“Ni hao.”
“Konnichiwa.”
Sometimes, for laughs, people shout, “Ching chong chang.”
Rarely, rarely, I get a correct, if shouted, “An-nyeong-hae-se-yo.”
These greetings follow me. Every block. Everywhere I walk.
Los Angeles has the biggest Korean population outside Korea itself. Downtown, Silver Lake, Koreatown. Doesn’t matter where I am. The chorus starts. Usually peaceful days, suddenly noisy with strangers shouting foreign salutations.
My routine? Keep head down. Walk faster. Swallow the lump in the throat. I could yell back. “I’m Korean, not Chinese!” or “I’m American!” but anger is heavy. So I ignore it.
Sometimes I try to correct them. Calmly. If the sidewalk feels safe enough. “Actually, I’m Korean American.”
Their reaction? Stunned silence. Or laughter. Proud, pitying laughter. They don’t care about the distinction. They never really did.
Notice how nobody yells “Guten Tag” at white Americans on the street. Nobody does that. But us? We get the special treatment.
Is it friendly? I want to believe it is. It feels like marking me as foreign. A visual “you don’t belong here.”
Invisibility and hyper-visibility.
That’s the Asian American experience. We’re everywhere, yet we don’t exist as individuals. We sit on the edge of the table when DEI matters are discussed. The “model minority” myth does heavy lifting here, keeping us quiet, keeping us ‘good’ immigrants in the eyes of power. But ICE arrests of Asian-descent people quadrupled under Trump. We got racially profiled just as much. Just differently.
Back home in Asia, distinctions matter. Korean is Korean. Chinese is Chinese.
Here? I’m just Asian. Lucky for me, maybe Asian American. But mostly just Asian. One pan-ethnic bucket.
A third culture, one stereotype.
The parts of me I love? They don’t register here. My language. My specific history. They get washed out. I become Sharon the Asian.
“No one is yelling ‘Bonjour’ at white people. But they do it to us.”
Let me tell you about Long Island. New York. Coffee shop.
An older white guy cut the queue, stepped up, asked me: “Are you from Asia?”
I wanted to scream. But manners win, usually. “I was born in Korea. Raised in LA.”
He smiled. Ignored that completely. Started telling me about his trip to China. How fun it was.
“That’s nice,” I said, trying not to grimace. “Never been. But I’m happy you liked it.”
He kept going. Blissfully unaware. My white coworker next to me was biting his lip to keep from laughing at the spectacle.
Hundreds of languages. Dozens of cultures. Countless distinct histories across one continent. And here? One language. Mandarin. The assumption is total. The simplification is absolute.
We’re treated like a monolith. Individuality erased.
This dehumanization has teeth.
Think Vincent Chin. 1982. Killed by men angry at Japanese competition for American car jobs. They hit a Chinese-American man because he “looked” the part.
Fast forward. 2020+. Anti-Chinese sentiment fueled by global politics and bad leadership spikes hate crimes against all of us. It doesn’t matter if you are Vietnamese or Japanese. The anger is misplaced. The targets are Asian faces.
Data backs the horror. Pew Research Center reports that one in three Asian adults knows someone attacked because of race since the pandemic began.
And the economic sting? 18.4% higher losses for Asian restaurants compared to non-Asian ones during the virus years. Not just Chinese spots. Indian, Thai, Korean too.
When you ignore the specific human, they become expendable.
But here’s the strange twist. The segregation built our current identity. The shared trauma knits us together.
Prejudice between different Asian groups? Real. It happens. But on this soil, I look at a stranger who looks like me, I see family. I see the auntie selling zucchini. The uncle crossing the street. A nod passes. Instant kinship. We stick together because the rest of the world refuses to see the nuance.
What do we want?
I am Korean. I am American. I hold both.
I don’t need strangers to be experts on ethnic distinctions. I know it’s hard. But don’t start with stereotypes. Don’t start with a shouted foreign phrase you got wrong.
Start with the assumption that I’m human. That I have a complex history. Then, maybe, you can ask.
Or you can just say hello.
