Don’t question. That’s what the System wants you to do for four years. At the end of the four years, you are supposed to look at the choices before you: Democrat or Republican. The last thing we heard on TV had something to do with gay people marrying each other. Yuck. Whoever says the meanest things about gay people trying to marry each other, well, that’s who you’re going to have to touch the voting screen for—it’s a simple video game – and you won’t have to think or worry about a thing for another four years.

Please excuse my clarity of vision, er, I mean cynicism. Your mission, if you choose to accept it (upon which time you must eat this issue of NHA), is to educate yourself not so that you can become a flaming left-winger like me, but so that you do not swallow everything that is fed you. So that you participate in the political system beyond voting, or forgetting to vote, every four years. So that you have political conversations, join unions, join organizations that have nothing to do with your income, and subscribe to ethics that may require you to, say, find a vehicle more fuel efficient than an Abrams tank. That makes you a dangerous Asian American.

Moving on. Your college education, if it is worthy, will present to you the question of the Vietnam War. The Vietnam War is just as important as Japanese American internment in the complete education of the Asian American student. Outside of genocide and bald imperialism, there is little that is starkly black-and-white about most wars, except for one thing: war is hell. You must take very seriously the deaths of over a million Vietnamese and 60,000 Americans in the Vietnam War, and you must be patient enough and mature enough, to examine the morass of contradicting American motivations, the violence of all involved Vietnamese governments and organizations, the sickening tonnage of bombs dropped by the U.S. on Vietnam (including her civilians), and the involvement of repressive Communist nations on the side of Uncle Ho, and you must look at all this, and you must allow yourself to take a more sophisticated, complex view of the terrible birth of today’s Viet Nam. And then you will have a hard time saying, “This side was right and this side was wrong.” Besides, if you don’t get beyond simplistic views, the University (not community college) professor will give you a “D” on your paper.

Finally, in college you will inevitably get caught up in the question of interracial dating. This is a difficult issue to deal with. I mean, what if you are an Asian American man, and you are against interracial dating? What happens when a hot white girl flirts with you? Do you say to her, “I hereby grant you Honorary Asian Status, at least for tonight?”

Or do you go back and deeply examine the psychological and political issues behind your stand? Let me offer some shortcuts to you, my Asian American nephews and nieces. If you are an Asian American man, and you think it’s largely impossible to get with an attractive white/Hispanic/Black woman, you are underestimating your attractiveness. We as Asian American men are often taught, or bludgeoned by society, into resisting our own aggressive instincts. When dating in America, aggressively pursuing (but not stalking) a woman makes the man a good deal more attractive. Go after them, son!

For those Asian American women who claim that they are not attracted to Asian American men: some part of you doesn’t want to be attracted to Asian American men. It’s scary, inconvenient, doesn’t fit your self-molded identity, brings forth the specter of an all-Asian family (yikes!), or contradicts your unconscious and distorted understanding that Asians or Asian men are inherently inferior by the fact of their Asianness. There are likely “daddy issues” involved too.

Asian American men and women must examine themselves and the media-dominated world that helped create us and the rest of America. Of course most of American society wants to assert the inferiority of Asians—it serves the economic, psychological, and sexual purposes of white folks: mo’ money, mo’ power, mo’ superiority, mo’ booty for white men and women and less for them heathen Asiatics.

But you’re going to have to come to your own conclusions, come across your own identity. Who the heck are you? Uncle Irwin is not here to tell you. Uncle Irwin encourages you to explore, study, seek understanding and find balance and peace in your heart. Oh, and make the world better. Uncle Irwin’s getting old.

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Irwin Tang, 36 years old, is a community college teacher and author of How I Became a Black Man and Other Metamorphoses.

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