Play It Again, Asian Ken
The tall canvasser in a purple vest lurched toward me with an elbow bump. “Yo, Mister Ken!” he said. I had never seen him in my life.
Hailed by the wrong name, I was nevertheless an Asian American man wearing a black t-shirt in the summer of Barbenheimer, “Asian” Ken, as portrayed by Simu Liu, in cosplay. The canvasser on the street called me out as a walking meme, and I couldn’t help but feel that familiar vise-like grip: the double shame of being stereotyped and feeling helpless to do anything about it.
Times have changed. It’s not like people are still calling me Bruce Lee or Short Round. Asian representation in Hollywood has come a long way since Shredder in the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film. But recent waves of anti-Asian violence prove that we are too easily jolted from our dreams of equal dignity. All it takes is a slur, a stereotype repeated by an anonymous troll or an American president for the old racist tropes to emerge like a brood of cicadas.
With apologies to Simu Liu, it’s one thing to resemble an actor, another to be caricatured by race. Take it easy, some might say. I mean, you do kind of look like Asian Ken. It’s not racist. Simu Liu is hot! People’s good intentions aside, I am still a face card in a game of Concentration, matching the last Asian man they’ve seen. Worse yet, I am superimposed by a mascot, made palatable by an avatar: the way, according to others, I move about in this world.
I admit that had the canvasser been white, my response would have been more visceral, owing to the scars of racism that never seem to heal. But maybe because he was Black, I extended the benefit of the doubt, a knowing nod to the racial condescension we both endure, even if unequally. Like the time in an elevator years ago when I joked, “I know we all look alike,” to two Black women, strangers who upon finding an ID of an Asian man on the ground, assumed that it belonged to me.
“They say that about us, too,” one of the women said, prompting the three of us to laugh over our predicament, butts of the joke to the ever-present they. We then fell silent until the doors opened.
A similar quiet struck as I approached the unrequited elbow. Don’t take it so seriously, crooned that disembodied chorus in my head. Sweeping my suspicion under the rug of good intentions, I reciprocated the bump and carried on with my day.
§
An avatar is a manifestation of an idea, from the Sanskrit term connoting a deity descending from the heavens. Or, in James Cameron’s CGI mythos, an alien embodied to pass in a non-native world. Either way, it keeps with logic that avatars befit how Asians and other minorities have been imagined by the West. That is to say, since at least the Yellow Peril of the nineteenth century, Asians in the U.S. have been reduced to figments: the Oriental, the Coolie, the Chinaman. Images that embody the stereotypes that precede them, these caricatures translate what is inscrutable into the devil you know.
We make use of everyday avatars to signal collective identities of individuals, such as the Philanthropist, the Creative, the Free Thinker. For those who claim them, any negative associations are treated as mere quibbles that even add to their cachet. Yet, more insidious avatars dwell in our unconscious. In Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World, Naomi Klein explores the twinning of social identities and the fault lines beneath the virtues we signal. In turn, she delves into the doubling minorities still face from the majority that perceives them. “However much you distinguish yourself from the stereotypes associated with your kind,” Klein writes, “For the hater, you will always stand in as a representative of your despised group. You are not you; you are your ethnic/racial/religious double, and you can’t shake that double because you did not create it.” No matter how much minorities accomplish and set themselves apart, their racial avatars are always there to diminish their personhood. Shaped by lazy depictions in film and literature, these mascots in turn perpetuate stereotypes that never die.
As a latch-key kid raised by nineties media, I observed with uncritical eyes such depictions as Unhinged Korean Shopkeeper or Oriental Villain. Characters like Incoherent Immigrant were announced with a gong or the pentatonic “Chinaman lick.” These caricatures fit a mold for the stories they served: narratives that often centered the subjective lens on protagonists who were generally white. Films like Big Trouble in Little China were unabashedly on-the-nose.
And yet, I was American born, raised in a white California suburb. I rarely interrogated such portrayals, assuming that I was one with the audience squarely behind the Western lens. Even so, I couldn’t ignore the creeping discomfort that resurfaced each time a character who looked like me was mocked on screen. It was a discomfort that stemmed from a dissonance that would sharpen into relief only years later, when I would reconcile the Asian part of myself with the American.
§
A confession to the reader: my name is actually Ken. My middle name to be clear, after my father who emigrated from Korea in the sixties. Growing up, I wore the name like a hand-me-down, resenting the fact that while my older siblings were given Korean middle names, I was issued Kenneth, my father’s chosen American name of Gaelic origin. Kenny, as in Rogers or G. Ken, the name of our bald boomer neighbor with a penchant for Hawaiian shirts and Harleys. Shorn of Korean identity—even my surname was spelled like its German homophone—it was as if my name symbolized my parents’ assimilation, an Ebenezer of American belonging. In turn, I imagined Korea more as a history than a place, abstracted through black-and-white photos, folk tales, and knock-off brand-name clothes whenever my father would return from a trip to Seoul.
But though I was (middle-)named after my father, I was too afraid of him to see him as a role model. My earliest imprint of masculinity, Dad was a diminutive hothead, a child king whose temper was fueled by Tanqueray. He was a paint-maker who worked out of our garage, with a habit of slamming doors so hard my nerves were jangled for decades to come. While my childhood wasn’t entirely forlorn, my father ensured that whatever nostalgia I have of those years is shadowed by violence.
Still, a memory of him stands out like a dog-eared page, when, as an adolescent I saw him in that dark garage after a meeting with a customer with whom he’d attempted small talk in his broken English. My father looked especially sullen, hunched behind stacks of papers on his desk while a pale fluorescent light cast his profile in a jaundiced hue.
“He thinks I’m just some short Asian man,” he said, as if speaking to himself. I don’t think he realized I was watching him at that moment, but his words seared into my memory as an early lesson about masculinity and being othered in a white world. Despite being told that the sky’s the limit, my ambitions, my own body would be weighed down with shame. Though I would wince at how my father ingratiated himself to white men, though I would quietly rage at his drunken antics before and after my mother's death, it is in this moment that I wish I could summon all my past selves to defend his name.
§
From senior year of high school, when my identity ebbed away from my father, a memory resurfaces like jetsam from the sea: my face photoshopped on a promo for Fight Club, the 1999 film about an unnamed Narrator, played by Edward Norton, who descends into a cult of white male aggression thanks to its avatar nonpareil, Tyler Durden, played by Brad Pitt. In lieu of Pitt’s face was my grinning mug, which I had superimposed for a Spanish class project: a cheap gag for a senior mailing it in. I remember staring at the altered image in class, not so much inducing a fantasy as willing myself to believe, on behalf of my white classmates, the plausibility of my face in an American blockbuster.
The irony of that image is that in the years ahead, beyond college and the rites of cisgender masculinity, I too would have my own aspirational doppelganger, my own Tyler Durden. Instead of an individual, he would be a composite of men taken from film, literature, the places I worked. In the absence of an extraordinary mentor, I assembled the best parts of several mediocre ones to shape my mannerisms, my speech, even the way I walked.
My alter ego would be everything the Short Asian Man was not—witty, assertive, brimming with sex and savior faire. As Tyler Durden was to the Narrator, my own doppelganger of peak masculinity would chastise me for weakness, impugn me whenever I lacked charisma and resolve.
But unlike that Photoshopped image in Spanish class, I would not resemble the paragon I aspired to be. Born from cultural dissonance, my own imagined avatar, the Tyler Durden of my Korean American subconscious, was unmistakably white.
§
Fight Club, originally a novel by Chuck Palahniuk, seems like a story culled from Internet message boards. Aimless, insecure men neutered by late-stage capitalism, assigning tradition to virtues of virility and aggression. This vision of masculinity, from the alt-right to the mainstream, has been abetted as much by reactionary politics as by media portrayals of male violence as spectacle.
For a Korean American kid, consuming narratives of pop masculinity required a great deal of denial and dissociation. After all, the avatar they enfleshed, invariably white, depended on denigrating men who were not. In his book Geisha of a Different Kind, C. Winter Han describes the framing of Asian Americans vis-á-vis the white ideal. “Even when they are not the punch line,” writes Han, “Asian men are portrayed as having failed to masculine norms, especially when compared to white men.” For instance, in Fight Club Han notes that it is Pitt’s character who “saves” an enfeebled Asian clerk by helping him to achieve his goals and thus become a real man. However, these perceptions were rooted in American history: disenfranchising and alienating American immigration laws shunted Asian men into a first impression that they could never shake.
“Thus,” Han writes, “not being able to vote, work in masculine occupations, and marry women of any race contributed to the formation of a gendered Asian male in the white mind.” Feminized in film and literature, the Inscrutable Asian Man suffused popular narratives, not to mention the perpetual, and sometimes fatal, caricature of the Submissive and Sexualized Asian Woman.
Supposing I could flatten time and expose my younger self to the modern, relative plenitude of Asian narratives in media, would he still cling to the tired molds of American masculinity? Would he still be immersed in the cisgender aesthetics of American pop culture or of the lingering Confucian patriarchy in Asian men? Perhaps, despite the advances in diversity, he would lament the unequal footing Asian Americans still have with white counterparts in popular media. That, like Sessue Hayakawa, the 1920s actor targeted by anti-miscegenation laws, Asian men are still emasculated in mainstream roles. Or, that while male Marvel superheroes are paired with romantic partners, Simu Liu’s Shang Chi is given a “friend.”
Even so, I wonder if that would change anything at all, whether there would be another path I could have taken, undeterred by American narratives of exclusion. Would another nurture be possible, resonating more with my Korean nature? That is, could I have realized a dignity beyond a socialized masculinity?
Or, as Norton’s unnamed Narrator asks, “If you wake up at a different time in a different place, could you wake up as a different person?
§
In the summer of 2002, I arrived in a different Korea than the one my father left. With his side of the family tree severed by the 38th parallel, I was in search of my mother's roots, paved somewhere beneath the sprawl of postwar Seoul. Along with the memories she shared before her passing eight years prior—half-forgotten stories from a past life—I carried on a folded piece of paper, the phone number of her younger brother: my uncle whom I had only known from a faded photograph, taken from a different time, a different place.
Though I had arrived in the land of my heritage, this was to be no homecoming.
Through his smudged rear-view mirror, the cab driver was watching me, his face pouched with overwork. I got used to stares ever since I touched down in Seoul; because of the way I spoke, the way I walked, I elicited a minor irritation at the sight of another gyopo—a child of the diaspora returning to Korea. Worse, I arrived as a never-was. If I wasn't seen as just another American summering in Seoul, I was a bastard son with a blunted tongue. Still, despite the lack of sympathy, or likely because of it, I attempted to belong in the land of my ancestors. I wanted to learn their language and shed the white avatar I carried so long in my psyche, to walk the motherland for once in my truest skin. I imagined a life had my parents never emigrated to the U.S., an alternate self apart from the white gaze. Would it even be possible in this globalized world? Or, would the native version of me still aspire toward a Western avatar?
Watching the blur of neon signs from the backseat, I wondered less about what I would say to my uncle than about what he would think of me. After all, I was a college junior nursing a fatherly void. Seeking validation from male figures who would recognize something special in me, I hadn’t yet realized that what I sought was beyond a gendered avatar. To occupy that void, I needed a community, an agora irrespective of gender and sexuality to redeem my personhood. But it had to start with someone steering me toward that multitude.
Perhaps my uncle was not that someone. Perhaps, like the driver, he would only stare cautiously with a hint of scorn, regarding me with my California tan as a sell-out, another heritage tourist. Would I remind him of hidden spite the day his big sister left for America, neverto see him again? Whatever the case, with little command of the language, I would only smile and nod like a simpleton.
As the taxi slowed, the red lights ahead illuminated the driver's face in the mirror. His eyes, directed at me, were smiling, as if he had happened upon a solution to a problem. Though I couldn't quite read his lingering gaze, it signaled to me that he had something urgent to say.
"You're a gyopo, aren't you?"
§
Until that summer in Seoul, my perception of heritage was narrowed to the diasporic communities where I lived. These enclaves of my grandparents' generation, colonies of a culture displaced, were scattered in Southern California neighborhoods like Fullerton, Irvine, and Garden Grove. But if the next generation was represented as a gradient, radiating outward by degrees of assimilation, I was on the pale fringe. Raised away from these Koreatowns, I was ignorant of my ancestors' language and history. I was clear across a cultural divide, perceiving through the white lens my elders as strange and inscrutable.
Inscrutable, as in how Americans regard the Other with fear and fetishization. As scholar Vivian L. Huang writes, “Such fear/fetish is premised on an Orientalist conflation of visual obfuscation with inaccessible interiority…the obscured face refusing speech and legibility, submitting to muteness.” In other words, Asians, in physical presence and affect, continue to suffer from the failure of Western imagination. In pop culture, the Inscrutable Oriental has at times been mythologized as the magical or wise Asian (Master Po or Mister Miyagi), at other times, sexually fetishized vis-á-vis the colonizing male.
How unconscionable then my own failure of imagination as it pertained to my own kin. How little I wanted to do with the Inscrutable Asian Man, at a time when I craved the esteem, or just the acceptance, of white peers and institutions. As a result, I became less Korean American than an Americanized Korean, a subaltern version of the white avatar. An Asian Ken.
§
In a restaurant resembling a grandmother’s living room, my uncle and I sat down to a meal of samgyeopsal with a steady supply of soju. He was in his mid-fifties, maybe older judging from his wintered gait, and yet his mannerisms betrayed a youthfulness held in reserve. Meeting for the first time, we were silenced as much by a language gap as by seeing my late mother, his sister, in each other’s face. As we helped each other to grilled pork, we did our best with halting phrases, my uncle stooping to my elementary Korean.
Though we were strangers meeting on the outskirts of Seoul, between each gesture it felt like we communicated the same questions: Are you well? What do you still hope for in life? How have you grieved all these years? Despite our frustration, we were afforded the grace of mutual dignity, a presence unblemished by words. Though my uncle’s face reflected years of pain—through my aunt, I would learn that his teenage daughter had also died suddenly not long prior—his sullen eyes met mine with an expression of joy abandoned to the moment. After the meal, he suggested one more stop to prolong what would be our only visit.
Noraebang, or Korean karaoke, needed no translation.
As my uncle ordered another round of beer I flipped through the songbook, a tome of old and new Korean songs I didn't know. Hits from my parents' generation, sung in voices that touched registers of primal grief. I thought maybe I would sit back and clap the plastic tambourine as my uncle crooned folk melodies of sorrow and lost loves, while I imagined again that different life: one in which I would match him verse by verse, a life where I could tread the soil my ancestors walked. A different version of myself, but likely still subject to a different avatar, if not through the white gaze then through some other mode of difference, to erase the person I saw in the mirror.
Holding a microphone, my uncle beamed at me with pride. A pride not so much in that I was an atoning gyopo, or even as a Korean living the American Dream—but as family, an ancestry made whole. Multitudes across time, connected through song, soju, and acid reflux. Taking the console, he eagerly punched in the numbers to the next song and handed me the other microphone. As we sat watching the screen, I put on my best Don Henley and belted out the opening lines to “Hotel California.”
MICHAEL HAHN writes essays, criticism, and fiction with works featured in Water~Stone Review, Colorado Review, phoebe, and Northwest Review, among others. He is a graduate of the MFA in Writing Program at Pacific University, where he is also a Mapmakers Alumnus. Currently based in the Washington, D.C. area, Michael is working on a collection of essays and a novel.
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