Asians, Girls, and Hip-Hop

I’d never been one of those yellow boys who collected ill sneakers and smoked weed and tried to live a funky hip-hop inspired life despite being suburban as hell, but I knew them growing up. They were juxtaposed against kids in solid button-downs and Science Olympiad t-shirts. Their counterparts were girls like me, who’d also listened to the Fugees in middle school and tried really hard to make slang fit pretty in a sentence. At one point a friend asked me what was it with Asians and hip-hop, and I said something about simple good music, which I knew was insufficient.

What I couldn’t verbalize then: the yellow connection with hip-hop never felt skin thin because it was swarming. It was everywhere, not just my pretty New Jersey town with the handful of boys I knew in a nice 2010 moment where every other song playing on the radio was Eminem. By the time I left Jersey five years later, I’d accumulated ten dollars in high school library fines for Jeff Chang’s Who We Be. Eddie Huang became every yellow kid’s favorite thought experiment, and Jin got mad Pentecostal with his rap. Dumbfoundead said that the maleness of hip-hop could counteract yellow emasculation, and the guy I was seeing listened to Nas a lot so maybe he was a little sensitive. Everyone tried to own rap even if they couldn’t, the yellow people and the white people, the rich-kid suburbanites and the good-boy nerds, which made rap some of the most seductive music out there. And everyone said they related to it because it was outsider music, which made me wonder if anyone could really be on the inside.

Mostly I wanted to know why I, female and suburban and upper-middle-class and daughter-of-professors and yellow-not-black, wanted to claim it too. After my roommate told me I had the music taste of her father, I decided to switch up the songs. I started falling in love with Tyler the Creator, no sweat. He was fantastic because he was colorful and awkward and intentional and decidedly, self-consciously unsexy. Some time in April we were listening to Goblin, and I realized I didn’t love Tyler the Creator in spite of the fact he talked about rape and cunts and faggots every other sentence but, maybe, because of it. He used misogyny as an aesthetic the way society did. He didn’t try to delude himself about inhabiting a world that he didn’t believe existed. His persona didn’t pretend to be happy or sane. He made machismo and misogyny and homophobia look like weak defenses against the pathetic outline of himself.

During finals period last semester, my roommate got me dead-fish hooked on HBO’s Girls like the artsy, social-justicey, slightly-feministy college kid I was supposed to be. The scene was picturesque because May was finally getting pretty and through the Matthews window you could see this yellow girl from Jersey sitting next to this black girl from Queens, and the two laughing at a group of four dumb sad self-concerned white girls on an oversized computer screen. I kept thinking about the discourse and fanfare about the show. I flirted with the idea that maybe Lena Dunham actually meant to talk about white privilege/self-entitlement/behavior by displaying it all so grossly. Regardless, my roommate and I were too colored to get the social commentary so we laughed at the unbeautiful, undesirable, broken, reasonless, repulsive white girls onscreen and thought that maybe we were getting at a white girl’s interiority. The girls’ pain was so loud it felt fake, like Taylor Swift songs and Tumblr. I wasn’t used to a hurt that dissolved, motionless. The hurt I knew about was so busy you could barely see it through the music.

Before, I had never seen a femininity that was so eager to claim victim. Female was my mother when she first came here, straight-from-China and pregnant and a grad student, with only $64 in her pocket. Female was Tinashe making thugs cry and Rihanna telling you to homicide it, but it wasn’t just sex and badassery, because the femininity I knew centered around an assumption that was by nature colored. It was outlined by Ntozake Shange, when she wrote “i cdnt stand bein sorry & colored at the same time / it’s so redundant in the modern world.” Female was Afeni Shakur saying she was just one of many black mothers who’d lost their sons, even if her son was Tupac. Femininity was a play, a tug, a performance. Our femaleness presented itself as an intertwining, inseparable cruel and vulnerable. Colored girls were cruel because we were vulnerable, vulnerable because we were cruel. It was part of our aesthetic.

But more, it was part of our survival. Our brand of femininity was historical, based on the castration of our families during slavery, our importations as picture brides or whores, our occupations while our men were imprisoned. Our type was personal, found in the way I was raised to build, not maintain, my legacy in this country. Our style was tangible when we described libido over romance, bodies over love, because it was nobler to push ourselves down than to let someone else do it. Loving hip-hop was listening, but more—loving hip-hop was learning to survive a femaleness that was colored and therefore cruel, even when it was obvious our male counterparts were not surviving. Loving hip-hop was an effort to be fresh and un-redundant, because we were taught to be this hard, meant to be this hard. Loving hip-hop was supposed to make this kid feel free.

Once, junior year, I sat in the cafeteria, thinking about 1997, which was the year I was born, but also the year when Tupac and Biggie were shot within six months of one another. I was wondering what that could do for a generation, whether it added wood or water to a fire. I wanted to write a poem about it but I thought I was too yellow to do it. Then two kids started a cypher in the middle of the cafeteria, yellow boys two years younger than me but in my precalc class, spitting things they probably spent hours preparing, which never happened and will probably never happen again. Other kids got up and applauded. I thought something I should have known before: it was possible to need something you didn’t make. You just had to figure out why.

Christina M. Qiu '19 lives in Mather House. Her column appears on alternate Wednesdays.