Being on campus for the first time, I perceived whiteness as something tangible and permeating. Last year, attending a predominantly white institution through Zoom lectures just meant seeing faces that did not look like mine. In person, I’ve come to realize that whiteness is not just about the school’s demographic makeup: it’s the statues of old Caucasian men in Healy Lawn, the “ethnic” food at Leo’s which is worse than Panda Express, and the exclusive clubs that tend to admit students who attended fancy boarding schools.
In the first week of school, I cried twice for opposite reasons. Once because I felt out of place, missing the comfort of my home. It’s not that I missed specific people, rather, I craved the sense of security – a support system which gave me the confidence to slay any monster that comes my way. The second time, I teared up during the first class for Asian Americans in the Public Sphere with Professor Christopher Shinn. Seeing people who looked like me, I felt an overwhelming sense of belonging. Here we were, making and taking space for ourselves.
In Asian Americans in the Public Sphere class we read The Collective by Don Lee, a novel that follows three Asian-American college students and their journeys as artists. The protagonist, Eric Cho, is a third generation Korean-American from Southern California, where he felt lost as one of many Asian Americans. He initially believes that at a predominantly white college, his ethnicity “might work in [his] favor, sort of as a reverse exoticism” and he is reluctant to associate with other Asian Americans because it would “lessen [his] distinctiveness” and “[he] might be stereotyped.”
This is a sentiment that resonated with me. My high school student population was 28.7% White and 42.9% Asian. In the program that I attended, nearly 90% of the students were Asian. I knew college would be a change—in fact, I even anticipated it. Georgetown would be my exposure to the “real world” where people’s perspectives were shaped by cultural experiences and backgrounds different from my own. But my arrival to campus challenged my optimistic ideals of what college life would be like: attending an institution where 21% of the students are from the top 1% was far from a dive into the real world, it was a sneak peak into the privileges of intergenerational wealth.
Asian Americans in the Public Sphere has reaffirmed my love for Asian American literature and art over and over again. The class explores a wide range of literary genres and media forms, from the graphic novel Shortcomings by Adrian Tomine about the experiences of being a young Asian-American male, to the novel Oriental Girls Desire Romance which follows a Chinese-American woman in 1980’s New York City. Despite how different these characters are, they ultimately ask the same question: where do I belong in America?
When mainstream society shuts out Asian Americans, we create our own spaces: ethnic neighborhoods, literary groups, film production companies, restaurants, and more. On campus, Dear Asian Youth is an organization making room for the voices of Asian diaspora.
However, the fight is far from over. The university has yet to establish an Asian American studies program and sponsor a permanent gathering space for Asian and Pacific Islander students. As grateful as I am for the community I have found in my Asian Americans in the Public Sphere class and at Dear Asian Youth, the burden of finding belonging should not lie on us alone. The university should be doing much more to welcome us into the collective campus community. This starts with recognizing the uncomfortable fact that not all Hoyas are comfortable calling Georgetown home.