WTH are Rich Asians?

"Boy, those Asians are everywhere." My Race & Ethnicity professor chimed in class a few times that we encounter Asians nearly everywhere we go. Perhaps she is talking about the influx of Asian immigrants who have infiltrated color lines in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Queens. Surely she is speaking this way in a holistic sense, a general manner, to encompass the imagined community of New York City, because I have yet to see one Asian person in Harlem. Then again I have only been to Harlem twice in my entire life (not that I have anything against Harlem, I just have no reason to be there). In Brooklyn it is easy to see that Asians rep BK. They surround the perimeters of handball courts, school yards, shopping malls. Bensonhurst has given way to a rush of Asian Americans while Italian Americans have moved out to other parts such as Staten Island and New Jersey. This increase in Asian Pacific Americans and South Asian Americans bring the six degrees of separation theory into mind. The increase in Asian American businesses (bodegas, takeout restaurants, buffets, 99 cents stores, groceries, supermarket chains) have burgeoned. Some last longer than others before the gate closes harshly and loudly, permanently. But it is easy to state that there are so many Asian people around. This stems from the very fact that I am Asian, and second I am traveling to the places I usually go to. There is always a background to my statement: Manhattan and Brooklyn. I only travel to these two boroughs. There is also an obvious fallacy: I have not been to everywhere in NYC, how can I deduce that Asians are "everywhere"? Asians are everywhere I go, but that's about it. The places where I don't go, or the places that I do go to, but I do not notice them; what can I say about those places? Do I leave them unaccounted for? This is generalization error.

I cannot imagine an Asian person who declares him/herself as a Republican. Either he misidentified with the wrong party, or he has inherited a glorious amount of wealth from his lineage. I make this accusation based on my personal socioeconomic status and viewpoint. I only make this judgment because I compare that Asian person to myself and the other Asian persons that I am very close to. The Asian friends that I know, but do not know anything about their family background, I exclude them from my mini-comparison. I quickly generalize that all Asians have been once immigrants and that they have little to no cash. This oblique generalization is dangerous because it leads me to believe that the rich Asian persons cannot be trusted, or they have something to hide.

This may have something to do with the rich and poor gap, and how Occupy Wall St has vilified the rich persons as the seething 1% who is hell-bent on enslaving the 99% poor slaves. This paradigm shift (propaganda nonetheless) is vitriolic and impactful. My gullible nature allows me to imbibe words more easily from strangers than family members and close friends. My amiable personality also permits me to fall prey to shift in decision and swaying my once-hardcore beliefs. Shameful but true. The master-slave dialectic is a Nietzschean way of classifying who is good and bad/evil. I employ this model to generalize and to classify groups of people.

In my mind I picture the rich Asians as normal Asian people who hide their wealth (similar to the Jews as they were horridly depicted in old Anti-Semitic films and propaganda) and feign impoverishment. I picture their nitty gritty frugal schemes and sometimes my mother will refer to them as stingy. She seems to generalize all Asians as selfish and crudely contemptuous of other Asians whose sons or daughters exceed their own. Gossipmongerers are rife in the Asian community. My mom believes that yee-chong-moo, the sewing ladies have this certain type of mentality towards the world -- to enclose themselves from trouble and to mind their own business and practice conflict-aversion. "Dop toh hung loo," keep your head down while walking; "Mmm choot sang fun ook kee": Say nothing while going home. These characteristics described by my mother belong to the poor Asians who spend countless, ensnared hours with their heads bowed towards sewing machines and lint. The rich Asians are pictured as Mercedes-driving persons who arm themselves in suit and tie. But they may pool their money together. In fact, that is really all that I can picture for rich Asians. I have never seen a rich Asian person in my life where I knew that their richness has transformed them overtly. I believe that a few of my Asian friends are rich and funded by their family / relatives, but their casualness and unspoken air surrounding their socioeconomic makes their richness unnecessarily invisible.

Speaking of being rich or poor, clothing unfortunately has nothing to do with the fact that persons are rich or poor. Clothing is external and it has nothing to do with socioeconomic class if they choose to dress a certain way. Individual articles of clothing may pertain to certain imagined or perceived styles-mannerisms (e.g. Professors wear fuzzy sweaters, look disheveled) but they cannot be strongly associated with the person's financial status. Articles of clothing (LV bag, Hermes watch) can be gifts, awards, prizes, donations, thrift-store-bought, etc. But apparently I don't think this way; I jump right to the conclusion and assume that Asians who wear Hermes or sport Tommy Hilfiger cologne belong to a higher class or are affluent bodies in society. This assumption solidifies the false belief that all Asians are supposedly/expected to be poor, immigrant, face-wrenching workers toiling in fast food restaurants and buffets. It's obvious that I do not care about Asian persons as individuals. Anyways, back to clothing: articles of clothing may point to their original business model/trend lifestyle-representation (e.g. Hollister represents surfer dudes and beach gals) but this does not necessarily mean that the buyer/wearer subscribes to it (Do Asian guys and girls surf if they wear Hollister and A&F? NO!) or that they even know about it (Some people don't look at catalogues; they just buy whatever they see that's attractive and that's that end of story). Dressing a particular way does not point to anything other than a performance. Butler's idea of performativity belies the idea that what you see is what you get. That is absolutely false. Clothes COVER our bodies therefore it is a coverup similar to makeup (this is debatable). If we were naked, unfortunately we would still make assumptions based on size or particularities of certain body parts. But clothes do not say something concrete about a person's financial background. However it may say something about their taste, most definitely.