We're Still In The Process Of Creating Asian American Culture And Thats A Beautiful Thing

Since it opened in 2016, the Chop Suey Club has become a cultural touchstone of the New York City’s Lower East Side — a community space/store/vibe-curator of contemporary Asian-Americana with the ultimate goal of helping Asians revel in their cool-culture. The brick-and-mortar store immaculately curates everything relevant to our lives, from home goods (think chic chopstick holders) to clothing from East Asian designers. Its website is a more vast space to explore art and style through the lens of an Asian blended identity.

The Chop Suey Club is named after the iconic Chinese dish believed to have been invented by immigrants in America. “I think it takes some personality to come in and come up to explore,” says Ruoyi Jiang, who launched the space. For a long time, the store didn’t have any signage, so you either had to know that the store existed or be brave enough to wander in.

When she arrived here from Beijing in 2009, Jiang realized there weren’t many places of commerce or community that celebrated contemporary Chinese designers. For the most part, Americans’ ideas of Chinese creativity and fashion were pretty archaic confined to relics found in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, or in qipao stores in Chinatown. What was sorely lacking, she believed, was a space that displayed and uplifted the art of the abundant young, creative forces coming out of Asia.

Once they’re in the store, Jiang says she wants people to feel like they’re in their cool aunt’s apartment. You instantly get the sense of a modern Asian American sensibility in the form of jade jewelry you’d wear at a rave , art inspired by the acclaimed director Wong Kar-wai, and a Mahjong Rubiks Cube . “I just want people to feel comfortable,” Jiang says. “I want a whole family to come and this be a place where each person could find something.”

I had to ask Jiang exactly how Asian American she considers herself. While she was born and grew up in China, she feels much more at home in Manhattan, where much of her community now lives. Jiang struggles to answer this question, but actually, I think it’s her in-betweenness that’s been her biggest asset in curating everything in her shop. Her unique cultural understanding and social role as someone who understands America, but is not limited by its beliefs about Asian people — has been essential in creating a subculture that doesn’t see bubble tea as its central point.

The Asian American experience in most of the U.S., at least in the mid-2000s when I was growing up, was to feel overlooked, uncool and unsexy. On TV, we saw ourselves as nerds, foreigners and ninjas. The only non-Asians who befriended us were the weird kids with anime obsessions who were rejected by their own.

But Jiang’s upbringing in a big Chinese city means she didn’t have the same limitations we do. “For Asian Americans who grew up in the U.S., there’s definitely a disconnect between what they know and understand about their culture and what they want to feel,” she says. “[These] cultural conflicts ultimately weaken their self-confidence.”

In other words, existing outside of our parents’ cultures while also not fully being included in American culture creates a sense of rootlessness that can prevent us from fully owning our creativity.

Along those lines, Jiang references Black American culture as an example of a minority group that built a strong culture by and for themselves. In a way, she hopes Asian Americans can find a similar sense of pride in a culture that we create on our own.

The Black community was “able to build icons, to have all these role models, and you can really see the cultural impact of those influences,” Jiang says. “And I feel that that’s what’s really missing for us at this moment.”

Of course, that’s a complicated rabbit hole to fall down, because the disenfranchisement experienced by Black Americans in this country is, at a fundamental level, very different from what most Asian Americans experience — not just because of how we arrived here, but because of beliefs linked to our race. It’s crucial to acknowledge just how much of Black culture was formed out of necessity.

And while Jiang’s observation deserves a whole story on the distinctness of these two groups’ experiences in America, I’ll simply say that I understand her desire for more visible cultural icons for our communities. Most Asians were not allowed to immigrate to the U.S. until the 20th century, meaning we’re just now learning to understand what, exactly, our identities stand for.

Jiang believes that Asian American culture is still too reliant on the white gaze. There is certainly some truth to that: It’s white-run Hollywood and white music executives who are still dictating which Asians we should uplift. Not all Asian Americans are K-pop fans, for example — in fact, I know many Asian Americans, myself included, who feel totally disconnected from the genre. And yet K-pop has become the largest vessel of Asian representation in the U.S. in recent years. We may have more Asian representation in general now, but it doesn’t always feel like we have a say in that representation.

Through the Chop Suey Club, Jiang wants to help bridge the gap between our families’ cultures and our American sensibilities so we can begin to create new things, new art and, ultimately, a new culture that actually relates to us. A big part of getting the ball rolling is to just create more spaces where the community can come together, such as the Chop Suey Club’s mahjong nights at the Ace Hotel in Manhattan, as well as their Lunar New Year celebrations.

When you grow up in the in-between, it’s difficult to discern which experiences are yours to claim. To me, the most exciting part about Jiang’s vision is her conviction that we are still in the process of creating Asian American culture — that we are malleable, and that anything is possible. The challenge now is to figure out what resonates.

“Authenticity is a really important thing for me. I think that’s part of the reason that people are drawn to what we’re doing,” she says. “I’m always trying to find the language that people from both cultures can understand.”