Anika Lima experiences a “gray area” when it comes to belonging in America. Although she feels American, was born in the US and has lived here all of her life, the UCLA college student said she regularly experiences racialized microaggressions and is often mistaken for an immigrant. “I usually wear cultural clothes and a lot of people think that means I recently immigrated,” she said. “I guess they see that as strange or foreign.”
It’s something she’s contended with her entire life.
When Lima was born, in 2003, her Bangladeshi American parents wanted their daughter to have a racially ambiguous name. They didn’t want someone to have a negative perception if they saw her name on a class list or a job application, so instead of passing on her father’s last name – which could quickly identify her as Muslim and South Asian – Lima’s parents chose a surname associated with Portuguese people.
“Even though 9/11 was before I was born, it still affects my daily life,” said Lima, 18.
Growing up in southern California, Lima, who wears hijab, was asked by one of her classmates when she was going to bomb their school. At age 10, she was questioned and subject to random searches at the airport. When she came home with a poster of an airplane from a Girl Scouts event, her parents told her not to put it up in case people got the wrong idea.
Now, she said, seeing another rise in anti-Asian attacks since the beginning of the pandemic made her heart hurt.
An overwhelming majority of Asian American youth are struggling to feel fully accepted as Americans as they come of age during an alarming rise in harassment and bullying, anti-Asian rhetoric, hate crimes and incidents against their communities. Students have reported being spat on, punched, accused of eating dogs and bats and being called names like “China virus”, all of which can take a huge psychological toll.
According to the recently released Staatus (Social Tracking of Asian Americans in the US) Index Report 2022, only 19% of Asian Americans between the ages of 18 to 24 completely agree that they feel they belong and are accepted in the US, compared with 51% of those over 65 years of age. The study found that Asian Americans are the least likely to feel accepted compared with Black Americans, Latino Americans and white Americans, even when born in the US.
Experts say a mix of feeling marginalized, being seen as perpetual foreigners, the rise in anti-Asian hate and violence and social media’s power to highlight injustice are driving Gen Z Asian Americans to feel less accepted in the US than older generations who felt more pressure to assimilate.
“There’s violence happening in places you assume are safe spaces for Asian people, like Chinatowns and Koreatowns,” said the sociologist Anthony Ocampo, author of The Latinos of Asia: How Filipino Americans Break the Rules of Race. “Coupled with things like mass shootings and anti-Asian rhetoric on the national scale, it makes it more of a risk to participate in American life – at least that’s the perception.”
Ocampo said the Trump era had led to an uptick in hate crimes and hate incidents that has made Asian Americans feel more foreign. Since Asians first arrived in the US, they’ve faced racism, xenophobia and violence. The yellow peril stereotype, which took hold in the 1800s, labeled Chinese Americans as dirty and carriers of disease. Asian Americans have been scapegoated during periods of economic downturn and murdered during anti-Asian riots and massacres.
“Racist violence against Asian Americans and other people who are non-white has been consistent,” Ocampo said. “It’s an ugly part of our history that people are trying to forget or erase on all sides of the aisle, but it’s worth remembering.”
For many younger Asian Americans, the Covid era is the first experience of nationwide anti-Asian sentiment and widespread attacks against their own communities, many of which have appeared in graphic videos on social media. Platforms such as TikTok and Twitter have also served as digital spaces to educate and empower young people. Activists have mobilized on Instagram after events like the Atlanta-area spa shootings that left six Asian women dead.
“This generation is especially influenced and informed by social media,” said Christina Chin, a Cal State Fullerton professor who researches youth and racial and ethnic identity. “I think the older generation relies so much on their lived experience where I think the younger generation is far more tapped into a lot of the racial inequality and social issues.”
Chin said Gen Z wanted to stake a claim to their Asian American-ness in a way that was different from older generations, who felt more pressure to seek forms of acceptance and belonging.
“Growing up, I didn’t feel like the most beautiful girl in class,” said Emma Civita, 21. “Beauty standards were so focused on if you had blonde hair and blue eyes.” Civita, who is Japanese American, was often asked “What are you?” as a child.
“Looking back, it’s a super weird question to ask a seven-year-old,” she said. “I feel like most people wouldn’t ask a white person ‘What are you?’ It’s only when you’re different looking that people ask that question.”
Civita said she cared less about beauty standards today, proudly identified with being Japanese and felt she belonged in the country “for the most part”. She said watching the way Asian Americans, especially older people, had been treated throughout the pandemic had both saddened her and made her feel closer to her family.
“I think about my great-grandmother who was interned at Manzanar and I just think: ‘How could you profile an entire race?’” California’s Manzanar war relocation center was one of 10 camps where Japanese Americans and Japanese immigrants ineligible for citizenship were incarcerated by the US government during the second world war.
A 2020 Stop AAPI Hate Youth Campaign report found that 73% of Asian American and Pacific Islander youths expressed anger and disappointment over the current anti-Asian racism in the country and many were experiencing fear and concern for their families’ safety.
As an Asian American, Erica Garcia, 22, said the Covid era was anxiety inducing. “My mom is an essential worker and I felt very afraid for her,” she said. “I always have that thought in my head like, ‘I hope she’s OK.’ That worry extends to my friends, my family and myself as well.”
Garcia, a first-generation college student who was raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, said she didn’t have a full sense of belonging in the US, as the daughter of a Chinese mother from Vietnam and a Mexican immigrant father. “It feels like you’re being tugged between so many different cultures, including American culture, which I tried to fit into but it never really checked out,” she said.
Being queer also affects her feelings about belonging, because for young Asian Americans from traditional families, “having queerness be part of your identity inherently makes you feel like a disappointment”. Garcia said her professors, classmates and girlfriend had all helped her accept her identity.
Other Asian Americans, like Marcus Sanders, 18, have always felt like they belonged in the country. “It was super diverse growing up in Union City and there were a lot of Asian Americans, African Americans and Latinos,” he said, “so everybody was like a minority group. I never felt like I was different.”
Sanders, a three-star quarterback at University of Oregon, said people were sometimes surprised to find out he’s of Chinese and Korean descent, since Asian American football players are still a small minority within the game. When he attended football camps, people would sometimes ask if he was Hawaiian.
Sanders said he still felt accepted now that he was living in Eugene, Oregon. “No one’s treating me differently because I’m Asian,” he said, noting that racism and violence against his community was still a serious concern. He said his Korean grandmother had been racially harassed in public during the pandemic.
To combat the racism, harassment and marginalization many Asian American youth experience, Stop AAPI Hate recommends that states implement ethnic studies throughout secondary school curricula so students learn about the histories of different US communities.
The reporting center also suggests anti-bullying training for teachers and administrators, employing restorative justice practices and supporting AAPI student groups. They also recommend that social media companies create accessible and anonymous reporting sites on their platforms for victims of online harassment.
Lima said she thought older generations of Asian Americans had been more complacent and grateful for any representation in the public sphere, but that her generation felt like they “deserve more”.
“I am proud of some parts of American history, but also I’m ashamed of parts of our history,” Lima said. “I want to make my communities better and I want to get more people to see us as American.”
This article was amended on 22 August 2022. An earlier version said Sanders attended Oregon State University and lived in Corvallis; in fact, he attends University of Oregon and lives in Eugene.
