Reflections and Questions on Belonging, Citizenship & Settler Complicity as the Asian Diaspora

Mar 6

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CONTENT NOTE: brief mentions of Asian murder, Indigenous genocide, and anti-Blackness

AUTHOR’S NOTE: I am a middle class, currently non-disabled Corean settler, cis woman, and immigrant with Canadian citizenship. I have been living on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations, colonially known as Vancouver, Canada since the age of 5.

In writing about and in relation to peoples of Asian diasporas, I recognize the tensions and assumptions in the use of the term we in reference to Asian, especially given East Asians’ dominance over Asian identities and the term, often portrayed without sufficient critical thought on who the term includes/excludes.

This essay is written from my embodied knowledges and lived experiences, and thus my particular social location, and I do not intend to erase or oversimplify the complexities and nuances of racial/ethnic identities and the intersections of gender, sexual orientation, class, citizenship, (dis)ability, and age. Please refer to the notes at the end of the essay for additional commentary where I aim to cover more nuance and complexity.

It was the first time that I felt a collective grief and rage about the systemic violence that I personally experience as an Asian woman.

In the spring of 2021, I witnessed the rise of the Stop Asian Hate movement, as rallies popped up across Turtle Island, colonially known as North America. The emotional build-up around centuries of anti-Asian immigration policies, the racialization of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the following increase in anti-Asian hate crimes reached a tipping point when 6 Asian women were murdered by a white man in Atlanta, motivated by his fetishization. As a Corean¹ woman and immigrant, I too was gutted. And for the first time, I almost even felt affirmed — that my pain and oppression were real. Although I have privately grieved and processed my angers and traumas around patriarchal, white supremacist violence towards Asian women, I had always done it on my own; never collectively.

But unfortunately, I also felt a significant discomfort in some of the responses by folks of Asian diasporas². I kept seeing signs, art, and chants, announcing “I am Asian-American!” or “I am Asian-Canadian!”, in an attempt to say — I belong here too. While I absolutely resonated with the collective grief, rage, and desire to belong, I felt awful in my heart and gut.

Asian-Canadians and -Americans navigate the challenges of not wanting to be seen/treated/dehumanized as the perpetual foreigner by the white gaze but also struggle with how much to assimilate in order to survive. This often leaves us in an in-between place between oppressor and oppressed, a dilemma in assimilating into whiteness and being used by the oppressor to further anti-Blackness³ and settler colonialism⁴, or in continuing to be seen/treated/dehumanized as the perpetual foreigner.

With that greyness in mind, these attempts of claiming belonging through citizenship represented, to me, unquestioned settler complicity and willingness to strengthen the settler colonial nations of Canada and America. To uplift and further legitimize the power of the nation state is to perpetuate colonial erasure of Indigenous peoples and their sovereignty.

As a Corean settler, I was caught between my desire to honour this collective moment and my discomfort in gaining proximity to colonial white supremacy. I wanted to join my Asian kin in the streets, and I also wanted to run away from the entire conversation, in fear of tolerating complacency in settler colonialism. I thought of my ancestors who survived Japanese imperialism and I could not stand the thought of gaining proximity to the colonizer for my own benefit.

But it is also not okay to run away. And there must be more options than to assimilate or be oppressed.

This essay is my attempt at honouring the grief/rage of the white supremacist oppressions of Asian diasporas while challenging our settler complicity on Turtle Island. This is my attempt at holding and navigating both and the in-between place that we/I so often end up being in. It involves asking the questions: How do we honour our grief and rage around white supremacist, patriarchal, anti-Asian violence? How do we navigate our desire for belonging as peoples of diasporas in a way that doesn’t further perpetuate colonial erasure, displacement, and dispossession of Indigenous peoples here on Turtle Island?⁵ How might we feel through and mobilize our anger and grief in ways that are liberatory – not only for ourselves but also for the greater collective?

In this essay, I will illustrate the struggle and desire for belonging for folks of Asian diasporas in Canada and the US, based on these white supremacist countries’ imperial and racist violence towards us/our peoples. Secondly, while empathizing with the deep desire to belong, I will identify how claiming citizenship as an attempt to be humanized solidifies these nation states and intensifies the settler complicity and complacency of Asian settlers. Then lastly, I will ask and explore the question of how else Asian settlers could cultivate a sense of belonging on these lands in the refusal of assimilation to the nation state while attending to our responsibilities as uninvited guests on Turtle Island.

Okay, let’s begin!

1. The Perpetual Foreigner’s Desire for Belonging

Recently, my mother told me that she lost her home the moment we left Korea. She knows that she doesn’t belong here in so-called Canada with her racialized skin and imperfect English. She also understands that she is now foreign to the land that our ancestors have called home for over two millennia. In The Colour of God, scholar Ayesha S. Chaudhry writes “… the cruel fact of immigration is that once you leave, you never really have a home. You and the place you leave behind transform, ceaselessly, infinitely, so that when if- you encounter each other again, you are unrecognisable to one another” (14). Since immigrating 21 years ago, the land, waters, and people that make up Korea have become foreign to my mother, and she has become foreign to Korea.

It’s a well-versed notion that peoples of diasporas are in the in-betweens — floating, navigating tensions between places, cultures, generations, and peoples. We are never fully landed or settled. We might have multiple homes and/or no home. Feminist writer and scholar, Sara Ahmed argues that migration and displacement challenge and break a perception of home associated with a “purified sense of belonging” (339) in which an individual is so comfortable and at ease in the space that they don’t question their belongingness.

Most white folks in so-called North America are so comfortable calling Canada and America home. They get to do so without thinking much of it themselves and without being questioned by others. Their sense of belonging has become so naturalized by the settler-colonial nation state that many white folks have never even thought about how, when, and to whose lands their ancestors arrived here⁶.

This is in significant contrast to the racial and sexualized undertones of constantly being asked “where are you from” as the first question by predominantly white men. Not only does it scream perpetual foreigner, but the question also reflects their fetishizing curiosity of my body, asking what flavour of Asian they might be pursuing. While white people get to be “so at ease that [they] do(es) not think” (Ahmed 39) in this unquestioned sense of belonging, I have been going to therapy, processing trauma around this one question and its implications, just so that I can go to the beach or a restaurant with less distress.

Canada and the US have been implicated in anti-Asian immigration laws, hypersexualization of Asian women, and exploitative Asian labour. We are constantly made perpetual foreigners, COVID-19 has illustrated the persistence of yellow peril, and anti-Asian hate crimes are rampant in seemingly progressive (ie. white liberal) cities.

Home and belonging are complicated by migration, ethnicity, and diaspora, so no wonder, folks of Asian diasporas feel uprooted. But we will never become white enough to belong here and I refuse to beg the oppressor to humanize me in the ways that work for them. Assimilation may offer more chances of survival, especially for older generations or for those with less access to resources and privileges. Assimilation may bring about less direct violence and danger upon ourselves. But assimilation is not belonging. Assimilating to the oppressor will not liberate us.

2. What Our Citizenship Does for the Nation State

Canada and the US are white supremacist, settler colonial, illegal nation states built on and maintained by stolen land, stolen bodies and stolen labour — or more specifically through Indigenous genocide, Black slavery, and exploited Latinx and Asian labour, all happened and happening within Turtle Island and across the globe through Canadian and American imperialisms.

To claim belonging to these countries through citizenship entails two things:

One is to conform to their state categories and hierarchies of “belonging and non-belonging ranging from ‘citizen’ to ‘illegal’” (Sharma 322). In Nation States, Borders, Citizenship, and the Making of “National” Difference, activist scholar Nandita Sharma⁷ says, “Nation state relies on the complicity of those who make themselves at home in the nation in order to legitimize the highly differential treatment accorded those classified as non-citizens, particularly those categorized as ‘migrant worker’ or ‘illegal,’ who are legally constructed as ‘foreign’” (323). If we as citizens of these nations demand “I’m Asian-American/Canadian” in attempts to become humanized by the white supremacist nation state, what about the Asian migrant workers, the refugees, and the undocumented? What about the Asians in Asia?

The second requirement is to “inherit the sins of the state” (Chaudhry 40). In reflecting on her own childhood desire to become Canadian through citizenship, Chaudhry notes:

“We forget, no, we erase the sins so we can celebrate ourselves simply, which requires us to first craft simplistic stories about ourselves. If erasing our sins means erasing entire peoples and histories, including our own, so be it. We demand this forgetting, this erasure, as the cost of ‘good citizenship’, and we are angry, frustrated, annoyed when people refuse to participate in the erasure, when they insist on reminding us of our sins, when they insist on remembering” (40)

Celebrating Canadian-/American-ness involves erasing and denying all the violence that has been and continues to be required for the existence of the nation state. This includes ongoing settler colonialism, anti-Blackness, and the violence of Canadian and American imperialisms around the world, including in Asia. How many of our families migrated to North America involuntarily? I am thinking of the Vietnamese refugees, Filipino migrant workers, even my own father impacted by the IMF financial crisis. Migration occurs on a spectrum of forced displacement to voluntary migration, often based on varying impacts of Euro-North-American imperialisms and colonialisms (though not to disregard the imperialisms of other nations that factor into migration). These countries colonize and expand their empires into our ancestral homelands, then claim to be saviours from the very violence that they instigate.

“… by making citizenship a form of belonging the state turns itself into a refuge from itself”

— Ayesha S. Chaudhry, 41

This is how Canada and the US make use of citizenship to include settlers of colour⁸ into the settler colonial project. Historic and current immigration policies reflect how peoples of Asian diasporas were and continue to be required to assimilate into whiteness and racial capitalism in order to become citizens. Through the model minority myth, we have been and continue to be used to further oppress Black and Indigenous peoples, based on our abilities and willingness to appease whiteness.

But what if we refused? What if we could refuse? What might it be like to hold and possibly soften the edges of our fears around refusing to assimilate: fears of not surviving, of exclusion, and of loss? If we have the privileges and accompanying courage to do so, what if we leaned more into collective liberation, action and solidarities rather than assimilation?

I have been deeply moved by a tweet by Anthony Ocampo, Ph.D, a queer Filipino-American scholar and writer, and it reads, “It’s taken me 38 years to realize that our destiny as children of immigrants is to disrupt, not assimilate.” (@anthonyocampo).

Tweet by Anthony Ocampo @AnthonyOCampo that reads “It’s taken me 38 years to realize that our destiny as children of immigrants is to disrupt, not assimilate." Dated Feb 10, 2020 9:18 AM. Twitter for iPhone.

Sit with that. Breathe it in.

Disrupting the nation state involves tackling interlocking systems of oppression. While racisms, imperialisms and colonialisms are not the same and must not be conflated, they are very much interconnected. In A Feminist Approach to Decolonizing Anti-Racism, scholar Rita Kaur Dhamoon highlights:

“… anti-racist work should be directed against hegemonies of migration and Indigenous dispossession as interconnected manifestations of white-supremacist capitalism, of which some hegemonies are based on societal and state-produced colonial hierarchies that privilege non-Indigenous peoples, including people of colour, at the expense of Indigenous peoples” (23)

We must lean into anti-racist and anti-colonial strategies that are situated in the settler colonial context of Turtle Island by recognizing the connections between Asian displacement/migration and Indigenous dispossession, as well as the ways that settlers of colour benefit from ongoing Indigenous dispossession.

For myself, this commitment to anti-colonialism and Indigenous sovereignty does not stem from a place of guilt or shame. These feelings often lead to overwhelm and inaction, and oftentimes do not inspire social change. Rather, I try to focus on actions to “redress settler complicity” as offered by Squamish Matriarch, Ta7taliya Nahanee.

In Privilege vs. Complicity: People of Colour and Settler Colonialism, Scholar Beenash Jafri also encourages folks to focus on settler complicity in contrast to privilege, especially for settlers of colour:

“… think[ing] in terms of complicity shifts attention away from the self and onto strategies and relations that reproduce social and institutional hierarchies. The issue then is not about individual absolution of responsibility, guilt, and culpability (‘checking’ privilege) but, rather, one of reexamining strategies through which we give ourselves that responsibility and become accountable in the first place” (85)

Strategy and accountability over individual guilt and culpability.

Based on this line of thinking, in what ways are we as Asian settlers benefiting from ongoing Indigenous dispossession? When have we conformed and when do we conform to the colonial policies and practices of the nation state? When have we challenged them and when do we challenge them? How can we use our varying privileges of citizenship to redress our complicity in settler colonialism and unsettle the nation state for the greater collective?⁹

3. Envisioning and Embodying Culturally Rooted Co-Resistance

When reflecting on how we as peoples of Asian diasporas can disrupt white supremacy and settler colonialism, I also wonder what we could learn from our own ancestral and cultural knowledges to guide us in our participation in collective action. This is the most important part — the envisioning of and participating in liberation and solidarity movements and doing so in ways that also connect us to our own cultural roots. And I would courageously offer the invitation that this may be one way of how we could tune into a sense of belonging that we so deeply seek.

I’ll give you a personal example.

If you have engaged much in Korean culture, you may have come across the concept of 한 (han). It is generally described to be an inherently Korean trait and experience of mixed emotions of rage, grief, and sorrow associated with injustice, specifically tying back to Japanese imperialism.

Korean-American scholar Sandra So Hee Chi Kim describes han in several ways, as “a collective sense of grief in the face of injustice” (272), “an embodied experience of shared grief” (273), and “an affect, a habit, a practice, and an imaginary based within the sounds and scripts of colonial and postcolonial historical experience” (271).

I remember feeling this han within me from a young age and it is ever-present in my emotional landscape, although sometimes it can be not as loud. It is a rage and grief that feels bigger and much older than me, that blurs the boundaries of self and other, and of generations. When I express some of this han vocally, a deep rumbling sound from my gut through my vocal chords, I can feel in my body, the ripples of grief and rage of my ancestors and my peoples.

While han is often associated with negative impacts, I also know that it is this collective han that liberated my ancestors from Japanese imperialism, as “han subsumes the feeling of hope as integral to the Korean experience of suffering.” (Chi Kim 256). In a workshop called Processing Rage¹⁰, I teach about liberatory rage — a rage that mobilizes us into taking action against injustice. Now imagine that this rage I feel is not only mine, but it is also the rage of my ancestors, my descendants, and my peoples. Yes, it can feel overwhelming, yes, I have struggled with it, and yet, imagine the power of its depth and vastness. That, to me, is han. It is both a result of and a response to injustice, “a dynamic process with both coercive and transformative potentials for a political imagination’’ (Chi Kim 273). Han is a collective and ancestral mobilizer.

While han is also often described as a unique trait to Koreans, I would agree with Chi Kim that while the social construct of han is unique to Korea, interwoven into Korean history and identity, the embodied experience of han is not. I believe that a peoples who have been oppressed for generations know this embodied experience. Chi Kim references one journalist who suggests that ‘‘an entire genre of American music arguably coalesced around the notion [of han]: the Blues, sung by African-Americans in the Deep South” (271).

I also hear it in the songs of Indigenous land defenders.

When I sing along to the Women’s Warrior Song at solidarity actions for Indigenous nations fighting against ongoing colonial invasion, organized by local Indigenous youth, I can hear and feel the sound of han in my belly and from everyone there. This expression of shared and different grief, rage, sorrow, and hopefulness is what reminds me of my responsibilities to these lands and Indigenous stewards.

Through the singing and sounds of han is how I honour and express my grief and rage. Han connects me to the collective in the face of violence and oppression. And han re-orients and mobilizes me towards collective liberation and solidarities. It is the gift and responsibility that I receive from my ancestors and my people¹¹.

images of black text on white background, text in caption — **Description of 한 - Han by Han Soom**
한 / Han is that indescribable combination of pain, grief, rage, anxiety, and fear that all Korean people feel. It is born out of centuries of invasion, colonialism, occupation and war on the peninsula, passed down through our mothers, ompa's, and appas, living in our Korean blood as we inhabit all corners of the diaspora today.

Now I zoom back out to us as peoples of Asian diasporas on Turtle Island. What cultural teachings could inform us on how to relate to the Indigenous peoples here, to these lands, and to our own cultural roots? My dear friend Gabes Torres¹² and I have had multiple conversations on the topic of kin and kinship, and she shared with me the Tagalog word for kin, kapwa, which she describes as “shared self”. We discussed the importance of both holding the beauty of interconnectedness in kin as well as the collective responsibilities that come with it.

I invite us to look through our own cultural roots and see what wisdoms might help inform us in participating in solidarities, dismantling oppressive hierarchies, and reconnecting to the greater collective. Given that many Asian cultures center collectivism and collective responsibility, I would think that there’s something worth digging into for everyone.

“If you have come here to help me you are wasting your time, but if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”

— Aboriginal activist group, Queensland, Australia, 1970s (MZ.MANY NAMES)¹³

Where did we start? Oh yes, belonging.

I wrote this piece to complicate citizenship as belonging. I wanted to challenge the relationship between belonging and embracing Canadian-/American-ness. I wanted to ask the question of how else Asian settlers could cultivate a sense of belonging on these lands in the refusal of assimilation to the nation state, while also attending to our responsibilities as uninvited guests on Turtle Island. While it is easy to associate home with geographical place or citizenship, I encourage us to explore belonging through relationships and engaging in the collective responsibilities of co-resistance that come with being interconnected. I believe and have experienced in an embodied way that solidarities and collective action also bring collective care, collective joys, and collective healing, offering glimpses of what could feel like a type of home.

As Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg writer and activist Leanne Betasamosake Simpson suggests, may we engage in constellations of co-resistance in the pursuit of collective liberation.

“We can’t achieve Indigenous nationhoods while replicating antiblackness. We can’t have resurgence without centering gender and queerness, and creating alternative systems of accountability for sexual and gender violence. Therefore, we need to create constellations of connections with other radical thinkers and doers and makers. We need to build mass movements with radical labor, with Black communities, with radical communities of color. We need to stop providing space for the “What can white allies do” questions and set up spaces where we can connect with other social movements and create constellations of mutual support and co-resistance.” (30-31)

Acknowledgments

This essay, which was written as a final paper for an academic course, is a deeper dive into some thoughts I had in June 2021 on Navigating Belonging, Asian Diaspora & Settler Complicity, given the news of the hundreds of unmarked graves of Indigenous children. Thank you to Professor Alifa Bandali and my dear friends, Nicole Albrecht, Gabes Torres, and Irving Chong for engaging in these conversations with me and for helping bring together this essay.

Notes

I intentionally spell Corean with a ‘C’ when self-identifying to recognize the history of Japanese imperialism and the attempted erasure of Korea on a global scale during colonization.
I have pluralized “peoples of Asian diasporas” in attempts to recognize the multiplicities of what Asian and diasporic mean and how they are perceived based on different manifestations of white supremacy and imperialisms that impact Asian peoples differently eg. Sinophobia, Islamophobia, Orientalism.
This essay does not specifically address some of the anti-Black responses of Stop Asian Hate, such as the call for more policing (which is also anti-Indigenous, given the Prison Industrial Complex of Canada).
This essay which clearly differentiates between Asian settlers, Black folks and Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island is not meant to speak on the realities and experiences of mixed-race peoples.
In her book, A Mind Spread Out on the Ground, Alicia Elliott (Tuscarora) speaks about how Indigenous peoples are also a part of diasporic studies given the ongoing displacement and dispossession of settler colonialism.
As Nikki Sanchez (Pipil and Irish/Scottish) speaks in her Tedx Talk, Decolonization is for Everyone, it is important for settler Canadians to denaturalize our/their presence on Turtle Island by questioning who our/their ancestors are and how we/they arrived on these lands. She offers the question, “can you name whose territories and nation your grandmothers were born on?” and invites settlers who are not recent immigrants to especially confront the intergenerational traumas of ancestors who have been complicit in colonial violence. Black feminist scholar Kristie Dotson (2018) also highlights that attending to our “originating” stories in these colonial nations resists the historical unknowing that maintains settler futurities.
There have been criticisms about Nandita Sharma’s previous understandings of national borders and nationhood that a lack of a pro-sovereignty analysis, which illustrates complicity in settler colonialism (Dhamoon, 2015) and I haven’t looked up if it has changed since. We can recognize the issues of border imperialism and the right to migrate while also recognizing the need for Indigenous sovereignty. I intend to learn more from Harsha Walia’s work, Undoing Border Imperialism and Border & Rule for this topic.
Who is defined as settlers of colour based on forced displacement is an area of discourse, and Amadhy & Lawrence (2009) offer insights especially in regards to the descendants of enslaved Black peoples.
I would also recommend Exalted Subjects by Sunera Thobani on the topic of national identity, indigenous rights, citizenship, and migration in the context of Canada.
Processing Rage is a co-creation between myself and Cicely Belle Blain that began in 2019. We offered in-person events pre-pandemic and there is more to come in the future.
Hansoom is “a storytelling project by and for Koreans” by five queer, diasporic Koreans on Turtle Island. They expand on han by describing jeong as han’s complementary emotion that is a deep care and responsibility for one another that we are born with.
Gabes Torres is a brilliant being, fellow therapist, and platonic life partner/lover with whom I share erotic, intellectual brain sex conversations and envisioning on ancestral wisdoms, community-based, state-alternative forms of healing, and queering intimacies. Check out her writing on Instagram and YES! Magazine.
I first came across this quote in Radical Acceptance by Tara Brach, which did not accredit the quote to a specific name. Feeling bothered by what I perceived to be a lack of accreditation, I did some research. While this quote is often credited to Lilla Watson (Murri), I found that she was “not comfortable being credited for something that had been born of a collective process” of the Aboriginal activists who organized in Queensland. It got me thinking about the tensions between the importance of crediting, especially marginalized folks, and the individualism of quote accreditations which solidify individualized notions of knowledge production.

Works Cited

Ahmed, Sara. “Home and Away: Narratives of Migration and Estrangement.” International Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 2, no. 3, 1999, pp. 329-347. https://doi.org/10.1177/136787799900200303

Chaudhry, Ayesha S. The Colour of God. Oneworld, 2021.

Chi Kim, Sandra So Hee. “Korean Han and the Postcolonial Afterlives of ‘‘The Beauty of Sorrow”.” Korean Studies, vol. 41, 2017, pp. 253-279. doi:10.1353/ks.2017.0026.

Dhamoon, Rita K. “A Feminist Approach to Decolonizing Anti-Racism: Rethinking Transnationalism, Intersectionality, and Settler Colonialism.” Feral Feminisms, no. 4, 2015, pp. 20-37, feralfeminisms.com/rita-dhamoon.

Jafri, Beenash. "Privilege vs. Complicity: People of Colour and Settler Colonialism." Equity Matters, no. 21, 2012, pp. 73-86, academia.edu/1481604/Privilege_vs_Complicity_People_of_Colour_and_Settler_Colonialism.

MZ.MANY NAMES. “Attributing Words.” Blogspot, unnecessaryevils.blogspot.com/2008/11/attributing-words.html

Nahanee, Ta7taliya. Decolonize First: Synthesizing for Social Change, 9 July 2020, Online Seminar.

Sharma, Nandita. “Nation States, Borders, Citizenship, and the Making of ‘National’ Difference.” Power and Everyday Practices, edited by D. Brock, R. Raby, and M. Thomas, Toronto: Nelson, 2012, pp. 321-342.

Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. “Indigenous Resurgence and Co-Resistance,” Critical Ethnic Studies, vol. 2, no. 2, 2016, pp. 19-34, jstor.org/stable/10.5749/jcritethnstud.2.2.0019.

Torres, Gabes. Personal communication. 28 October. 2021.

@anthonyocampo. “It’s taken me 38 years to realize that our destiny as children of immigrants is to disrupt, not assimilate.” Twitter, 10 Feb. 2020, 9:18 a.m., twitter.com/anthonyocampo/status/1226918425412243462.

Ji Youn Kim