I’m done hiding, now I’m shining, like I’m born to be
Our time, no fears, no lies
That’s who we’re born to be
Waited so long to break these walls down
To wake up and feel like me
Put these patterns all in the past now
And finally live like the girl they all see
No more hiding, I’ll be shining like I’m born to be
~ Golden, KPop Demon Hunters
Last week, a Taiwanese American was the first to lead a company to be valued at over $5 trillion company, little boys and girls across the country were dressed as characters from KPop Demon Hunters as the most popular costumes for Halloween, and a Japanese pitcher carried his team to win the World Series.
NVIDIA was the first public company to break the $4 trillion mark back in July and last Wednesday became the first to crack $5 trillion. Jensen Huang was shattering all the stereotypes that Asians lack the leadership abilities to succeed. These harmful tropes are what lead to the artificially created bamboo ceiling on Asians in business, law, medicine, government and virtually every industry.
As an Asian American, it was surreal to see so many kids and adults of all ages and races on Friday, dressing up as Korean cartoon characters Rumi and the Saja Boys for Halloween. I knew that KPDH costumes would be popular, but I had no idea how popular. On Saturday, I watched Game 7 of the World Series with my sons, and told them how impossible it was that someone was pitching scoreless innings after just pitching 96 pitches in a complete game the night before. His arm should have fallen off. The Los Angeles Dodgers would not be world champions if it weren’t for Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto.
Asians are always underestimated and overlooked. They are rarely given the benefit of the doubt. Jeremy Lin faced this his entire career from being Northern California Player of the Year in high school and getting zero college scholarship offers, to being cut from the Warriors, Rockets and almost the New York Knicks, until he had his break out Linsanity game. No one believed he could do what he did, except himself. When his back was against the wall and he was about to be released from the Knicks, he played his style of basketball and dominated the league for weeks as an undrafted player. He became a global phenomenon because he shattered the perception of what people thought an Asian basketball player was capable of.
When Yoshinobu Yamamoto signed his contract with the Dodgers, he had countless haters and doubters questioning why they would pay so much for a 24 year-old unknown pitcher from Japan. They signed a 12 year contract for $325 million salary with a signing bonus of $50 million, for an average annual value of $27.1 million. This is only a couple of weeks after the Dodgers signed fellow Japanese player Shohei Ohtani for $700 million. Yamamoto started his pro baseball pitching career in Japan at the age of 19. He won the Sawamura Award (the Japanese equivalent of the Cy Young Award) in 2021, 2022, and 2023. He also won the league MVP award in each of those three seasons. But people didn’t believe that level of dominance could translate to the MLB. Now everyone is a believer and he is an MLB legend.
When Jensen Huang started NVIDIA in 1993, it was producing graphics processors for gaming. In 1996, the company was thirty days from going out of business. In 2006, they launched a software architecture that would allow developers to use the parallel processing power of these GPUs (graphic processing units) for non-graphics tasks including AI and scientific research. By the early 2010s, the NVIDIA GPU was being used by AI researchers for deep learning and now it is powering the AI revolution and generating hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue along the way.
When Maggie Kang was making KPop Demon Hunters for Sony Animation Studios, they had no idea what to make of it. They had spent $100 million in production budget to make the feature film. They didn’t understand the appeal and sold the distribution rights to Netflix for a $20 million premium (on top of the cost of production). Sony thought the deal “made sense” at the time, and that they dodged a bullet for this obscure animated musical fantasy movie about a Korean girl band saving the world from demons. They didn’t think that it would be fit for theatrical release. One weekend of the sing-along version on 1,700 screens in movie theaters paid back that $20 million. It is the most watched film on Netflix in history, with over 325 million views and counting after 91 days. The KPop Demon Hunters franchise has original IP worth billions of value to Netflix from sequels to merchandising. Even they weren’t prepared for the demand of Halloween costumes, so knockoff manufacturers capitalized on them being caught off guard.
Growing up, we saw kids making fun of us by pulling back their eyes and mocking our languages, and now they are proudly dressing up as Rumi and Shohei for Halloween and singing lyrics in Korean.
The model minority myth is that we are successful, when in reality it means we are obedient hard workers who rarely complain or ask for promotions. We supposedly make good workhorses but not good racehorses. We are automatically seen as background characters, not main characters. Otherwise we make great sidekicks or punchlines like Short Round or Long Duk Dong. You’ll still rarely see Asians as the main lead in a romantic movie. You can’t name a movie with an Asian American President, because that would be too much of a stretch. The only time you do see one is when we make the movies ourselves, like Bruce Lee did or Jon Chu did with Crazy Rich Asians. Otherwise, we’re “not marketable enough” or don’t have “mass appeal.”
Growing up, we always dealt with being othered and treated like foreigners in our own homes. Mocked for our features (below is Houston Astros Yuri Guriel mocking pitcher Yu Darvish after hitting a home run), languages and food. There is no other physical gesture I can think of that is used to mock another race than this one. So unless you’re Asian, you don’t know what this feels like as a kid. People refuse to believe that this still happens today, but I assure you it does. I grew up in the 80s seeing racist gestures like this, coupled with “ching chongs”. Just last fall, a girl no older than 10 said “ching chong” to me behind my back at a luxury vacation resort in Carmel, California. Meanwhile our kids today are still dealing with this lazy and ignorant racist behavior.
A friend sent this screencap of Guriel to me on Saturday, because he was so proud of what Yamamoto and Ohtani were doing on the world stage. He is a Korean American who grew up in Tennessee where kids made this gesture to him all the time. His sons grew up in New York and they got it too. In 2008, the Spanish Olympic basketball team took a team photo like this for the Beijing Olympics. In August 2021, the official social media account for the Juventus Women’s team posted a photograph of a player, Cecilia Salvai, making a racist “slant-eyed” gesture towards Asian people. Just last October, former world No. 2 tennis player Paula Badosa has apologized after a photo was shared online that showed her pulling her eyes back with chopsticks while playing tournaments in China.
People say it’s just a joke or to ignore it and rise above. But imagine being a kid, minding your own business and an adult mocks you with this gesture. How do you think that might feel for the confused child? It makes them feel ashamed of the way they look. It makes them feel like they are somehow less than for being different. It makes them feel like an outsider and unsafe. At my age, I can say or do something to the bigot, but a child is powerless in that situation. They are left feeling dehumanized and traumatized. That trauma can lead to a lifetime of feeling like they don’t belong.
Even calling out racism towards Asians is frowned upon by some. People will say, “Asians don’t have it as bad as others,” as if this sort of behavior isn’t worthy of calling out. Do not dismiss our pain as if it is somehow not real or hurtful. And don’t ever let anyone gaslight you or invalidate your feelings. We aren’t playing in the oppression olympics. We need to stand up to hateful behavior no matter who it is targeted at, because it is wrong, not because of who the target is.
As Asians, we need to be unafraid to call out unacceptable behavior in any venue, and not silently accept it. Many of our cultures pride ourselves in enduring suffering and “eating bitterness”, which is why we tolerate so much of this nonsense. But that is exactly what makes us easy targets, because people assume we won’t fight back. Don’t allow others to tell you what you can and can’t speak up about. Ignore the bogeyman telling you that you’ll be in trouble if you say something. You have agency in every situation, and you can choose to be a victim or you can choose to defend yourself.
After being treated like outsiders, workhorses, and background characters, Asians in America are having our moment to shine at the top of the business, entertainment and sports worlds. I have no doubt that we will continue to have more weeks like last week in the future, especially if we refuse to allow others to bring us down or hold us back. Ignore the haters and doubters, because they are ignorant losers who only live to tear down others. Be unapologetically yourself.
Growing up, we saw kids making fun of us by pulling back their eyes and mocking our languages, and now they are proudly dressing up as Rumi and Shohei for Halloween and singing lyrics in Korean. We’re not looking back.
‘Cause we are hunters, voices strong, and I know I’ll believe
We’re goin’ up, up, up, it’s our moment
You know together we’re glowing
Gonna be, gonna be golden