Musical accompaniment on Spotify.

There’s something very twenty-something about having inherited an extraordinary vocabulary for interrogating one’s life while possessing comparatively few settled institutions telling you how to live it.

—ChatGPT, 2026

I’ve acquired the unfortunate habit of pasting Substack essays written by crushes and friends of past and present into ChatGPT. I like to analyze their works alongside the literary greats—and my own work, which rarely sees the light of day. To procrastinate from said writing, I debate the alleged insights. It is easier to think than to do.

ChatGPT is the college classmate who actually does the readings and readily draws connections between anything you throw at them. The connections may be tenuous or altogether wrong, but then again, my classmates often were too. Alternatively, one can liken these conversations to a poor man’s imitation of an Oxford tutorial. I have 1:1 access to a rather effusive college professor fond of platitudes, and all I’m spending is a few cents in water.1

The two of us like to tinker with my essay fragments until they sound better. I then argue with the AI as it valiantly attempts to help plan out the larger essay, producing outlines and analyses of questionable value over minutes that bleed into hours. The last few months, I’ve been working on an essay about my childhood, dreams, and search for belonging in San Francisco. For the folks I’ve told about it, it’s a race to see whether that essay or the Winds of Winter will come out first.2

My peers and I are mostly in our mid-20s. Our lives are still full of potential and possibility, even if doors are just now beginning to close. The circumstances, it seems, have led us to earnestly ponder the load-bearing questions of life, meaning, and the human condition.

Most of us have day jobs befitting the Silicon Valley milieu, but we’ve all found our own little ways of resisting as we conform to the system. We write (or in my case...attempt to write) on Substack. We explore undersaturated hobbies like improv and line dancing, or go a little extra with the conventional ones—one software engineer is also a part-time yoga instructor. I co-organized a small cabin-in-the-woods reading retreat for Ezra Klein’s Abundance, an experience that contributed to my later acceptance into a weekend reading retreat on womanhood.3

One of my friends started an anti-tech tech club to foster community. Yet, none of us are truly against tech. To the consternation of several friends, I’m not even looking to reduce my screen time. The solace of group chats where we share memes, things to do, and absurd details of the day has no true analog equivalent.4 Our phones offer the opportunity to turn fortuitous encounters into relationships that leave footprints on the sands of time.5 Of course, they can’t do so alone.

I often buy multiple tickets to events without quite knowing who else wants to come. I trust in higher beings that someone will be interested enough in the event, in me, or take enough pity on me to say yes.6

The day I published my first Substack post, I became qualified to organize a last-minute writing retreat for Labor Day weekend. It was the Monday before, and my housemate and I realized we had no plans. The group chats yielded two quick recruits, but we wanted more people. I recruited a freelance writer I’d met once at a magazine launch a month before. Another co-conspirator convinced her childhood friend to fly up from LA. She drove the six of us in a Honda Odyssey booked from Turo. It was her first taste of being a soccer mom.

The first night of this trip, I caused a stir by declaring Mary Oliver the de facto poet of Substack. It was a sweeping judgment, though not quite the pejorative some took it as. I’ve liked Mary Oliver since high school when John Green read “I Go Down to the Shore” on a podcast and I found a pirated copy of A Thousand Mornings online.

I go down to the shore in the morning
and depending on the hour the waves
are rolling in or moving out,
and I say, oh, I am miserable,
what shall—
what should I do? And the sea says
in its lovely voice:
Excuse me, I have work to do.

—Mary Oliver, “I Go Down to the Shore”

Back in 2025, I rang in the new year at a weeklong tech and social impact fellowship where we squatted in San Francisco’s most competitive ‘hacker house’ and I experienced the good life in bed with an Eight Sleep. We did some hacking of our own, but really we spent our days practicing rituals of community building and introspection. To prepare, we had been asked to read Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass alongside canonical works of effective altruism like Peter Singer’s The Life You Can Save. We were left to make sense of a seeming tension between duty to the wider world and attention to one’s surroundings. Each night, we ended with a new Mary Oliver poem.

Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

—Mary Oliver, “The Summer Day”

After the program ended, a few new friends took to Substack. They pondered their learnings and the questions still left unanswered. Meanwhile, the fellowship’s co-organizer entreated me to write my polemic against education’s outsized importance in the American welfare system. He urged me to follow what made me feel ‘alive.’ This was not quite the banal language of dreams and passions, or so I was told. Regardless, I could not conceive of chasing such a life here in the real world.

By the end of that year, I had unexpectedly moved to San Francisco. I took a job at a startup. The treatise remained unwritten, but I now had several more friends with Substacks.

Perhaps my impression of Mary Oliver’s Substack ubiquity says more about my community and the algorithm than the platform itself, but ChatGPT backed me up when asked.7

Our mid-20s may mark the end of development for our prefrontal cortexes, but they’re just one stage in what John Green characterized as one’s journey of meaning. This phrase, too, was richly debated. When ChatGPT read an earlier draft of this essay, it said:

“We’re all on our own journeys of meaning nonetheless” sounds like precisely the accommodating platitude you tease ChatGPT for producing.

One member of our writing retreat—the least tech-pilled among us8—was skeptical too of both the phrase and its accompanying genre of Substack writing. For her, now was the time to stop the navel-gazing of her first few years since graduation. She needed to start making money. Meaning could come later. It wasn’t quite the same, but I thought of Marc Andreessen’s controversial exhortation to stop thinking and start doing. The retreat’s most tech-pilled Substack writer had been the first to share the venture capitalist’s advice with me. We have all answered such calls with mixed results.

True to form, I spent a good chunk of the retreat reading instead. I reasoned that to write about myself, my friends, and our journeys of meaning, I should re-familiarize myself with Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. I first read it in high school on the recommendation of Harvard day-in-the-life YouTuber John Fish. Seven years later, I remembered the name of the book and little else. I had written a half-finished draft of this essay a few weeks before the retreat. I had a title promising literary analysis I could not provide. ChatGPT had taken me in circles trying to explain Frankl’s philosophy and connect those ideas to my friends’ Substack essays.

I wrote that draft while traveling across China. In Chengdu, my friend Frank9 read it and kindly suggested I may have gone a little overboard in fawning over certain people’s writing. He also summarized Frankl: happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue. Trying really hard to fall asleep can make it harder to fall asleep.

Though Frankl had developed logotherapy before his imprisonment in Nazi concentration camps, he drew on those experiences in Man’s Search for Meaning to argue that life could remain meaningful even when almost everything familiar had been taken away. A person could still have someone to love, work to complete, or a responsibility to meet. Rereading the book, I could understand how having this why could give life value even when little else remained in one’s control.

In the absence of deprivation, Frankl diagnosed boredom as the ailment of the post-war era. Logotherapy would be the salve to the twentieth century’s existential vacuum, for he predicted that “progressive automation will probably lead to an enormous increase in the leisure hours available to the average worker.” Maybe AI will actually take us there in the twenty-first. Oh what shall—what should I do?

My friends and I are already asking the question, well before the long-prophesied leisure Armageddon arrives. One quit his job in search of more meaningful work. He writes against “consensus tracks,” the scripts for achievement that reward performing value over creating it. There are still goals to chase, but he takes pride in having chosen them for himself. For him, that has meant founding a startup in San Francisco.

There’s no value in winning a game that doesn’t matter to you, so what is it that you really want? Is that the game you’re playing?

—, “Is this what you wanted?”

Another friend questions whether we can truly know what we want. She grieves at 24 while in a Shanghai McDonald’s over what’s changed in her past dozen years, and what will change still over the next dozen. In her chase for community and love, she can no longer tell whether the choices she’s made are in search of approval or happiness. The boundary between desire and duty is blurry, for “we become the decisions we make.”

This is the circumstance, these are my cards. I will play my hand.

—, “One Great Year (of the Snake)”

My friends and I are amidst a cornucopia of opportunity. Our journeys of meaning are complicated not by boredom in the absence of a why but by a paradox of choice. Which of the many possible whys should we pursue? My newest Substack friend laments how the dreams that drive her have grown smaller since youth. Should the realism of adulthood temper those bigger dreams? Reading Man’s Search for Meaning again, I couldn’t quite parse Frankl’s thoughts on these dilemmas.

ChatGPT summarizes Frankl’s guidance as:

attend to the meaningful possibilities in your actual circumstances, judge which call for your response, and take responsibility for acting on that judgment.

I’m still not quite sure what that would entail. It reminded me of being told to follow what makes me feel alive.

Meanwhile the world goes on. I was not the only one who failed to write all that much on the retreat. We spent as many hours eating as we did writing, and most of us discovered a profound love for Ikeda’s marionberry muffins. The lone dissenter only dared to reveal himself at the end of the trip. We stopped at Ikeda’s again on our way back. I bought two packs of muffins to share at work, and another for myself.

On the car ride back home, I ask my writer friend about her hopes for the future. She is not one for a five-year plan. When it comes to her future community, though, she imagines a circle much like the one she has cultivated today. It is a wish she knows must adapt as people move, grow older, and the world changes around us.

When she turns the question back on me, I stumble a little. My own plan for my late 20s has long been marriage and a white picket fence, perhaps with a child on the way. I think I still want this. I don’t believe that love is like happiness. It cannot simply be left to ensue. But neither can I make it happen by pursuing it hard enough.

It’s been easier to pursue friendship. I’ve grown attached to the life taking shape around these relationships, even as I want a partnership to come along soon. But once it does, I hope I’ll still find myself on group trips like this one, comparing notes on our journeys of meaning. To the chagrin of several of my friends, I’ll probably still be talking it through with ChatGPT too.

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Appendix

I followed Frank’s advice. I cut a bunch of essays and people. Still, I wanted to shout out some recent reads, including pieces that appeared in earlier drafts.

• - My first 8 months self employed

• - Maybe one day I’ll move to Mars

• - la la la(nd): learning to dream big again at 25

• - the rise of the substack self-help philosopher

• - what's in my bag?

• - dear college

• - up in the air

• - What a $179 Mouth Rinse Taught Me About Silicon Valley

• - March, 2026

• - Keeping Your Options Open is Ruining Your Life

My music tastes have never quite fit demographic expectations. I’m an Asian American from the suburbs of D.C. I ascended into one of the Northeast’s ivory towers: Yale. Today, I’m a machine learning engineer and wannabe sociologist planting my roots in San Francisco. Sure, I grew up working class, but my mom’s a hair stylist and my dad a tour guide. There’s not a single blue-collar bone in my body. Yet somewhere along this road, I became a country music fan.

The first concert I ever paid for was Zac Brown Band at Citi Field the summer after my freshman year of college. My girlfriend at the time and I were staying at a $20 a night Airbnb in Flushing. The thirty-minute walk from Main St to the stadium took us from Hong Kong in the 90s to a Friday night in Texas. I could count on one hand the other Asians in the crowd. None of them were guys.

The opener, Cody Johnson, delivered an impassioned speech celebrating patriotic fervor, military veterans, and a nonpartisan culture of acceptance. He decried social media’s cancel culture amid a wave of cheers. We walked out of the stadium later that night to chants of “LET’S GO BRANDON!!”

This past June, I flew to Nashville to see Alan Jackson’s last full-length concert. I bought two tickets in October, back when I felt I had high odds of being in a relationship by summer. The tickets were $1715, but I reasoned that if things worked out, it would be a great couples trip. If it didn’t, well, surely I’d have fallen in love again by then. Summer was still a long while away.

The situationship didn’t pan out, nor did another romance sprout in its place. By May, it was time for a contingency plan. I marketed the ticket to friends and co-workers, first at face value, then at a discount. Most had no idea who Alan Jackson even was. I considered the financially responsible option of scalping the extra ticket. It would have paid for my flight. Friends suggested I instead set my Hinge location to Nashville to find my plus one, but I’ve never been quite so bold. In the end, I subsidized the ticket for a long-distance friend to meet up with me in Nashville. It was a great weekend couples trip, even if it was not quite the one I had expected.

At the concert, some Canadians in the row above us asked how I had become an Alan Jackson fan. Did my parents, like theirs, indoctrinate me over long car rides across the American equivalent of Alberta? The story I told was rather peculiarly intellectual.

One day on the internet, I somehow found myself reading a blog post about country music’s reaction to the tragedy of 9/11. I was down a freshman year rabbit hole trying to understand the relationship between music and political ideology. How had country music come to be associated with Republicans? That was how I stumbled upon an article describing how Alan Jackson’s somber tribute, Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning), stood apart in a musical era of jingoistic patriotism with its message of faith, hope, and love.

I had already heard the song before, but the article became a catalyst for diving deeper into the Alan Jackson catalog. My next loves were Little Bitty, with its jaunty vision of an ordinary life built together, and the tender look back on such a life in Remember When. I was then at the beginning of what would become a nearly four-year relationship, already imagining a future I might someday look back on with nostalgia.

When I’m asked how I fell in love with country music more broadly, though, I start with a childhood of self-inflicted patriotism and dreaming the American dream. Until Passenger’s Let Her Go broke this spell on the radio in the seventh grade, I listened mostly to patriotic songs like God Bless the U.S.A and old American folk songs. A YouTube ripoff¹ of the Cedarmont Kids singing Simple Gifts was probably my most played video during fourth grade. Meanwhile, the Battle Hymn of the Republic was a middle school favorite for bursting into song alongside my Communist-pilled friend, who now works in private equity.

Passenger and a barrage of YouTube acoustic cover artists dominated my listening throughout high school. Country music began creeping in through the mysteries of the Spotify algorithm at some point in senior year. In retrospect, this wasn’t actually much of a leap. Country still had guitars, vocals, and stories to tell—just with more steel guitar, less piano, and a lot more twang.

The first Dolly Parton song preserved in the artifacts of my Spotify playlists is her collaboration with Pentatonix on a new version of Jolene. My first listen was in late 2020, at the start of my impromptu Covid gap year. That same day, I discovered 9 to 5. I hadn’t actually worked a nine-to-five yet,² nor was I a woman, but one could empathize with the feelings nonetheless.

It was Coat of Many Colors, however, that actually etched Dolly into those memories of mine. The records are lost as to how I discovered it, though Last.fm preserves what happened next. I listened once, added it to my playlist, and forgot about it for a week. Then one day I played it eighty times. Twenty-six more the next.

I didn’t grow up like Dolly in anything akin to a Tennessee mountain home. I never went to church on Sunday, and I never heard crickets in the fields nearby. My mama never sewed any clothing for me. My grandma did knit me sweaters, but they were of a single color and I was never made fun of at school. None of this stopped me from going back through the years, wanderin’ back to seasons of my youth at the ripe old age of 18. Six years later, at 24, I’m wandering back once more.

My mom visited me in San Francisco for the first time this past week. On a twelve-hour layover before flying to Australia for the Sydney marathon, she gave me a perm. Before leaving home, she stayed up all night preparing my favorite foods. Her carry-on bag was packed with spring rolls, Thai barbecued pork, and sticky rice in many forms: mango sticky rice, khao lam (sweet rice stuffed in bamboo), and zongzi (savory sticky rice wrapped in bamboo leaves). As we ate these foods for dinner with several of my friends, I was reminded again of Coat of Many Colors and my mom’s love for me.

I first heard the song in early 2021, midway through what should have been my freshman year of college. I was instead spending a gap year doing nothing in particular. Of course, I still invented goals to strive for. I learned to read Chinese. I worked on flashcard research. I read books about educational inequality. Really, though, I was spending a whole lot more time than normal with my mom.

My mom’s pandemic hobby was baking and cooking foods like the ones she would later bring to San Francisco. She made even more complex foods back then. A few times, my mom undertook the multi-day process of making xiao long bao, delicate soup dumplings that require you to simmer broth into gelatin, chill it, and chop it into the filling. She never quite learned to wrap them so that the skin was thin, prompting complaints from her perpetually ungrateful child: me.

Most of the time, my mom labored alone. Sometimes, though, we made food together. We eschewed traditional dumpling making in favor of learning together how to wrap bamboo leaves around sticky rice to create zongzi. The videos were in Chinese, a second language for both of us. It had become our lingua franca, even as we struggled through some of the instructions.

Communication has always been a little tough for us. It became harder to share parts of my life with her as I climbed the ladder from specialized schools to Yale and, eventually, a startup in San Francisco. More and more of my world was unfamiliar to her, while neither of us quite knew what vocabulary the other possessed across our patchwork of Chinese, English, and Thai.

The difficulty was not only linguistic. My mom rarely remembers the people I talk about, and she doesn’t always ask the questions I wish she would. Sometimes, halfway through a story, she interrupts with whatever unrelated thought has just occurred to her. After our recent dinner, a friend remarked that I had seemed exasperated with her at times and asked whether this was simply our dynamic.

Perhaps it is. A remnant of the ungrateful child who cannot see past the flaws of the people closest to him. I am impatient with her. I decide too many things are not worth the effort of explaining. And I have never put in the time to recover Thai, my first language from the year I lived in Thailand as a two-year-old. Chinese didn’t have to become the lingua franca.

Yet, whenever I listen to Coat of Many Colors, I find myself feeling rich as I could be in the love we share. My childhood was never quite like Dolly’s In the Good Old Days (When Times Were Bad)—we had shoes, and medicine, and eventually money. Still, decades spent cutting hair left my mom with carpal tunnel. Like Dolly, I wouldn’t trade my memories of that time for anything, and I would never go back either. On my recent trip to China, I bought her a pair of good hairdressing scissors, the kind she had never been willing to buy for herself. She had spent all her money on me.

Dolly passed away on August 25th, 2026, the day before my mom arrived on her layover with the food she made for me. I found out at work. I’ve been playing Coat of Many Colors on repeat since.

A new friend from work recently asked me why I loved country music. I tried to make him see. But in the moment, every explanation sounded a little trite. I probably sounded like I just liked cookie-cutter songs about cookie-cutter lives, and country certainly has its fair share of songs that fit unflattering stereotypes. Still, the greatest country songs tell simple stories about what makes a life rich—glimpses of lives and feelings that remind me of what I’m carrying with me up this ladder of the American Dream.

The same friends who had no idea who Alan Jackson was have spent this week posting about Dolly. She was one of the last country greats that almost everyone—including the Democrat city kids I’ve planted my roots among—could love without needing to explain themselves. My Yale secret society has been talking since graduation about a reunion trip to Dollywood. Perhaps it’s time for that to leave the group chat.

In case you missed it at the start, you can listen to the playlist of referenced songs/artists in the playlist on Spotify.

¹ The original ripoff has since been deleted. Here is the music video uploaded by the actual Cedarmont Kids.

² If we keep a strict definition of the hours, I still have never worked a 9 to 5. Then again, most people don’t.

相关信件: 致艾琳 (Eileen), 一涛 (Yitao), 朱锟 (Kalos)

致艾琳、一涛、朱锟（Kalos）和全美国华人，

我是束骏杰，一名耶鲁大学新生。 艾琳，读了你的公开信后，我更坚定的相信选择耶鲁是正确的，我很期待将来与你合作以实现我们所期望的改变。 但是，你的公开信中的部分观点我无法赞同。我担心这些观点会在美国华裔乃至亚裔群体中引发分歧，导致大家无法达成共识并采取行动。在阅读了一涛和朱锟（Kalos）的深入答复后，我也希望表达一些我的想法。

艾琳，你说“我们今天所拥有的一切都归功于黑人的努力”，我不认同这种观点。这种说法是在淡化美国华裔在平权斗争中付出的努力。 我们都知道，现今在美国出生的婴儿可以通过“落地国籍”原则自动获得美国国籍，但人们往往不了解黃金德（Wong Kim Ark）为了巩固这一权利所付出的巨大努力。 类似的，在现今美国的公立学校中英语作为第二语言的教学已经十分普遍，但人们常常忽视在Lau v Nichols案中的美国亚裔的贡献。 围绕种族主义的斗争不管在过去还是将来，都不仅仅是黑人与白人之间的斗争。反种族主义斗争跟所有族裔都息息相关，需要所有人共同合作。 如你所说，文森特·钱（Vincent Chin）谋杀案引发的抗议活动正是这种跨种族合作的重要代表，但是这一符号恐怕已经被众多美籍华人—遑论其他族裔—所遗忘了。

在现今意识形态极端分裂的美国，我们见证了因种族主义带来的种种恶行：乔治·弗洛伊德（George Floyd）谋杀案、 因新冠引发的亚裔仇恨，不一而足。在这种环境中保持缄默、拒绝发声、进而助长种族主义，是错误的。很多人都犯了这样的错误，这也包括很多美国华人。我们应该反思、批评我们之中保持沉默的人，但同时也要明确我们的立场。与其思考我们亏欠了什么，我们更应该把能量集中在为更好的美国做出贡献。

一涛，您指出针对美国华人的刻板印象是正确的。 但是，这种理解同时也在传播和加深对其他群体的刻板印象。在把美国华裔的成功完全归功于中国文化的同时，我们也在暗示其他的群体缺乏这样“优越”的文化。 这种思考方式在强调单一文化的优越性：因为我们的文化鼓励自力更生，鼓励努力工作和创业，所以美籍华裔便比其他群体要更优越。 但正如朱锟（Kalos）所说，这样我们不也在暗示其他美国人对这些价值观不抱有类似的自豪感？ 若真是这样，为什么在西班牙，二代华人移民的学历却不如其他少数族裔[6]？ 西班牙华裔是否缺乏所谓让美籍华人成功的中华文化价值观？

为了正确解释美籍华人与其他少数族裔在成就上的差异，我们必须了解我们的起点，族群资本和种族主义的影响。 艾琳提到了1965年的重要性：那一年移民政策的变化导致了对拥有高等教育的技术移民的偏爱。 虽然美籍华人在美国有一段漫长而动荡的历史，我们大多数人今天能来到这个国家，也是这个政策的结果。

一涛，我毫不怀疑您和我们所有的第一代华裔父母一样，都为实现美国梦而付出了极大的努力。 如您所说，许多一代移民在到达美国时几乎没有任何退路。 但必须指出的是，尽管缺乏物质资源，这些一代移民其实已经拥了许多人没有的宝贵资源：高等教育。 50％的美籍华裔移民拥有本科或更高学历，而在中国只有4％的人有相同的学历[5]。 同时，只有5％的墨西哥裔美国移民拥有本科学历或更高学历，而17％的墨西哥裔拥有同样的学历。 在全部美国人中，拥有本科或更高学历的也只有28％。鉴于我们作为一个社区将教育作为未来成果的重要指标，您难道不认为在移民美国过程中所经历的严格筛选是我们集体成功的重要因素吗？另外，由于美国华人整体的教育水平较高，我们也可以通过共享资源来更好的支持教育水平相对落后的华人家庭。

与美国不同，在西班牙，只有40％的中国移民从高中毕业，而拥有本科或更高学历的人不到5％[6]。 预计只有11.7％的二代中国西班牙人会获得大学学位，但在西班牙的所有少数族裔中这个数字是21.4％。 尽管来自相同的文化背景，西班牙华裔和美国华裔在教育水平上存在明显差异。由此可见，中国文化不足以解释美国华裔的成功。

当我们比较子女和父母的教育水平时，我们发现在美国第二代拉丁裔比起他们的父母的进步最大[3]，但是这一上升趋势并没有延续到他们的子女身上。这种现象，即第1.5代和第二代美国移民在教育上取得的巨大成功，在社会学中可以用移民乐观主义从两个角度解释。 首先，对于那些自愿来到美国的一代移民，在适应的过程中遇到的种种问题更像是暂时的，他们更有意愿去找到解决方案并克服挑战。而另一个角度令人沮丧: 移民后裔在争取美国梦的过程中遇到的种族歧视使他们对这个梦失望了。

与美国华人一样，韩裔及朝鲜裔是在美国也被视为“模范少数族裔”。 但是在日本，韩国人和朝鲜人受到了类似黑人在美国受到的歧视。 在小说《柏青哥》中，李敏进（Min-Jin Lee）含蓄地展示了这种种族主义的破坏性影响[4]。书中是这样描述一个在日本的朝鲜孩子的挫败感的：

摩撒知道他要变成为一个坏朝鲜人了。警察经常以偷窃或在家私自酿酒的罪名逮捕朝鲜人。每个礼拜，他住的那条街上都有人被警察抓走。诺亚说，一些朝鲜人违反了法律，所有朝鲜人都会背上恶名。在亚野区的每一个街区都有男人打老婆，每一个街区都有女孩子在酒馆里工作、为了钱出卖肉体。诺亚说朝鲜人必须努力工作，变得更好，借此提高形象。而摩撒只想把那些说脏话的人臭揍一顿。在亚野区，有一些丑陋的老女人骂街，还有一些男人喝得酩酊大醉，睡在屋外。日本人不希望朝鲜人住在自己家附近，因为他们很脏，和猪住在一起，孩子身上还有虱子。此外，还有人说朝鲜人还不如贱民，因为贱民至少还有日本血统。诺亚对摩撒说，他以前的老师都说他是优秀的朝鲜人。而摩撒明白，由于自己的学习成绩差，又不懂礼貌，那些老师一定认为摩撒是个糟糕的朝鲜人。

他妈的那又怎么样？ 如果其他十岁孩子认为他蠢，那也无所谓。如果他们认为他很暴力也无所谓。如果有必要的话，摩撒不怕把他们打得满地找牙。“你以为我是野兽”，摩撒想，“那么我就可以成为野兽，让你吃点苦头”。摩撒无意成为优秀的朝鲜人。那有什么意义？

在给艾琳和朱锟（Kalos）的回应里，很多人指出了这不仅是两代人之间的差异。在我这一代之中，许多人也持有不同的看法。 是的，面对种族问题拒绝发声的问题不局限于一代或几代人。我们不能一概而论的宣称我们的父母都是种族主义者，也不能自诩是摆脱了偏见的“受过教育的精英”、使命是帮助父母摆脱种族主义的偏见。事情恐怕没有这么简单。 当然，我们不能否认许多美国华裔对黑人的种族主义歧视。估计所有人都听说过、甚至使用过“黑鬼”，这个词的存在和传播的广度就足以说明了美国华裔群体中相当一部分人持有种族主义观点。

归纳总结与偏见之间的界限线模糊，我想我们每个人都曾越过这一界线。但是通过参与像这样的讨论和深入思考，我们大家可以共同努力，消除偏见，促进反种族主义思想，以创造我们所希望的更加平等、司法更加完善的、更好的美国。

奥巴马在2004年说，“不存在所谓黑人的美国、白人的美国、拉丁裔的美国、亚裔的美国 。 只有一个美利坚合众国。” 他说：我们共同的美国公民身份比我们之间的差异更为重要 [1]。 但是，乔治·弗洛伊德（George Floyd）谋杀案揭示的事实是，奥巴马对美国的描述并不是对现实的反映，而是对未来的展望。我们并不是第一次听到这样的愿望：亚布拉罕·林肯和马丁·路德·金都说过这样的话。改变需要时间，但是我也们也应该回想起40年前詹姆斯·鲍德温（James Baldwin）发出的质问[2]： “我还要等多久？”

一涛，我同意我们应该谴责骚乱带来的暴力和对小企业的破坏。 如您所说，这些行动“完全不利于解决问题。” 但是，我们要分清暴徒和示威者。 我们不能让暴动者的行动淹没了示威者的声音: 他们不愿继续忍耐了。 暴动者的行动说明了问题的严重性，但我们不应过度关注暴动而忽略了真正重要的东西：为警察改革和反种族主义做出贡献。

祝好,

束骏杰 (Matthew Shu)

翻译: Shi Feng, 徐文骅 (Brian Xu)

参考文献

[1] B. Obama, “Barack Obama’s Remarks to the Democratic National Convention,” The New York Times, Jul. 27, 2004.

[2] K. Thorsen, James Baldwin: How Much Time Do You Want For Your “Progress?”

[3] G. Kao and M. Tienda, “Optimism and Achievement: The Educational Performance of Immigrant Youth,” Social Science Quarterly, vol. 76, no. 1, pp. 1–19, 1995.

[4] Min Jin Lee, Pachinko. Grand Central Publishing, 2017.

[5] J. Lee and M. Zhou, The Asian American Achievement Paradox. Russell Sage Foundation, 2015.

[6] J. Yiu, “Calibrated Ambitions: Low Educational Ambition as a Form of Strategic Adaptation Among Chinese Youth in Spain,” International Migration Review, vol. 47, no. 3, pp. 573–611, 2013, doi: 10.1111/imre.12037.

Referenced letters: Eileen, Yitao, Kalos

To Eileen, Yitao, Kalos, and the Chinese American Community,

My name is Matthew Shu, and I am a rising freshman at Yale University. Eileen, your letter reaffirmed to me why I have chosen to attend Yale, and I hope to collaborate with you in the future to achieve the changes we both call for. However, I disagree with parts of your letter and I worry that similar disagreements have distracted others in the Chinese American and wider Asian American community from accepting your premise and call to action. After reading Yitao’s and Kalos’ thoughtful responses, I hope to add my voice to this discussion.

Eileen, I do not agree with the mindset that “we owe everything” to Black Americans. When we make this claim, we’ve discounted our own agency in the fight to make America a more equal society. We’ve overlooked how Wong Kim Ark’s struggle cemented for all Americans the right to birthright citizenship. We’ve forgotten how Asian Americans in Lau v Nichols fought for “English as a Second Language” programs to become widespread in America’s public schools. The struggle against racism is not and has never been the struggle of Black Americans on one side and White Americans on the other, with everyone else on the sidelines rooting for a particular side. As you accurately point out, the protests in the aftermath of Vincent Chin’s murder represent a powerful moment of interracial cooperation. But he is not remembered by most Americans. Asian Americans are not the only ones who have forgotten this symbol of cooperation.

In this divisive atmosphere, Asian Americans have not been the only ones complicit in this “kind of silence” in the aftermath of heinous racist acts—from George Floyd’s murder to COVID-19-fueled xenophobia. We must chastise those in our community who stay silent, but in remembering our past, we must also clarify our message. What we owe Black Americans and other protesters today is not a debt, but rather, further cooperation in movements to create a better America.

Yitao, you are correct in calling out stereotypes against Chinese Americans. However, I believe you have fallen victim to similar stereotypes about other communities, as well as our own. When we attribute the general success of Chinese Americans as a product of our Chinese culture, we are implying the inferiority of Black and Hispanic cultures. By holding this viewpoint, we suggest that Chinese Americans are superior to others because of the cultural values we hold of self-reliance, hard work, and entrepreneurship. But as Kalos notes, are we then suggesting that other Americans do not place similar pride in these values? If so, why do second-generation Chinese immigrants in Spain have lower educational attainment than all other Spanish minorities [6]? Are Chinese Spaniards somehow deficient in the Chinese cultural values you claim as the primary reason for Chinese American success?

To properly explain the disparities in achievement between Chinese Americans and other minorities, we must understand the effects of starting points, ethnic capital, and racism. Eileen mentions the importance of 1965, the year a change in immigration policy led to increased preference for highly skilled and educated immigrants. While Chinese Americans have had a long and tumultuous history in America, most of us today have come to the country as a result of this act.

Yitao, I do not doubt you and all of our first-generation Chinese American parents have worked extremely hard to achieve the American Dream. As you stated, many first-generation Chinese Americans had little to fall back on when they arrived in America. However, it is crucial to note that despite this lack of material resources, many first-generation Chinese Americans had a valuable resource: prior education. 50% of Chinese American immigrants have a Bachelor’s degree or higher while only 4% do in China [5]. Meanwhile, only 5% of Mexican American immigrants have a Bachelor’s degree or higher while 17% do in Mexico. In the general American population, only 28% have a Bachelor’s degree or higher. Given how much we as a community value education as an indicator for future outcomes, wouldn’t you agree this hyper-selectively among Chinese American immigrants is an important factor in our collective success? Because such a large proportion of our community is highly educated, we are also better able to support children from less educated families by sharing community resources.

Unlike in America, only 40% of Chinese immigrants in Spain have even graduated high school, and less than 5% have a Bachelor’s degree or higher [6]. Only 11.7% of second-generation Chinese Spaniards are expected to obtain a university degree, compared to 21.4% across all ethnic minorities in Spain. Despite sharing the same home culture, there is a clear discrepancy in educational attainment between Chinese Spaniards and Chinese Americans. Chinese culture is an inadequate explanation for Chinese American success.

When we measure success by the change in education level relative to parents, it is actually second-generation Hispanic Americans who are the most upwardly mobile [3]. Unfortunately, this upward trend does not continue to third-generation Hispanic Americans. Immigrant optimism is a hypothesis in sociology explaining this statistical observation that for some ethnic and racial groups, 1.5 and second-generation Americans achieve the greatest educational success. There are two reasons for this idea. The first is that voluntary immigrants to America see adjustment issues as temporary and are more willing to find solutions to overcome the challenges faced. The second, more depressing, reason is that later generations of minorities have become disillusioned by the racism they have encountered as they strive for the American Dream.

Like Chinese Americans, Korean Americans are another ethnic group in America seen as a “model minority.” But in Japan, Koreans are targeted similarly to Blacks in America. In her novel Pachinko, Min-Jin Lee poignantly shows the damaging effects of this racism [4]. Here is an excerpt capturing this frustration in a Korean-Japanese child:

Mozasu knew he was becoming one of the bad Koreans. Police officers often arrested Koreans for stealing or home brewing. Every week, someone on his street got in trouble with the police. Noa would say that because some Koreans broke the law, everyone got blamed. On every block in Ikaino, there was a man who beat his wife, and there were girls who worked in bars who were said to take money for favors. Noa said that Koreans had to raise themselves up by working harder and being better. Mozasu just wanted to hit everyone who said mean things. In Ikaino, there were homely old women who cussed and men who were so drunk that they slept outside their houses. The Japanese didn’t want Koreans to live near them, because they weren’t clean, they lived with pigs, and the children had lice. Also, Koreans were said to be even lower than burakumin because at least burakumin had Japanese blood. Noa told Mozasu that his former teachers had told him he was a good Korean, and Mozasu understood that with his own poor grades and bad manners, those same teachers would think Mozasu was a bad one.

So the ** what? If the other ten-year-olds thought he was stupid, that was okay. If they thought he was violent, that was okay. If necessary, Mozasu was not afraid to clean out all the teeth right from their mouths. You think I’m an animal, Mozasu thought, then I can be an animal and hurt you. Mozasu did not intend to be a good Korean. What was the point in that?

In the responses to Eileen’s and Kalos’ letters, I have seen many point out this is not only a generational divide, and that many in my generation hold differing views as well. You are correct. This is not a generational issue. It is not so simple as declaring that all our parents are racists and that we, the second generation educated elite, are above prejudices and here to save our parents from racist beliefs. It is preposterous, however, to deny that many Chinese Americans are racist towards Black Americans. Almost all of us have heard or even used the term 黑鬼 (hēi guǐ - black devil) as a slur. The simple existence of this term is evidence for the prevalence of racism within the Chinese American community.

The line between stereotypes and useful generalizations is a thin one, and there are times we have all crossed this line. But by engaging in more of the thoughtful dialogue Eileen’s letter has generated, we can all work together to dismantle our prejudices and promote anti-racist thinking in order to create the more equal, more judicial, and greater America we all call for.

When Obama declared in 2004, “there’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America,” he claimed our shared American identity mattered more than our differences [1]. Yet, in light of George Floyd’s murder, it is clear just how much divides our country today. Perhaps it is better to see Obama’s words as a promise, another in a long line of promises made by great Americans like Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. Progress takes time, but as James Baldwin expressed over forty years ago [2]: “How much time do you want for your progress?”

Yitao, I too, do not condone the violence and damage done to small businesses as a result of these riots. As you say, these actions are “totally counter productive to solving the problems.” However, it is important to make a distinction between rioters and protestors. We can not let the actions of the rioters drown out the voices of the many more protestors who will not tolerate waiting anymore. The actions of rioters speak to the severity of the issues, but we must not let the debate over these rioters derail the necessity of making meaningful contributions toward police reform and anti-racism.

Best,

Matthew Shu (束骏杰)

References

[1] B. Obama, “Barack Obama’s Remarks to the Democratic National Convention,” The New York Times, Jul. 27, 2004.

[2] K. Thorsen, James Baldwin: How Much Time Do You Want For Your “Progress?”

[3] G. Kao and M. Tienda, “Optimism and Achievement: The Educational Performance of Immigrant Youth,” Social Science Quarterly, vol. 76, no. 1, pp. 1–19, 1995.

[4] Min Jin Lee, Pachinko. Grand Central Publishing, 2017.

[5] J. Lee and M. Zhou, The Asian American Achievement Paradox. Russell Sage Foundation, 2015.

[6] J. Yiu, “Calibrated Ambitions: Low Educational Ambition as a Form of Strategic Adaptation Among Chinese Youth in Spain,” International Migration Review, vol. 47, no. 3, pp. 573–611, 2013, doi: 10.1111/imre.12037.