Selected Public Writing
Cultural Exchange Between the U.S. and China Before the Social Media Era,
TIME Magazine, 2025.
In the quotidian moments of cultural exchange, inside jokes, and social commentary that Xiaohongshu (RedNote) has afforded, we see an echo of the promise of those early years of U.S.-China detente, when a rising generation of Americans and Chinese dreamed of a future outside of the confines of Cold War antagonism.
The Fact of Non-Blackness: On Claire Jean Kim’s Asian Americans in an Anti-Black World,
Los Angeles Review of Books, 2023.
In her effort to reframe Asian American history through the lens of structural anti-Blackness, Claire Jean Kim’s new book both emerges from—and exceeds—the fraught discourses of Asian American anti-Blackness that have dominated social justice spaces in the post-Black Lives Matter era.
Policing the Borders of Anti-Asian Violence
ROAR Magazine, 2021
Amidst calls for militarized state “protection,” it is urgent we expand the concept of anti-Asian violence towards a systemic and global diagnosis of imperialism.
The Long History of Anti-Asian Violence,
Jewish Currents, 2021
A conversation with Jewish Currents places recent attacks on Asian Americans in the context of longer histories of white supremacy and imperialism.
China and the American Lake
Monthly Review, 2021
What the history of the United States’ 19th century “pivot to Asia” tells us about the structures of transpacific empire amidst a “new” Cold War.
Reviving the History of Radical Black-Asian Internationalism
ROAR Magazine, 2020 w/ Minju Bae
Amidst a global pandemic, Third World internationalism offers a framework to connect today’s movements against antiblackness, imperialism and anti-Asian racism.
The Armed and Anxious White Psyche
Boston Review, 2019
Contemporary gun violence is not so much terrorism as tradition. It is deeply intertwined with the white supremacist foundations of the United States.
Asian America’s Great Gatsby Moment
The Atlantic, 2018
In its gauche depiction of Asian capitalist excess, Crazy Rich Asian’s aspirations to mount a revolution in Asian American media representation are held back by its politics of respectability.