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Marvel made history this year with the release of Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, the first major Asian-led superhero film in the U.S. The story follows Xu Shang-Chi, a Chinese American young adult played by the Chinese Canadian actor Simu Liu.
Several Asian women have been doxxed and harassed by members of the subreddit because of these posts, including author Celeste Ng, who has featured multiracial Asian families in her writing and has a multiracial family herself.
Though these posts come from a very vocal group within r/aznidentity, the community is large and their posts cover a diverse array of other topics. For example, there is a whole flair (the Reddit tagging system) dedicated to media and entertainment, which is where Liu comes in.
Have you heard of MRAsians before? How do you think our community should move forward in combatting this ideology and building coalitions between Asian men and women? Let us know in the comments below. Thank you for reading.
Thank you so much for writing this piece and bringing awareness to this issue, Madison. This is so so important especially after the fame Simu Liu gained from Kim's Convenience and Shang-Chi. We can't turn a blind eye just for the sake of Asian American representation...
Liu first rose to prominence in his breakout role on Kim\u2019s Convenience (2016-2021), a Korean Canadian sitcom adapted from the play of the same name written by Ins Choi. Kim\u2019s Convenience first premiered on Canadian broadcast network CBC Television in 2016, then gained a massive following worldwide after Netflix distributed it internationally in 2018. The show follows the hijinks of the Kim family, an immigrant Korean Canadian family who own a convenience store in Toronto. Liu played Jung Kim, the disowned son of the Kim family who was gradually making up with his father, Mr. Kim.
The international release of Kim\u2019s Convenience coincided with the explosion of the Facebook group \u201Csubtle asian traits,\u201D a group for sharing memes about Asian experiences (mostly in the Western diaspora) founded by Asian Australians. Thanks to this group and other Asian social media spaces, Kim\u2019s Convenience became a hit among Asian diaspora communities around the world.
When Simu Liu himself became an active member of subtle asian traits, also known as \u201CSAT,\u201D he became a community leader-of-sorts when it came to Asian representation in entertainment, as he occasionally shared personal posts about his experiences in the industry. From there, his social media platform grew, and he managed to gain the attention of Marvel Studios, asking them to make him an Asian superhero. In 2019, Liu was officially cast as Xu Shang-Chi, the first Asian American superhero lead of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Despite making it big, Liu seemed to stay true to his roots\u2014he brought the SAT community along through heartfelt updates and photos from behind the scenes, in the time from his casting announcement all the way through the release of Shang-Chi.
As an Asian American pursuing a career in the film industry myself, Liu quickly became a role model of mine. It wasn\u2019t hard to root for him; he genuinely felt like one of us. His personal presence in SAT, where so many of my real-life Asian American friends and I congregated online, plus his loud dedication to Kim\u2019s Convenience even after he was cast as the lead for a Marvel/Disney blockbuster, made him seem genuine and relatable.
However, Liu has also failed to show up for our community before. For example, he called actor Mark Wahlberg out in a 2018 tweet for Wahlberg violently assaulting a Vietnamese man as a teenager (in addition to other attacks on BIPOC). But in late 2020, Liu announced he was joining a project where he would be working alongside Wahlberg and simultaneously deleted his previous tweet about Wahlberg\u2019s violence.
On September 15th, Slate released a massive article breaking down the subreddit r/aznidentity, which calls itself \u201CA New Era for Asian Americans and Asian Diasporas around the world.\u201D Their description reads:
\u201CThe most active Asian-American community on the web. We serve the Asian diaspora living anywhere in the West. We are a Pan Asian community (East, Southeast, South) against all forms of anti-Asianism (anti-Asian racism). The community is about helping Asians make sense out of their own life experiences, find a supportive like-minded community, and live the best possible life. We emphasize our Asian identity, not to be used as pawns by the Right or Left.\u201D
At 44,500 members, r/aznidentity is one of the largest online Asian American communities, and will naturally have a diverse array of voices and opinions. However, as the Slate article highlights, one of the loudest voices allowed a platform in the subreddit are Asian men who criticize Asian women for dating non-Asians\u2014especially Asian women who date white men, referred to as \u201CWMAF\u201D (white male/Asian female) coupling in their posts.
In addition to specific threads linked in the Slate article, it\u2019s not hard to find posts targeting Asian women. For example, this post about \u201Casian blue checks\u201D (Asian women with verified Twitter accounts) alleges that Asian women use white supremacy as an excuse to befriend and date white people.
As a former Asian-Pacific American studies student, I understand where these Asian men\u2019s perspectives are coming from. While Asian women have been fetishized throughout history, Asian men have been perceived as a threat (yellow peril) who would steal jobs and white women from white American men; Asian migrant workers often faced violence because of this, and media went out of its way to portray Asian men as desexualized and undesirable.
While there are necessary conversations to have about how this legacy of racism persists today, especially in racial \u201Cdating preferences,\u201D r/aznidentity\u2019s posts tend to target real-life Asian women, rather than the racist hetero-patriarchy that has sought to destroy our families and communities for centuries.
Another woman\u2019s experience, Eileen Huang, is detailed in the Slate article. Huang is an undergraduate student at Yale who was relentlessly harassed by men from r/aznidentity after their blog post about anti-Blackness within the Asian American community went viral in May 2020. To this day, a year and a half later, the subreddit continues to post about Huang; just a few weeks ago, one member called Huang \u201Ca self-hating racist bigot.\u201D
Huang responded to the attacks by finding out the real-life identities of the people attacking her to directly confront them, which she said left them \u201Cjust so frightened\u201D without their anonymity. To her surprise, many of them were college-educated professionals working high-paying jobs. Huang responded to the Slate article on Twitter:
r/aznidentity keeps up with this ongoing crisis as well, with masterposts and threads tracking anti-Asian hate crimes in the U.S. However, this has led to anti-Black comments that incorrectly attribute this violence to the Black community more than other groups. One user wrote, \u201CBoba libs literally value black feelings over Asian lives\u201D on a post responding to a Twitter thread (written by \u201COG boba liberal\u201D Huang) about the effects of increased policing on Black and brown communities as a response to anti-Asian violence. (The term \u201CBoba liberal\u201D refers to Asians with \u201Cshallow political ideas.\u201D)
Going beyond Asian women dating non-Asians, some r/aznidentity members will make generalizations about mixed race white Asians (also called \u201CWasians\u201D or sometimes \u201Chapas\u201D in the Asian community in general, which is erroneous because the term \u201Chapa\u201D belongs specifically to mixed Native Hawaiians). They point to the half-Asian, half-white 22-year-old man responsible for the 2014 Isla Vista killings as an example of what mixed Asians, especially with white fathers and Asian mothers, will likely become, due to an inherent violence they argue exists within white male/Asian female relationships.
Reading these posts when the Slate article first came out was a harmful experience for me, both as an Asian woman and as someone who is mixed white Asian. My family, including my white dad and Asian mom, is unceremoniously normal\u2014aside from the fact that when my mom met my dad at a college party, he was in a rock band in Los Angeles in the early \u201890s (a story for another time).
These posts allege that all relationships between white men and Asian women play into the fetishization and stereotypes of Asian women, but my personal experience couldn\u2019t be farther from that. My Asian mom was the breadwinner of our family while my white dad was the homemaker during my childhood. In recent years, when my Asian grandparents began experiencing tremendous health issues, my dad has always shown up to directly support and assist them, despite living 400 miles away; he even gave a eulogy at my grandpa\u2019s funeral.
Though Asian women tend to marry non-Asians more than Asian men, I grew up with healthy examples of both in my family. White men and white women have both married into my extended family; because of this, as a child, I always thought it was normal to just marry anyone of any race, gender having nothing to do with it. (I even have Asian relatives on my dad\u2019s side of the family, too!)
According to the r/aznidentity Rules, \\\"Unproductive/senseless bashing of other minorities\\\" is not allowed, and \u201CMisogynists, Misandrists, Negativists, those who disrupt the community spirit esp. by being disrespectful are not tolerated.\u201D However, given the volume of these posts targeting Asian women and other people of color, it\u2019s clear these rules aren\u2019t being followed and it\u2019s unclear whether these rules are actually being enforced by moderators.
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