What even is an ‘Asian’? And why are we bundled together?

The useful part

Tze Ming Mok introduces a new book that explores through art, activism, research and lived experience what it means to be Asian in Aotearoa. We didn't know if we liked each other yet, because we didn't speak the same languages or dialects. There was just an unspoken agreement that we wouldn't try to hurt each other.

How it works

• Spivak's strategic essentialism is one way of Being Asian, but it also requires thinking through what your strategy is in aid of.
• To make a real life for ourselves, with agency, humanity and validation of our specificity?
• What even is an "Asian" and why are we bundled together, at lunch, in statistics, in books, in a blur of ill-fitting stereotypes?
• On the streets of Aotearoa, "Asian" is a racialised term specific to East Asians or "yellow" Asians.

Details worth keeping

At a grassroots organisational level, pan-"Asian" community activism in the diaspora is often based on strategic alliances within state-determined funding of diversity, policy and community initiatives – the confines and definitions of which can be grating.