Sunday Read: Pulitzer Prize author ponders Tou Thao and the place Asian Americans hold in the U.S.

I'm taking a break from usual weekly attempt at relevance by linking the reader to another site. Sorry, about that.

Many of us here on social media rarely take the time to read OG "content creators" such as Time magazine and local newspapers. I found the Time magazine essay -- Asian Americans Are Still Caught in the Trap of the ‘Model Minority’ Stereotype. And It Creates Inequality for All -- so thoughtful that I want to share it with you.

Viet Thanh Nguyen, who won the 2016 Pulitzer for Fiction for his novel "The Sympathizer," is just a damn good writer. In the July 6 edition of Time, a couple of days after Independence Day, he writes:

"The face of Tou Thao haunts me. The Hmong-American police officer stood with his back turned to Derek Chauvin, his partner, as Chauvin knelt on George Floyd’s neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds and murdered him.

"In the video that I saw, Tou Thao is in the foreground and Chauvin is partly visible in the background, George Floyd’s head pressed to the ground. Bystanders beg Tou Thao to do something, because George Floyd was not moving, and as he himself said, he could not breathe.

"The face of Tou Thao is like mine and not like mine, although the face of George Floyd is like mine and not like mine too. Racism makes us focus on the differences in our faces rather than our similarities, and in the alchemical experiment of the U.S., racial difference mixes with labor exploitation to produce an explosive mix of profit and atrocity. In response to endemic American racism, those of us who have been racially stigmatized cohere around our racial difference. We take what white people hate about us, and we convert stigmata into pride, community and power. So it is that Tou Thao and I are “Asian Americans,” because we are both “Asian,” which is better than being an “Oriental” or a “gook.” If being an Oriental gets us mocked and being a gook can get us killed, being an Asian American might save us. Our strength in numbers, in solidarity across our many differences of language, ethnicity, culture, religion, national ancestry and more, is the basis of being Asian American.

He continues, writing about his immigrant parents and their struggles to attain what they believed was the American dream in San Jose, which before the rise of Silicon Valley, was like many urban downtowns, was a downtrodden ghost town devoid of live and entrepreneurial activity. 

Nguyen was able to bring together all the political, social and economic viruses creating havoc through our country 

"If we are dissatisfied with our country’s failures and limitations, revealed to us in stark clarity during the time of coronavirus, then now is our time to change our country for the better. If you think America is in trouble, blame shareholders, not immigrants; look at CEOs, not foreigners; resent corporations, not minorities; yell at politicians of both parties, not the weak, who have little in the way of power or wealth to share."

He goes on to write about our Asian American identity, the model minority and where we fit in the melange of a multi-hued America.

It's a damn good read and one that we can spend a many hours pondering. If you want to read the entire essay, click here.

Excellent writer that he is, Nguyen doesn't give a nice answer neatly wrapped with a bow to the questions he raises. That answer lies within each of us.