The phrase "Asian identity" is often treated like a neat label, as if it refers to a single, clearly defined experience. But in truth, Asian identity is not a monolith. It’s a mosaic—a vast, sprawling collection of cultures, histories, languages, skin tones, class dynamics, immigration stories, and spiritual beliefs. To treat it otherwise is not only misleading but damaging. And yet, that’s exactly what many mainstream conversations about diversity, equity, and inclusion have done: flattened the experience into digestible soundbites or polished caricatures. We need to make more space for complexity, for contradiction, for nuance. And more than that, we need to let people live in those in-between spaces without needing to explain or defend them.
This becomes especially apparent when we look at how Asian identity is portrayed in media and popular culture. The faces we often see in Hollywood, on corporate brochures, or in discussions about representation tend to fall within a narrow range—light-skinned East Asians with a particular accent, a specific education, or a curated, digestible “model minority” backstory. It’s a framework that’s economically convenient but emotionally limiting. High-value keywords like “diversity hiring,” “cultural representation,” and “minority leadership” get thrown around in DEI campaigns, but they often skirt the messy reality of lived experience.
Take Priya, a second-generation Indian American who grew up in New Jersey. She went to a predominantly white high school, spoke fluent English with a Jersey twang, and couldn’t speak a word of her mother tongue without stumbling. At college, when she joined the South Asian student group hoping to find community, she found herself subtly excluded because she couldn’t relate to Bollywood music or Hindu temple visits. “I felt too American to be Indian,” she told me once over coffee, “and too Indian to be American. It was like being an extra in someone else’s story.” Her experience isn't rare. In fact, it's painfully common—and still, largely invisible.
That invisibility is part of the larger issue. When society imagines Asians through a single lens, people like Priya disappear. So do the Southeast Asians whose families arrived as refugees and not tech workers. So do the Central Asians whose culture doesn’t fit the typical East vs. South Asian binary. So do the adoptees raised by non-Asian families, and the biracial kids constantly told to "pick a side." We don’t just need diversity within representation; we need representation of diversity itself.
The pressure to conform to stereotypes isn't just external—it seeps into families and communities, too. Many Asian parents, navigating their own survival in new countries, urge their children toward safe, respectable professions: engineering, medicine, finance. These career paths come with security, and in many immigrant households, security means freedom. But it also means many young Asians feel suffocated under the weight of expectation. A Korean American friend once told me her greatest act of rebellion wasn’t dating someone outside her ethnicity—it was majoring in English literature. She still remembers the day she had to explain to her father that yes, people actually pay writers, and no, she wasn’t throwing her life away.
There’s also the matter of colorism—a rarely discussed but deeply ingrained issue across many Asian communities. Skin lightening creams are still bestsellers across Asia. Fairness is often equated with beauty, success, even worth. That ideology trickles into diasporic circles in the West, where lighter-skinned Asians are often more likely to be cast in media roles, featured in promotional content, or even treated more favorably in dating apps. Algorithms and search engine optimization favor beauty standards that reflect Eurocentric ideals, boosting CPC terms like “skin care for fair skin” and “Asian beauty tips” while overlooking the deeper implications of those searches. A Filipina friend told me once that as a teen, she genuinely believed she had to bleach her skin to be taken seriously as beautiful. She only realized how wrong that was after moving to California and attending a Black Lives Matter rally where the speaker talked about internalized racism. That speech cracked something open in her. She started therapy. She deleted old photos where she’d filtered her skin into near-ghostliness. And she started talking to her younger sister about pride, not shame.
Asian identity also collides with issues of mental health in ways that are unique but often undiscussed. Many Asian cultures, particularly those with Confucian, Buddhist, or collectivist roots, tend to prioritize family honor, social harmony, and emotional stoicism. That can make it incredibly hard for someone battling depression or anxiety to speak up. A Vietnamese friend once described her panic attacks as “family shame in disguise.” She didn’t seek therapy until grad school, when she could do so without her parents finding out. Today, she’s a licensed psychologist working with first-generation Asian clients who struggle with that same silent weight. Her work touches on everything from intergenerational trauma to imposter syndrome to the experience of being gaslit by systems not built for you.
Then there’s the matter of language—who speaks it, who’s forgotten it, and who’s punished for it. For many Asian Americans, language is a loaded topic. Not knowing your native tongue is seen as a cultural failure, yet speaking it with an accent is met with ridicule. It’s a double bind. When my friend Kevin visited his extended family in China after years of living in Boston, he found himself stuck. Too foreign to blend in, too ethnic to feel fully at home in the U.S., he described the trip as "visiting a version of me that never happened." And yet, there was beauty there too: watching his grandmother cook, understanding each other through gestures and broken phrases, remembering that identity isn’t always verbal—it’s also sensory, relational, embodied.
We also need to talk about queerness within Asian identities—a topic still wrapped in silence in many circles. For LGBTQ+ Asians, there’s often a double coming out: one to their broader society, and another to their ethnic communities. That’s a lot of emotional labor. A Japanese American trans man I met at a cultural festival once told me his greatest joy wasn’t transitioning—it was the moment his grandfather, who barely spoke English, patted him on the back and said in broken words, “You strong.” Not “you are strong.” Just “you strong.” It was enough.
The intersection of race, gender, and sexuality plays out differently across different ethnic groups, and we need to make space for those variances too. The same goes for economic backgrounds. Not every Asian American is thriving in Silicon Valley. There are Bhutanese families living in crowded apartments in the Bronx. There are Cambodian grandmothers in Minnesota who rely on food stamps. The “wealthy Asian” stereotype isn’t just reductive—it erases the struggles of entire communities who need support, not assumptions.
When we speak of inclusion, especially in educational or corporate environments, we often stop at surface-level identifiers. But real inclusion means asking the uncomfortable questions. It means interrogating our own biases—why we think of certain people as “more Asian” or “not Asian enough.” It means understanding that cultural identity isn’t static—it shifts, it evolves, it contradicts itself. And most importantly, it means listening. Truly listening.
At a recent family gathering, my cousin—who married into a Thai-Chinese-American family—shared a moment where her toddler looked at a map and asked, “Where am I from?” Everyone laughed, but later she told me that question stayed with her. “How do you answer that?” she said. “It’s not one place. It’s not one thing. It’s layers, it’s food, it’s songs I don’t know the lyrics to, it’s homesickness for places I’ve never lived in.”
That’s the truth of Asian identity. It’s messy, hybrid, evolving. It holds multitudes. And maybe the most radical thing we can do is not force it into shape—but simply let it be. 🌏