The SoCal East Asian Ethnostate

On the stunted formation of Asian-American identity and its infamous vanguards

There is something uneasy in the Los Angeles air this afternoon, some unnatural stillness, some tension. What it means is that tonight a rave will begin to rage, Lexuses from the southeast whining up through Long Beach and Culver City, blowing up Juul storms out along I-405, drying the hills and nerves to a flash point. For a few days now we will see vapor back in the canyons, and hear EDM in the night.

Something’s happened in the past decade or so that has brought us to a point where, broadly speaking, it’s no longer ontologically uncool to be East Asian in North America. Even if you don’t feel cool yourself, rest easy in the fact that swaths of people idolize an idealized version of you, someone with your eyes, but beautiful.¹

It’s not that STEM guys with Chinatown haircuts have somehow become gallant symbols of Asian-Americanness, but it’s that they’re no longer the epitome of our representation. There are now more than three ways to be East Asian in the US that are becoming more and more elusive to break down and place into stereotypes. It’s no longer as simple as kung fu, dog-eating, mathletes, and 9-year-old cashiers. Now, our race is a trend, and Discord kittens are transitioning into us in droves. We’re known for our drip, our beauty products, our porcelain skin. Looking Asian has moved from nerds in graphic tees to wolf cut lesbian twinks wearing Gentle Monster and baggy designer pants.² All this is an aesthetic exteriorization of our status as the model minority.

We can thank Southern California for this, and for all the wrong reasons.

Sitting in the southwestern United States along the Pacific Ocean, stretching its asphalt tendrils north towards the San Gabriel Mountains, Los Angeles County and its satellites are home to the largest East and Southeast Asian communities in the US, who in the case of a major tectonic shift would be easily swallowed at once into the bowels of the earth without much chance for protest, which they don’t do much of anyway. Besides Hawai’i, the Bay Area, and certain pockets strewn throughout the mainland, Southern California has received a reputation for its high concentration of Asians as well as a paradisiacal abundance of Asian businesses, foods, and arts. Here sprawls what seems to be an authentic Asian-American community that thrives on its own terms. In just one out of countless identical malls, one can find three Vietnamese restaurants, Korean barbecue-cum-karaoke, and high-end bubble tea cafés placed in sequence. It’s hard to find anywhere else in America with this diversity and concentration of Asian presence, and in such scale, lavishness, and purity.

It should be made clear, then, that the term “Asian” in this American setting means to exist in a cultural context even more diverse than what one usually finds in Asia itself. It also means staying entirely in this environment, not involving yourself with non-Asians. Having access to only one or two kinds of Asian cultures, if at all, like for those growing up anywhere outside this bubble, is a sign of inferior Asianness.

For SoCal Asians, the rave is their sound and their fury. One of the largest congregational ritual performances of Asian-American identity in Southern California and beyond, raves have filled the spiritual void left by the lack of organized religion in East Asian communities. At night, hundreds of attendees in uniform black attire take in the eucharistic body of St. Molly as their congregation leader mixes ecstatic sine-wave hymns from his pulpit of Pioneer DDJ-400s. Everything about rave culture subverts the most fundamental stereotypes about Asians in America. The libertinism of scanty outfits, prodigious drug consumption, and electronic music powerfully flouts the image of Asians as untrendy moral conservatives imposed upon them by both their parents and mainstream American society; plus it’s fun. It’s liberating to be in this environment, to see other Asians around you in a space that genuinely seems your own, at once a rebellion against social strictures and a celebration of Asian-American identity. It all feels so empowering, and exclusive for you and your own people. After all, where else in America does it go down like this? Where else can you and your friends meet up for boba and pho in the afternoon, hit your Sanrio vape in your car listening to keshi, and get trashed on soju? Where else can Asians feel like a privileged community, like they have a safe space uniquely for themselves to do exclusively Asian things without having to answer to anybody or explain the Taoist wisdom behind it? Where else in the world is there a homeland for all Asians?

So it really seems that Asian-Americans have found their way. Being Asian-American now looks a certain way, sounds a certain way, and moves a certain way. There is a recognizable and beautiful landscape attached to the label. And all that is cool, isn’t it?

Well, notice how I began this piece by saying that SoCal Asian-Americans have challenged stereotypes and opened up more ways to be Asian. And now I’m saying that being Asian looks, sounds, and moves a certain way. What I mean is that SoCal Asians have challenged stereotypes by making new ones instead, but it’s less bad because these happen to be trendy. Now, because there’s a hierarchy of racial prestige from which people find the stones to dole out judgment, even your own people will assess your Asianness based on whether or not you fit into certain tropes.

For a while now, I’ve found proud declarations of East Asianness to be pathetic. Like, pathetic in the actual sense of inspiring pathos. It’s sad, and it keeps creeping up on me, and I’ve been trying to parse it for a while now––this sense that East Asian identity often seems brandished from a place of profound insecurity, like it doesn’t know what it really is. Or maybe it does, but it’s an ethnic identity that’s motivated solely to prove that it is not like anybody else while remaining just as reactionary as the society it claims to need shelter from.

Asian-Americans can be out of touch with their heritage for the same reason that Asian-Americans in SoCal can refuse to assimilate and find cultural spaces of their own––namely that there is no one way to be Asian in America. This is a road paved arguably by these SoCal Asians who have created an pan-Asian cultural aesthetic attractive enough to earn it attention in the mainstream. Now, these same people are shutting the door for those who don’t live according to the highly sheltered and localized Angelino version of Asian-American life. What has resulted is the creation of Asian America’s very own brand of zionism, by which I mean the rhetoric that Asianness as it exists in Southern California represents the most authentic and cosmopolitan way to be Asian in America. Descriptions of Asian-American life outside of SoCal are met with genuine confusion, pity, and mockery, like those living in the Midwest cannot truly be “Asian” without adopting the same lifestyles and consumption habits as those in California. These pseudo-Asians, however, are still kept in the fold by a paranoia toward the non-Oriental races. The Asian’s greatest stumbling block toward freedom is no longer the white moderate but East Asians from Southern California. The woke mind virus has thankfully fried the brains of gwailo so hard that they’re too scared to make outward assumptions about your race and are thus more ready to take you at face value, whereas in LA you’ll have to answer to Peter Kim.³

The real argument is that the appearance of Asian-American exceptionalism operates solely on an aesthetic level, and at the cultural level lacks any real meaning. So strong is the legitimation of Asian identity on the consumption of Asian-coded goods, but what does it mean to be Asian-American internally? What is there really besides the insistence that we’re neither brown nor white? (Are Desis Asian?) The refusal to identify with non-Asian symbols and the construction of an Asian-American uniqueness perpetuates a negative peace: it touts the success of the white liberal multicultural project while simultaneously distancing itself from other minority groups in search of an impossible exclusivity. Asian-Americans seem to have largely overcome the hurdle of racial acceptance on a superficial level, and then stopped having challenged nothing else once it has gained enough privilege to discriminate against minority groups in less fortunate positions. SoCal Asian-Americans have failed to examine their own problems on virtually every level, in the matters of gender, queerness, sexism,⁴ racism, class, politics, and fundamentally, what the term Asian-American even means.

The ethnostate is so haunted by its reliance on whiteness and cultural hegemony that it has essentially replicated mainstream American bigotries, hence the East Asian ethnostate. With their culture regarded as the most pristine and attractive, Koreans reign supreme in the hierarchy, going down the more browner one gets, with Desis being past the cutoff line. The most insane and whitest racial stereotypes exist within this system: the browner you are, the junglier you are. Honestly it’s so racist in a 18th century way that I can’t even put it into words, and it’s hard to comprehend if you haven’t lived in it. Just take my word for it, and if you know then you know how many racial slurs they throw around. Anyway, colorism is the law of the land. In addition to being economically disadvantaged relative to their East Asian counterparts, Southeast Asians face social exclusion within the ethnostate. Their culture is rarely depicted in media with the same kind of glamor and sacrality that those of East Asians enjoy, revealing that the popularity of East Asian cultural symbols has only occurred because of their association with elite consumption in the first place. Do we want our cultures to be respected because of their intrinsic beauty, or because they’re modern i.e. Westernized?

Originating first as a label for political organization in the mid-20th century, the term “Asian-American” now finds a tangible and attractive social aesthetic localizable to areas such as Southern California. Making up this image are sociological phenomena like the above-mentioned self-identification as “Asian” out of a historically unprecedented diversity of ethnic groups who in their homelands would be loath to identify with one another. To be Asian in this environment is to be cosmopolitan, properly speaking, within the circumscribed bounds of Asian culture within North America, to participate and consume in a society composed of a controlled diversity: boba, pho, hot pot, NewJeans, et cetera––the Asian things. Hence, to reach into Black or Latino culture does not add to one’s worldly sophistication; it may even cheapen it instead––SoCal Asians are notorious for only-Asian friend groups, partly due to environment but also certainly racism. When SoCal Asians speak of the “Asian-American” identity, they do not understand the “American” part to mean participation within and among a pluralistic America in which they are one out of many, but as a hostile foreign terrain to build walls against in their own separatist zone. This is why they treat Asians in other parts of the US with such scorn and derision. In Southern California is an ethnostate of Asians, but in truth East Asians, who are interested in their own prestige, and nobody else’s, within a political and economic system that they feel fundamentally works well for them (leftism, of course, is the big bad scourge from which our families fled). After all, we’re the good ones, the respectful ones, the ones who are noble where the others are savage. The pressing issue for them is the rehabilitation of their outward image (the ancient Confucian concept of face) within this system, hence their dedicated yet flaccid outcries to #StopAsianHate. These cries are crocodile tears: the moment gains are made and legislation is passed, they will withdraw to their comforts and look away from the oppressed. I have seen maybe five East Asians at any event involving Gaza and Palestine. It is precisely their refusal to identify with other minority groups against capitalism and whiteness that is the cause of their political infirmity. They believe in the American Dream and all the Puritan contempt for the downtrodden that comes with it. So long as this holds, do not side with them.

I don’t think there’s any hope for SoCal East Asians as a whole, politically speaking––they shall remain entrenched in their culture like boba in tea. Any chance for political organizing and solidarity with other minority groups and the working class will likely come from those who have felt the cold judgment of the ethnostate’s slanted gaze.

1. This person is known as a Korean

2. This person is known as a Korean

3. This person is known as a Korean

4. This person is known as a Korean