NEW YORK– The Pell 12 seats remain filled.
Customer after customer comes through the small barbershop on a narrow side street in Manhattan’s Chinatown. Of course they come for the cuts. But actually they come for the coolness.
From New York City, from the metro area, from many states away, they come for what they see on 12 Pell’s vibrant social media accounts, where the young, predominantly Asian-American hairdressers offer advice to teens and men of all ages and ethnicities . with humor, jokes, confidence and ease – and without a hint of hesitation.
Karho Leung, 34, embodies that. A son of Chinatown and one of the founders of 12 Pell, he wanted to start a company that reflected him – his creativity, his long-standing interest in fashion and style, his desire to “build the world I want to live in… for permission.”
About as American an idea as it gets, right? The hunger to find your own way, to find your own way, to make your voice heard? In some ways, Leung is a case study for the latest incarnation of this. A look at social media and pop culture shows that many other Asian Americans from his and younger generations are doing the same thing – in business, in politics, in content creation, in entertainment, in life.
If the space isn’t there yet, they are determined to create it.
Any look at the country’s past shows that such an American reality has not always belonged to everyone, including previous generations of Asian Americans. That American idea of the freedom to define your own space? That often meant less space for others.
Previous generations of Asian Americans, some of whom have lived here for more than a century and others whose roots stretch back to recent decades, have lived in America where their communities of immigrant origin were smaller and viewed as intrinsically, perpetually foreign. America where there was little general awareness of the countries to which Asians and Asian Americans traced their ancestry, where there was no internet or social media culture that encouraged people to determine their own lives.
Instead, there were stereotypes that persist to this day – of otherness, of broken English speaking and passivity, sometimes sneaky or suspicious, often eating some kind of strange, pungent food. Other iterations included nerds and geeks who could be assumed to pass the math test more easily than score the winning point in the game, or to be fashionable enough to offer style advice.
But while these stereotypes still cause harm, they don’t have the same power in a country and time where many Americans now eat from a global plate; where there are yoga studios and henna tattoos, temples and cultural festivals everywhere; where Asian American creators have space to tell their own stories; and where the size, diversity, and geography of Asian American communities have increased dramatically over the past two decades, even as they remain a small part of the overall whole.
Those stereotypes don’t affect Leung — born in Maine and raised in Chinatown — in the same way they affected generations before him.
“It’s funny because even though I saw these kinds of stereotypes and portrayals happening growing up, it never really dawned on me that I was dealing with that,” he says. “There was a stigma, but I always drove in my own lane.”
Just ask Jeff Yang, 56, a writer who has spent decades documenting Asian American communities and culture. When asked whether the cultural space Leung inhabits and makes his own sounds like the world of Yang’s childhood, he laughs.
“I grew up in a world where I felt like everything about me was projected onto me by other people,” Yang says. “The stories that were told were all told by non-Asians about what I could do, who I could be, what I could look like.”
It’s not like that world doesn’t still exist. Still part of just one of three South Asian families in Reading, Pennsylvania, Simran Anand, 27, grew up in the 2000s. She says she can relate to the feeling that previous generations had when they felt culturally isolated in her daily life when she left home.
But there was something they missed: large-scale South Asian communities, like in Edison, New Jersey, where her parents went at least quarterly. A Sikh gurdwara about an hour away where she could learn about her faith. And the option, when she went to college, to choose a school where she could join thriving South Asian student groups.
For her, it’s both, not either-or, a sensibility she brings to her jewelry company BySimran, which she founded a few years ago to create pieces that draw inspiration from South Asian designs but are adapted to her sensibilities. also as a young American woman.
“I’m American, but I’m also South Asian,” she says. “And I don’t have to be one or the other.”
Demetri Manabat, 23, agrees. Born and raised in Las Vegas to a Filipino father and Mexican mother, the spoken word artist readily admits that “it sounds like another world” to hear his parents’ experiences growing up.
They did not teach him and his brothers Tagalog, one of the languages of the Philippines, or Spanish, because “they grew up in a time when speaking any other language was quite frowned upon.” And so they assumed that that kind of perception would continue throughout my years, which it didn’t.”
“I used to get so angry at my parents and think, ‘Why don’t you teach me a language?’ And it wasn’t until recently that I could finally understand it, it wasn’t at all like it is now.
Alex Paik remembers. The 43-year-old Korean-American artist came of age in a predominantly white suburb outside Philadelphia and now lives in Los Angeles. “Growing up, it was like I wasn’t Korean enough or I wasn’t too Korean” — caught between the norms of his immigrant parents and the America around him, he says. “I felt like I was always trying to meet these standards. moving the goalposts.”
Nowadays he looks at his eleven-year-old daughter with intrigue. “She loves to read, and there are so many stories these days written by Asian American women that star Asian and Asian American girls, and I think that’s so cool,” he says. “I don’t know how it would affect your sense of self, but it has to affect it somehow, so I’m really curious to see how she grows up… It’s just normal for her.”
He, Yang and others point to multiple factors that have affected the lives of Asian Americans over time, including the demographic reality that there are more and larger communities across the country, largely due to immigration reform from 1965. Globalization has also played a role, introducing cultures to each other as the world has become smaller. And the role of the internet and technology cannot be overestimated.
Of course, in American communities of Asian descent, there have always been people willing to be the founding fathers, the pioneers in politics, protest, business, entertainment, and the arts. DJ Rekha is one of them. In 1997, Rekha started Basement Bhangra, a monthly party in a Manhattan club that would last twenty years and was for many people’s introduction to the beats and rhythm of Bhangra, a music style originating from the Indian subcontinent.
“What I thought is no different from what anyone else who is trying to create something says,” says Rekha. “You hopefully want to do things that feel authentic to you, and that an audience connects with.”
Paik thinks part of what he sees in younger generations is also the natural flow that comes from a connection to the land that looks different for those born here than it does for immigrants.
“If you start with the assumption that you belong in a space, I feel like it changes the way you approach things,” he says. “Whether you really want that space doesn’t really matter. You have an attitude of: yes, of course this is my house, this is my country. I grew up here.”
And that last statement—“I grew up here”—is the driving force behind new generations of Asian Americans rising up and claiming their own space—even if the assumptions they make about what’s possible for them can be somewhat unsettling to other generations.
“Previous generations will of course have one of those ‘what’s going on’ moments,” says Manabat. “I think that’s the goal, to have that moment of, ‘This is crazy,’ but it’s everything you hoped would happen.”
In short: building the world they want to live in. And don’t ask for permission.