anyone walking towards me. I can say #StopAsianHate as much as I want, but it won’t protect me from possible physical harm any time I leave my building from here on out.
This is the reality that AAPI folks live in now. Yes, I know that anti-Asian hate crimes have been virulent throughout American history; I’ve read the crowdsourced timelines on Twitter and have spoken about it myself in the past. But statistically speaking, it seems that it is now exponentially much more dangerous to walk around in the bodies we inhabit. This is a peril that many AAPI my age, especially those of East Asian descent, have fortunately been able to sidestep, but one that our Black and Brown compatriots have gotten killed for. It’s the first time many AAPI alive today, who did not live through the protests of the 1960s or 70s, have had to experience this particular danger, and it’s shocked a lot of us to our core. I’ve said before that for most East Asian Americans, for whom invisibility was our biggest issue, representation has become our pet cause to a damn fault. And I think that it’s again applicable in this case. #StopAsianHate and similar hashtags are campaigns for visibility. And while representation and visibility are important, it’s only the tip of a much larger iceberg that resides underneath, one comprised of class, colonialism, ancestral trauma, colorism and anti-Blackness, and so much more that I cannot fill in the scope of a single essay.
So, why even bring all this up in a discussion about the term “bamboo ceiling?” Well, chiefly because it frames the AAPI experience through the lens of whiteness while eliding all other issues in and around our community. One of the strong arguments is that it’s a term that tokenizes ourselves — even the inclusion of the word “bamboo” is crude to many AAPI folks’ ears. It reduces us to objects and images rather than fully lived human experiences. Oftentimes we do it completely subconsciously. There’s a joke about how Asian American (and other diaspora) poets always write about mangos, but there’s some truth in a joke, isn’t there? Don’t get me wrong, I love mangos, and I love all of those poems about mangos, but there’s also something about mangos that conjures up something instantly exotic in a white reader’s mind.
I have a hunch where this comes from — many of us, after years of pressure to assimilate into white culture, find freedom and release in our mother cultures. There’s a community already built around our mother cultures, and it feels like for the first time that there are people who actually understand us. For some, there’s also the increased exposure to exactly how white supremacy and the US has harmed people of color, and you feel increasingly like you’re living in a hostile and abusive environment. So the common touchpoints of your mother culture become comforting to you, and media will reinforce those images, those touchpoints. Soon it will do the mental reconfiguration for you, so you too repeat the same images, because it speaks of shared experience, it’s redolent of community.
Kim Tran made a good point on Twitter recently: many AAPI folks don’t have the “lunchbox moment.” It made me remember that actually, despite growing up in the white suburbs, I didn’t have one either. No one around me seemed to care what I ate. I tried Lunchables a few times because the other kids had it, but didn’t see what the big deal was. In middle school, we paid for lunch at the cafeteria, so we all found some kind of solidarity in the cardboard-tasting French bread pizzas. Lunchtime was traumatizing for other reasons, but not because of my ethnic food. And I’d kind of forgotten about it, because of the dominant narrative.
Look, I’m not really criticizing or blaming anyone here. To some extent, we all tokenize ourselves and get swept up in these grand narratives that are popular in our communities. But what is the “lunchbox moment” except to view ourselves in contrast to whiteness? And what about the jars of kimchi or Sichuan chili oil I find at organic grocery stores that are made by Asian Americans, but are packaged in the minimalistic design that’s so appealing to white people?
I think Jay Caspian Kang hits on something important in this op-ed: at present moment, the AAPI community at large is trying to figure out what conversations we should even be having (though, keep in mind, many people have been doing the grassroots, solidarity, and education work for years), and is feeling out the language around these conversations. To me, one of the questions we should be answering is that of AAPI identity. We are not on a spectrum between whiteness and Blackness, as many have led us to believe, we (as is every ethnic minority) are our own thing, a circle that sometimes overlaps with whiteness and Blackness, like a Venn diagram. And like every ethnic minority, we experience our own strata, layered with various forms of intracommunity privilege and oppression. But white supremacy has often pitted us against the Black community and forced us to view ourselves through a white lens; it feels as though we have very few definitions of what being AAPI is outside of whiteness or Blackness.
This is what we mean when we say even our imaginations have been colonized. In a liberated world, who would we be? Who are we outside the construct of white-approved achievement, what are we beyond the white gaze? Of course, we cannot disentangle ourselves from an Americanized experience; to this day, I am still the most well-read in Western works of literature by dead white men, and I joke at my own expense that white men tend to hate me because I understand them better than they do. This was not an educational environment I got to choose, though in my adult life I am working every day to expand my horizons in every direction. But the colonizers got a headstart. What I am suggesting is somehow holding this American experience without being beholden to it. Yes, I love cowboy shit, but yes, I learned about the history of Chinese and other Asian immigrants in the American West and know where our skeletons lie on the map. Yes, sometimes I write like a Victorian ghost, but as a semi-bilingual writer, I get to break the English language to express something closer to my originally Mandarin mind, and I get to do this every day, over and over again, to my own satisfaction (and trust me, I will never be satisfied). These are very facile and sophomoric examples, I know, maybe not very good examples at all, but the point is, I am also trying to figure out myself what this “AAPI identity” I speak of is. It will come in many forms, in as many AAPI people as there are in the world, but when we find it, I promise that it will come as a rainbow that arches far outside the realm of white supremacy and capitalism.
We don’t need to break through the bamboo ceiling. I believe in much greater things than that. I look forward to the day we get to walk hand in hand out of the building, and create something more beautiful than any one of us could have dreamed of.
Hi, it's me, your local dumb bitch who forgot about this platform being anti-LGBT and posted a whole anti-capitalism and anti-white-supremacist thing on a platform monetarily supporting those who are capitalist white supremacists. There's a few writers who are talking about Substack alternatives, so I'll stick around to see how those conversations pan out. It was a pain in the ass getting you all here to begin with, lmao, but that's a concern for a later day, I suppose. In any case, for anyone reading the comments, I apologize for the pretty poor timing of this post. And thanks for reading.