On the same day the Supreme Court ruled against the use of affirmative action in college admissions, model Julia Lee is blowing off steam by attending the Midcity Comedy Show in Los Angeles.

Most of the acts are comics of color, including some who are Asian-American, such as Lee.

Especially the ethnic jokes

self-mockery

,

Guilty pleasures

Throughout the night there are bits mocking the stereotype that all Asians are scholastic and overachieving.

Adam Chong, the Korean

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American MC, calls a Latino man and Asian woman in the multicu

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course audience for some good-natured ribbing.

“I love Mexican-Asian love,” he says. “Your kids will look terribly Filipino.”

Julia Lee,

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a fashion model and social media influencer, chuckles at the raw humor of the comedians. The show comes as a welcome relief from the atmosphere of foreboding that has permeated many aspects of everyday life that has left Americans Lee’s age and younger feeling rejected and anxious.

Lee, 31, is part of a legion of newcomers to Los Angeles who have helped transform the city into an epicenter for emerging online personalities in the worlds of fashion and pop culture.

But it’s hard to do business as usual and celebrate achievements, like being called “The Asian Superstar” on the cover of L’Officiel India magazine, while living in a country experiencing a spike in identity-based hate crimes and a political backlash against exactly what she and other influencers of color want to encourage to encourage brown and black people to express injustice, to share themselves and to be proud of where they come from.

With all the recent turbulence, including the Supreme Court ending the use of racial preferences in college admissions, partially on the assumption that black and

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brown applicants were selected at the expense of more qualified Asian students, it seems to Lee that the country is becoming even more divided.

“Affirmative action, it puts me in a weird place as an Asian American,” says Lee. “I feel like the decision pits Asian Americans against Latinos and Blacks, and that’s not fair. There has to be a give and take.”

Long before the court ruling, Lee felt the urgency to speak out.

She is an American of Chinese and Vietnamese background who is not related to the author of the same name. She has juxtaposed her lighter social media musings with reflections on race, skin color and the need to abolish European beauty standards that seem to be on the rise. out of step with the reality of the country.

“What beliefs took you time to unlearn? I’ll start: my skin color determines my status and how beautiful I am,” Lee wrote in a recent Instagram post to her 105,000 followers.

The overarching issue is one that many in her community have a hard time talking about, Lee says: Asian Americans

and elsewhere //line editor said to take this outlm//

are held up as the “model minority” while being subjected to the racist attitudes that other oppressed people endure.

What is often overlooked in the culture wars, she says, is that Asians also grapple with daunting questions about who they are and how they fit into the nation’s reckoning on racism.

Lee was so outraged by videotaped beatings of Asians in New York that she became one

active in the Stop Asian Hate movement. She organized an anti-hate rally in that city’s Chinatown neighborhood last year, and helped plan another in that city to encourage Asian Americans to vote.

“I wanted to speak for people who may not be able to speak for themselves,” she says.

Bathed in dappled sunlight

a

cafe terrace in hollywood, lee projects

both

seriousness and a disarming aura as she reminisces about cutting through class in high school to walk in her first runway show

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during fashion week in Philadelphia, her hometown.

The show she kept secret from her parents

illuminated illuminated

a passion in her. While studying abroad in Milan,

Italy, //rule editor confirmed this//

While in college, she signed with an agency in New York, where she focused primarily on working in advertising campaigns and modeling for department store buyers.

But something always seemed off.

She had successfully auditioned for castings and wondered if she was chosen simply to tick off the diversity box or because her traits were truly valued?

When she was rejected for model casting, a different kind of doubt gnawed at her: “Sometimes I felt like I wasn’t ‘Asian’ enough.”

Her confusion and frustration were

only

compounded by the reality that fairer skin tones are also more valued by some within the Asian community, she says. Because she’s late

,

immigrant father was Vietnamese, her skin is darker than the Chinese side of her family.

During a trip to Taiwan, she had to get used to people musing out loud, “Wow, her skin is so dark.”

“It

‘s

was, like, a bad thing,” says Lee.

Lee says her parents didn’t talk about race or racism when she was younger, even though Lee is white

,

childhood piano teacher said for years that “Asians don’t know how to play the piano with feeling.”

All of these experiences taught Lee that there is much more to being Asian American

more nuanced and contradictory than many of her fellow citizens realize.

“If you’re Asian-American, you can relate to this,” Lee writes in another Instagram post about “trying to balance Asian and American culture.”

“I felt like I belonged to both, but not quite belonged to either,” she says.

Lee welcomes the recent spate of movies, TV shows and mainstream music acts that allow Asians to express themselves on their own terms. She dreams of venturing behind the camera to create and produce her own Asian-themed programs.

But the animosity doesn’t seem to have subsided since the former president

Trump reignited age-old, anti-Asian resentment by calling COVID-19 the “Chinese virus.”

Lee admits she was shocked when so many Americans voted for Trump in 2016. She felt naive about race relations. Seven years later, with Trump still stirring up animosity in his bid for a second term, she has few words to express how disheartened she is to continually confront the bigotry he has unleashed.

UCLA professor Jerry Kang, an expert in the study of institutional racism and implicit bias, says Americans like Lee shouldn’t be surprised that the pendulum seems to be swinging back to attitudes of the past, at least for some.

South Korean-born Kang, 55, is the university’s founding Vice Chancellor for Justice, Diversity and Inclusion. He says that after decades of civil rights gains for people of color, women and the LGBTQ+ community, many Americans are uncomfortable with the speed of social change.

Still, like Lee, Kang is frustrated that people with opposing politics fail to agree on “what it means to make sure everyone fundamentally believes they belong to the project that is America.”

That night at the comedy show, Lee says it feels good to decompress around strangers who look like her or understand on a deep level what it’s like to represent both the diversity many Americans profess to want and the complexities of your own existence. .

After her father died in 2019, Lee was overcome with a desire to connect with her Southeast Asian heritage. She hopes to start that journey by visiting his homeland in the near future. As a former cover model for Harper’s Vietnam, she will be recognizable to many there.

Before the show, Lee opens a folder she found in her family’s old house which piqued her curiosity. It is full of yellowed letters on thin parchment and faded immigration documents that her father and other relatives kept in the 1970s as they rushed to flee Saigon, present-day Ho Chi Minh City, during the American pull

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from Vietnam.

Lee’s father had protected her from the ills of the world and the mixed messages that people of color often received in American society. Somehow, she says, “he always made everything sweeter than reality.”

While there is no real way to get sugar

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Lee says she wants to shroud the tensions that strain the nation’s cohesion, honor her father, and honor the sacrifices her parents made so she could make the most of her Americanhood.