I Will Always Love the Asian Boy in His Baseball Cap

Originally published via November 21, 2023 via Substack

She was the porcelain jewel of the Ilano clan. My cousin, who immigrated from the Philippines, came to America already with bright white, delicate, skin. Welcomed by the Californian sun, whose violence was awfully too similar to the one of the Philippines. So, to protect her skin from the sun’s dark varnish, she lathered and preserved her skin with creams whose bottles adorned eastern calligraphic characters. Often, she exploited the bore and quiet of American suburbia by enjoying runs on our unpopulated streets. Before her departure– much like an astronaut to be jettisoned out of the shuttle– she would put on a silver sweatsuit of reflective mylar. She would fix a hat whose visor was so massive it would cloak her whole upper body in shadow and, of course, she would smear more of her eastern calligraphic lather. In that same Californian house, my mother would teach me to prepare rice. She would proctor me, the way in which my hands would fold and swish the grain over water. However, before I could discard the opaque liquid, often my mother would ask me to save it. She would put it away so, in the mornings, she could rinse her face with it. My mother mythologized that rice water could clean off the soot in which the sun paints our faces with.

Already as a young asian boy, these contentions are what cultivated the valued benefit of the preservation of my light complexion. However, instead, I opted for the utility of the baseball cap. Afterall, the young asian boy shouldn’t care much about how he looks; the young asian boy shouldn’t bother for eastern calligraphic lather or rice water. The baseball cap added a few centimeters to my already dismal height, it provided shade, it veiled my thin eyes from the gaze of ones taller than my own. This baseball cap could be a veil, a safety blanket, a way to vet how I am perceived. Yet, soon enough in my emerging adolescence, I realized that the hat was not enough.

Many years later, I was sitting in my high school’s courtyard. Across the pavement, Freddy Tompkins was broad-shouldered, slouching while still irrefutably tall. He sat on a bench wearing his curly brown hair and his Abercrombie & Fitch jawline. Before long, he noticed me, buried in my notebook. He approached me, unprovoked, and quipped “spoiled butter,” referring to my skin. We were fourteen, Freddy Tompkins and I, adorning a few weak hairs off our upper lips. We stared at each other, and I said nothing. Silence, like he knocked the wind out of me. Sucker punch. “Spoiled butter.” However, the more I dwell, the more I consider that this instance ought to be tangential, it should have been commonplace within my wider immigrant experience. Yet, for some reason it wasn’t. I was left perplexed— and it makes me feel, god, so pathetic— as to why that label has to be the one that’s attached itself to my subconscious identity, despite being however many years removed from it.

Where was my hat now? Where was my veil?  Until then, I spent the years in my baseball cap running away from the stereotypes I was expected to fulfill. I considered the fact that, if I was bad at math, if I had a distaste for anime, if I never publicly ate rice: I could be designated as “the bad asian,” “the dysfunctional asian.” The one that isn’t acting in accordance with its packaging... score! I figured that I would be invulnerable to the typical racial ridicule any Asian American would feel— somehow, I othered myself from the others. This method provided me the grounds to cognitively distance myself from any commonplace racial aggression thus. I could preserve my sanity and grant myself the privilege to look in the mirror and say: “yes, Josh, you are white just like them.” This escape from stereotypes has sculpted my identity into a fine, plastic, crystalline, structure. It fasted the strap of my baseball cap even tighter to the back of my head. Call me a slant-eye gook? Let me grab my mirror and remind myself that I am the recipient of the genetic lottery that is the hooded eyelid. Say that I’m a dog-eater? Let me flash the lunchable I had to beg my mother to buy instead of packing leftover tortang talong.

This denial to participate in the asian-American discourse would proceed to inform many of my decisions, interests, and passions. Perhaps it is why I write against the behest of my engineer father, or it is the reason I’ve mastered cooking steak to a medium rare while my mother questions why I’ve never made any of my partners Filipino food.

However, “spoiled butter,” unlike every other thing I’ve prepared myself to be called, was outside of the usual lexicon I’ve familiarized myself with. It was a screwhead unfamiliar to my toolkit; a product of Freddy Tompkins homegrown, albeit creative, racist, little red-pilled, mind. Freddy’s comment deceived me, as I perceived his comment, for once, to hold truth. It breached my previously unconquerable fortress, and so the hurt was tenfold. My, once comforting, mirror didn’t let me escape “spoiled butter.” Instead, this time, it reminded me “no, josh, you are not American just like them.” I had been doing so well at distancing myself from racist aggression that it didn’t occur to me the one thing that could destruct my fine, plastic, crystalline, structure was irrefutable and succinct creativity. Congratulations Freddy Tompkins, my baseball cap, gone.

I was left in a limbo, where I’ve removed myself from the bounds in which I could relate to my yellow peers, yet lacking the phenotype to properly relate to the peers I’ve chosen to align my interests to. I’m finally experiencing the repercussions of othering myself within already being the other. I’ve spent my whole life confined so tightly in my hat, sweating off the fever of my culture and it has left me an alien.  I was covered so perfectly I’ve surrendered myself to a life of abject invisibility. So, here I am: naked, sweaty, and lonely. Trapped in a body I’ve learned to reject, not quite knowing who to properly relate to.

Quite uncharacteristically, for my sophomore year of university, I had registered for a class on diasporic Asian literature. An innocent pursuit. I didn’t seek to reconnect to my asian-ness, like the Filipino Youth International (FYI) members had been begging me to do, I just needed to fulfill my requirements. We were assigned to read Celeste Ng’s “Everything I Never Told You,” and on the thirty-fifth page, our protagonist describes her [asian] husband as follows:

“Skin the color of tea, of fall leaves toasted by the sun”

These were the twelve words that ruined me. The twelve words that unlocked a terrible realization that, for the past six years, my skin had never been described as anything beyond “spoiled butter.” It sparked a realization that I had been proceeding to govern myself within this view, a view that fulfills the assimilation into the bias of the white gaze. A gaze that has astutely prescribed that, to be asian is to be less beautiful. That beauty is only obtained through a guise of white performance, and if not on the margins, Asian beauty is determined through a western capitalist pasteurization of our culture. One where colored bodies are to be sorted into what is palatable and what is to be discarded. It is a process that results in the dilution of the products that do pass through the filter. It is Asian culture with the expectation that it can be morphed to fit the mold which is aesthetically pleasing to the white palate.

Of course, songs with asian words can exist, given the performers have chemically waved hair, restructured noses, and bleached skin. An asian can exist upon the movie screen, given they are fantastically exceptional at martial arts or arithmetic. I couldn’t help but reject what was given to me. Either be white or be the diluted form of the east they expect. To me, I’d rather be something I’m not, because at least then I’m allowed to be ordinary and have ordinary problems. Instead of the pursuit of whatever bastardized commodified form of Asian-ness I was expected to fulfill. I yearn to go back in time and shake these projected identities off of me. For so long, I thought:  

“How was my Asian boy in his baseball cap supposed to exist, if all he is given to follow are the cold husks of yellow-ish faces?” 

Now, I see a way in which you can exist. As the color of tea or fall leaves. I see it now, young asian boy. That your skin is yours, but it is also your mother’s, it is also your cousin’s, it is also your father’s. Allow yourself to become unencumbered by any performance, please take that hat off your head. Do not allow the asian calligraphic lather ruin your skin and poison your blood. Realize that, in the rice water you hold, you are using the discard in what feeds us, to appeal to the gaze that is ostensibly not us. Perhaps, you will never be good at math, or enjoy  anime, or eat rice. However, those things are not what makes an asian—and it doesn’t have to be. You, as you exist, and that is enough. Just take off your hat, allow your jet-black hair absorb the heat of the sun, and sweat. Sweat unburdened, feel the air between your follicles.

Now, young asian boy, you can see. It is not your fault that you are lost, it is not your fault you are tired. For the Asian-American, as you’ve been told, does not exist. You wear your hat to veil yourself, to put on a white performance over what you’ve been told is undesirable. But your mother, your cousin did not do their labors to hide, they did it to be seen. Do not be mistaken, that these women, stand upset in their American experience. They stand in pride for the lives that they were able to make. It is through the Asian-American’s labor, that their future is realized. You do not need to adhere to the arbitrary to be Asian. You are Asian because you stand and you keep walking against what you are expected of. Oh, young asian boy, do away with your hat, I will always love you.