In Beijing at the 2022 Winter Olympics, Chinese American athletes are either winners or traitors.
San Francisco native Eileen Gu, an 18-year-old freestyle skier, made headlines when she placed first in the women’s big air event and won the gold medal for China instead of the United States. A chorus of adverse U.S. voices rose in response to Gu and her chosen team, chief among them a right-wing podcaster who told Fox News that it was “ungrateful” for Gu to “turn her back” on her country. Missing from this discourse was criticism against white American-born athletes who chose to compete for other nations.
The kind of targeted commentary that trailed Gu as a Chinese American athlete unearths a prevailing limited understanding of Asian identity in the U.S. “It’s either-or. You can’t be both Asian and American,” said Russel Jeung, a professor of Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University and the co-founder of Stop AAPI Hate, a national coalition that gathers data on racially-motivated attacks against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. “You’re an American winner like Nathan Chen, or you’re a traitor like Eileen Gu.”
But Gu and Chen, a figure skater who won gold for the U.S. in Beijing, are not the first Asian athletes to find themselves at the center of a national debate about the relationship between Asian and American identity. Kaitlyn Eri Lee, a figure skater who began competing internationally for Team USA in 2013, noticed a short leash for Asian American athletes in global competition. “Being an Asian American woman in the sport, I only had a few role models,” she said. “I could look up to Kristi Yamaguchi, you know, or Michelle Kwan.”
Although they competed almost two decades ago, Yamaguchi and Kwan faced a relatively identical landscape to the one that Gu encountered when she chose to represent China this year. In an interview with The Washington Post, Yamaguchi revealed that competition officials at the 1988 world junior championships mistook her for a Japanese athlete. “I’m like, ‘Can someone tell them I’m American?” Yamaguchi said.
A decade later at the 1998 Olympics, MSNBC published a headline that read, “American Beats Out Kwan,” referring to Kwan’s second-place finish to Tara Lipinski, even though both athletes were born in the U.S. and competing for the U.S. team. Then at the 2002 Olympics, The Seattle Times ran a secondary headline that read, “American outshines Kwan,” in reference to Sarah Hughes’ gold medal win over Kwan.
“It’s all kind of this ‘alien Asia,’ the separation from white American skaters. Just even within your own team, let alone go across borders or nationally,” Lee said.
This kind of language that denotes a difference between Asian athletes and their “American” peers points to a deeper force of foreignization at work. “Kristi Yamaguchi, Michelle Kwan, they’ve all been cast as Asian athletes and not necessarily as American athletes,” Jeung said. “It’s only when they win that they’re fully accepted or fully embraced as Americans.”
When Chinese immigration to the U.S. increased dramatically during the California Gold Rush and the building of the Transcontinental Railroad, the concept of Asian Americans’ perpetual foreigner status began as a means to depict Asians as inherent outsiders to U.S. society.
“We have in-groups and out-groups, and out-groups are to be feared and dangerous, and then also attributed to a lot of other negative behaviors,” Jeung said.
Asian Americans came to face a specific form of racism in the U.S. called Orientalism, in which the out-group East, or the Orient, is the polar opposite of the Occident in-group West. “Asia is seen as traditional, whereas the West is seen as progressive. Asia is seen as superstitious and traditional, whereas the US is seen as modern and rational,” Jeung said.
White Americans characterized Asians as the “Yellow Peril” that would invade the nation, take jobs, bring diseases and generally threaten the United States’ vision of itself as a racially pure, Christian nation. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was the first significant ban on immigration in the country, and it set a national precedent for the exclusion of Asians from American identity.
In 2020, U.S. political rhetoric about the origins of COVID-19 racialized the virus and positioned Asian Americans as its scapegoats, citing racist antagonisms about Chinese politics, eating habits and ways of life. Pandemic-inspired hate speech stoked the flames of Yellow Peril sentiments and falsely positioned Asians at the center of a global crisis. In September 2021, Stop AAPI Hate reported that one in five Asian Americans experienced a hate incident in the past year. That translates to approximately 4.8 million people.
“The political rhetoric exacerbated fear of the pandemic, but it also normalized hate so that people felt free to mock others, felt free to mistreat others, felt free to exclude others,” Jeung said.
The pandemic set the stage for the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing. The weight of normalized anti-Asian racism and the eyes of emboldened racist critics descended upon Asian American athletes and viewers alike who came to the competition already rubbed raw by the nightmarish pandemic.
“When you see Eileen Gu attacked for being a traitor, then that really pushes you towards assimilation, towards acculturation, because you don’t want to be deemed a traitor, right?” Jeung said. “You have to betray your Asianness if you want to be loyal to America. So I know kids who don’t eat Asian foods, who don’t like the way they look or their language because they’re trying to fit in as much as they can to America.”
For athletes like Gu and Lee, the act of competing internationally itself posed difficult internal questions about belonging. “We’re grappling with those two different ideas, in that I am an American, in that I was born here. I only speak English. I went to school here. I represented this country. I stood under the flag and put my hand on my heart as the national anthem played,” Lee said.
The prestige and fanfare around the Olympics still are not enough to shield athletes from the sting of the United States’ stunted capacity for validating Asian Americans as Americans. Online debates about Gu’s nationality — and her perceived betrayal of it — reveal what little distance the U.S. has put between its contemporary notion of multiethnic identities and its Yellow Peril past. Decades after the fragmented coverage that followed Yamaguchi and Kwan, the same rhetorical machine of social media comments, newspaper headlines and broadcast hot-takes still honors a manufactured, racist barrier to American acceptance.
“Asian Americans in the Olympics have historically had to confront, ‘Are we Asian? Or are we American?,’” Jeung said. “And I think moving forward, I want us to see it be ‘both, and,’ both Asian and American.”
KARISSA KORMAN 