Smelly lunch, tiger mom: what’s your Subtle Asian Trait?
- A Facebook group with 700,000 members is helping Asian immigrants have the last laugh when it comes to racist stereotypes experienced abroad
- It is the latest example of how internet groups and memes are bringing the Asian diaspora together
AS EDWARD TIAN scrolls through Subtle Asian Traits, he knows that his “smelly lunch” experience is something that many Asian immigrants can relate to. In the Facebook group, countless posts touch on the embarrassment of bringing lunch to school and even being bullied for eating “disgusting” food. They are familiar experiences to many Asian immigrants across the world who’ve felt pressure to assimilate or distance themselves from their heritage.
“They’ll ask you if the meat in your lunchbox is dog or cat meat, or they’ll make fun of how much garlic Asians eat,” Tian, 20, recalled of his school days.
“I remember I begged my mom to stop sending me to school with Chinese food and I wanted her to buy ‘pizza pops’ and ‘fruit roll ups’ because that’s what all the cool kids had.”
Tian, a first-generation Chinese immigrant studying finance at the University of British Columbia, sees Subtle Asian Traits as “a unifying cultural force across the Asian diaspora”.
“You’re thrust into an environment where you are simply identified as Asian – you have to do it for social survival,” he said. “It’s not easy to create a feeling of unity because Asians come from fundamentally different nations and cultures.”
As the Asian diaspora expands, millennials are using social media to share their experience of straddling different worlds, often in the form of internet memes – witty and irreverent images and text shared online.
Subtle Asian Traits, the brainchild of nine Chinese-Australian teens who met in high school, has attracted more than 704,000 members since its creation in September.