I am NOT an American

I despise the label 'Asian-American'.

To me, it denotes ownership, more specifically, a nationalist ownership of generalized Asians by Americans. Just the very notion of adding a hyphenated term to my so-called ethnic identification signals being thrust into limbo - I am obviously not American otherwise they would just call me American but there's a need for the colonialist to have a sense of ownership over me, otherwise I'd be called asian.

Asian is what the colonist labels me. I had no say in my identity. The term Asian doesn't take into account my own personal narrative - a son of Vietnamese refugees. It doesn't take into account where I come from, where my parents come from, what language I speak, what food I eat, but rather, the label is a way for the colonialist to signify that I am not white - that I am different and therefore don't belong.

I sure as hell don't identify with the title 'American'. To be American, you must be a citizen of America. Being a citizen, to me, signifies a certain attachment to the country of America - a certain loyalty, but more importantly, it signifies someone who shares in the fruits of the country and shares a common language, culture, and practice. I don't share in the fruits of a country that was made for whites and is still run for whites. My community, the Vietnamese peoples obviously didn't share in the fruits of this country when it dropped more than 6.7 million tons of explosives and sprayed more than 40 million gallons of Agent Orange on our homeland, displacing millions of people. Don't let those numbers escape you. A 1-ton bomb is more than capable of killing 130 people and the amount of Agent Orange sprayed on Việt Nam has destroyed 1/4 of the arable land that was available before the war.

It is obvious that I am not a citizen because other citizens don't recognize me as such. Laws are all talk about equality but when I am still called gook and chink by white racists and when the pigs on the block condescendingly ask me if I speak english before threatening to arrest me, it is made painfully clear to me that nothing has actively been done to achieve any sense of equality.

Unfortunately, however, I'm certainly not Asian, or more accurately, Vietnamese, because America's social colonialism has made it so that I don't know how to fluently speak the tongue of my parents. I no longer know my parent's culture as my own, but rather, the culture I am faced with is a sad compromise in which, unless something is done to resist colonization, the culture of my parents will eventually be lost throughout generations as was done with blacks or more assimilated peoples such as the Japanese in America.

So fuck Asian-American, call it what it is: I am a colonized person. Every day American society tries to rid me of my culture and the culture from of my parents. Every day the generation gap widens between the colonized youth and the colonized adults and elders. We of the colonized youth hardly speak our language (in fact, we're told that our parents speak funny english!), know our customs, or can eat our own food. We look to the white person for a standard of beauty (or specifically for Vietnamese, we sometimes look to more 'higher' asians such as Japanese and Koreans). We've been taught not only to hate ourselves, but to hate our community.

So it's time to fight back against this continual colonialist take-over of our every day lives. Every time someone speaks Vietnamese, tries to cook Vietnamese food, questions where and why Vietnamese people practice certain customs - these are all forms of active resistance to dominant colonialism. We must be proud of who we are (and I'm talking about all colonized people - not just Vietnamese) because if we are not, this racist society will be quick to brainwash us into hating ourselves.