Missing Identities: Racialicious Revisits Secret Identities

By Guest Contributor Sunny Kim

I first learned about Project Secret Identities over two years ago when a call for story submissions started to float around my corner of the interwebs. My excitement was limitless! No more waiting for some white guy to come save me! Now I could have my own superheroes. Secret Identities promised to fill the need for comics that cast us as the superheroes and I waited with bated breath for the release.

Here we are in 2009 and the book has been released to much fanfare. And yet, I feel disappointed. Don’t get me wrong, I dig the nerd specs on the pleasing green cover (I rock my own pair everyday). There are some real gems in this anthology including the oft-cited “The Blue Scorpion and Chung” (Bruce Lee hated being Kato) and the true-to-life stories in the section From Headline to Hero (“Taking Back Troy” re-imagines Vincent Chin’s story in a way that doesn’t let us forget it). Despite the many great stories found within this anthology there are some glaring holes that I can’t seem to fly over.

The editors of the book tell us that Asian Americans have more in common with Clark Kent than just his geek chic appearance and as such present an opening for our superheroes. Yet the editors define Asian American by the stories they chose, and it seems like they define Asian as “East Asian with a sprinkling of Filipino and a drop of Indian.” In other words Secret Identities is more East Asian than Asian, and Shen and Yang have — I’m sure unintentionally — deleted most of the Asian continent in their selection process.

While Asian America isn’t as explicitly defined as it was in Aieeeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Writers, where Frank Chin stated in the introduction that the work would feature Japanese, Chinese and Filipino writers, Secret Identities doesn’t acknowledge its bias at all nor does it emerge from the same historical context*. So where are some missing identities that didn’t make it into the book? What about the daughter of a Cambodian refugee and a Filipino cannery worker in Seattle**? Or how about expanding our knowledge of Asian American hate crime victims by looking at the death of Cha Vang, a Hmong immigrant, whose white killer did not get charged with a hate crime? On a similar note: where are the stories of poor and working class families and young LGBT runaways? All of these are real aspects of our diverse community.

There are so many members of the APIA community who have fought courageously to get recognized within the monolith of Asian America and this heavily East Asian male representation does nothing to recognize that battle. The reason why college organizers at UCLA spent so much time trying to disaggregate the numbers of Asian American admitted students is because those identities remain invisible without it. When we allow these identities to remain under wraps there are serious economic and racial struggles that cannot gain any ground because varied communities are dismissed as doing fine and become lost within the model minority myth. Can Secret Identities really be “The Asian American Superhero Anthology”?

Maybe this is less a criticism and more a longing for a different kind of Asian American voice and maybe I’m just a backseat anthology editor. I would have started by taking a hard look at who the editors are and what communities they can reach. When I asked Jeff Yang why Secret Identities has so few stories outside of East Asia I was told that they had put out a general call for submissions and that some of the stories submitted just weren’t good enough to include.

Now I know that you know that this sounds pretty similar to what people of color have been hearing as a justification for crooked systems, biased hiring processes and exclusion from publishing houses for decades. I understand that an editorial board must have standards and cannot squeeze stories out of people but they also have a responsibility to broaden the reach and broaden again if need be. I also know that ALL of the editors of Secret Identities are East Asian men.

Page 1 of 2 | Next page