Cover Photo: An Asian man wearing a face mask that covers his mouth and nose
Photograph by Alessio Lin/Unsplash

Love and Silence in Asian America

If the world responds to our silence and not to our love, then it teaches us that silence is a condition of our development.

Aiiieeeee!

No-No BoyAiiieeeee!

Aiiieeeee!

racist love

This Bridge Called My Back, Aiiieeeee!

me,

expectation

expectation

Aiiieeeee!gives

why

Symposium

You were taught to be the quiet one if you wanted a place

You chose the stereotype because it gave you an identity

Ugly FeelingsSingle White Female

Single White Female

envied

How can I allow myself to be changed (to become silent) for a world that will never love me back?

Because I could never be accepted for who I was instead of what I looked like, I desired even more to be accepted.

Woman, Native, Other

Matthew Salesses is the author of The Sense of Wonder, national bestseller Craft in the Real World, the 2021 finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear, and two other novels. Adopted from Korea, he has written about adoption, race, and Asian American masculinity in The Best American Essays 2020, NPR’s Code Switch, the New York Times blog Motherlode, and The Guardian, among other media outlets. BuzzFeed has named him one of 32 Essential Asian American Writers. He lives in New York City, where he is an Assistant Professor of Writing at Columbia University.