Andrew Yang’s Asian American superpower-Sanewnetworks
When I met Andrew Yang at lunch in front of Shanghai 21, a popular restaurant on the bend of Mott Street in Manhattan’s Chinatown, he seemed visibly nervous under the Yang mask for New York. When he gave short answers to a professional photographer asking him if he preferred Metz or Yankee, I saw curious onlookers and fans taking photos from afar, from millennials to immigrant grandmothers. He kept glancing at them as if he wanted to escape from the photo shoot, return to the Yang Gang, and avoid our scheduled interview.
Which was not the best mood for our lunch. This was supposed to be the moment when Ian finally spoke about his experiences as an Asian American – a topic that he had avoided, as far as I could tell, all his life. But now he could no longer ignore this question.
Asian grandparents and elders were attacked and beaten in some cases on the streets of Manhattan, and Yang agreed to talk about it. Then, a week before our proposed lunch, a Georgia man killed eight people, six of whom were Asian women. The story, struggling to break out of the back pages, suddenly became topical, nationwide news, and the Asian-American community, long a fragmented, powerless collection of subcultures and nationalities, was both enraged and frightened at the same time.
Our appointment as a dim sum also coincided with an astrologically impossible moment when an Asian American was the leader as mayor of New York at a time when the city he wants to lead has become the nation’s epicenter of anti-Asian violence. Hate crimes against AAPI residents are up 833 percent since 2019.
All of this made Young look to his legacy like never before
During the presidential race, Yang has at times displayed an awkward attitude toward his Asian identity. He joked about knowing a lot of doctors because he was Asian; he included MATH (Make Americans Think More) in campaign promotional materials; in his campaign biography, he mentioned that he was embarrassed when a childhood bully asked if Chinese guys had small dicks. At the start of the pandemic, he wrote an article urging Asian Americans to fight the wave of xenophobia, including by wearing red, white and blue.
Andrew Yang’s Asian American superpower-Sanewnetworks
