The goal of this chapter is to introduce anti-Asian racism and the COVID-19 pandemic. It begins with the story of Kristina Arevalo, an Asian American scholar pursuing a PhD in developmental psychology in New York City who experienced racial discrimination during the COVID-19 pandemic. This is consistent with the history of racial scapegoating in the US, a strategy of blaming Asian Americans for health and economic crises, as well as wars, that relies on fear and hate to justify violence against them. This chapter is informed by Asian critical race theory (AsianCrit), discusses who are Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders, some popular myths about them, and their place in a racial position model. It examines how anti-Asian racism is supported by the model minority myth, the Yellow Peril racist trope, the perpetual foreigner stereotype, and Orientalism. The chapter includes a Food for Thought section on the Delano grape strike and linked fate. It ends with a discussion of Kristina Arevalo and rethinking who is considered a “Real American.”

This chapter asks how literature and literary criticism contribute to the understanding of Asian American racialization. It traces the emergence of the panethnic construct of Asian America as a radical exercise of global, anticolonial imagination, exploring how Asian Americans are racialized as intermediaries within the United States. Asian American literature captures the dynamism of this construct, Rana argues, drawing out an allegory for literary analysis from Chang-rae Lee’s 1995 novel Native Speaker. The tragic characterization of the novel’s protagonist – a spy cast as analyst – renders the model minority myth as mythos, reorienting its trajectory of assimilation and incorporation toward the broader interpretive totality of US militarism and empire. Asian American literature thus enables readers to trace the cocreative relationship between social formations and literary forms, to read not for the representation but for the refiguration of race.