Trill Clinton
09-30-2019, 10:52 AM
https://jezebel.com/stories-about-my-brother-1835651181
“The way that he died is something that I struggle with,” I told Prasad. “I wouldn’t have been having this conversation with you, or working on this essay, if he had died in a plane crash, or a freak accident.” Undertaking such an invasive cosmeticsurgery, and adding risk on top of risk by pursuing it in isolation in a foreign country, “isn’t just something that someone does, or something that happens randomly, and that needs to be interrogated,” I said.
There are, of course, myriad reasons why someone would undergo such an extensive procedure, and many of these reasons come from a healthy place. But as Prasad explained, the source is key: Did this come from an internal place that says, “This is who I am”? Or did this come from a sense of not being good enough–of believing that his self-worth was based on what he accomplished, how tall he was, and what he looked like?
While the decisions he made were his own, I believe that Yush felt that society’s narrow confines of what it means to be a man—especially a brown man in America—offered him little choice. I see the pain of a sensitive boy who succumbed to the impossible, unforgiving demands of an unhealthy relationship tomasculinity; fostered by a patriarchal Indian-American household; and exacerbated within a male-dominated, libertarian tech industry where the success of certain men was treated as self-evident proof of their superiority.
Yush’s observations about power, masculinity, and his standing in the world were not incorrect. Research has shown that tall people are richer (https://www.businessinsider.com/tall-people-are-richer-and-successful-2015-9) and more successful, and Western culture has a long history of trying to emasculate Asian-American men (East Asian men in particular) that can be traced to the 1800s, when Chinese men emigrating to the United States during the gold rush were viewed by whites as an economic and racial threat. Anti-miscegenation laws, formed in the 1660s to bar marriages between white people and black slaves and codify white racial purity, quickly expanded (https://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1075&context=aalj) in the early 1900s to include the small but growing population of Asian-Americans in an effort to preserve whiteness. These laws remained on the books even after segregation ended, until 1967, the same year my Dadaji brought his wife and three children to Canada. Such laws are now relics of the past, but the stereotypes they codified persist. In American movies and television, Indian men have historically been portrayed as nerdy and unable to attract women, like Raj in the Big Bang Theory,or as thickly-accented human punchlines, like Apu on the Simpsons. On dating site OkCupid, among men, Asians have the fewest responses—a statistic that Yush often cited, before he created an algorithm to attempt to improve his odds on the dating site.
While Yush and I saw some of the same problems in society, our responses were opposite: I have found a community of people who reject stereotypical gender identities, roles, and behaviors, whereas I think Yush internalized these messages, deepening insecurities that burrowed even further due to unmanaged depression. As a boy and then a man, he was discouraged from connecting with his feelings and saw that to express vulnerability is to be feminine and weak. Rather than blaming a greater system of patriarchy and white supremacy for these double standards, under which we all suffer, he blamed feminists like me.
“The way that he died is something that I struggle with,” I told Prasad. “I wouldn’t have been having this conversation with you, or working on this essay, if he had died in a plane crash, or a freak accident.” Undertaking such an invasive cosmeticsurgery, and adding risk on top of risk by pursuing it in isolation in a foreign country, “isn’t just something that someone does, or something that happens randomly, and that needs to be interrogated,” I said.
There are, of course, myriad reasons why someone would undergo such an extensive procedure, and many of these reasons come from a healthy place. But as Prasad explained, the source is key: Did this come from an internal place that says, “This is who I am”? Or did this come from a sense of not being good enough–of believing that his self-worth was based on what he accomplished, how tall he was, and what he looked like?
While the decisions he made were his own, I believe that Yush felt that society’s narrow confines of what it means to be a man—especially a brown man in America—offered him little choice. I see the pain of a sensitive boy who succumbed to the impossible, unforgiving demands of an unhealthy relationship tomasculinity; fostered by a patriarchal Indian-American household; and exacerbated within a male-dominated, libertarian tech industry where the success of certain men was treated as self-evident proof of their superiority.
Yush’s observations about power, masculinity, and his standing in the world were not incorrect. Research has shown that tall people are richer (https://www.businessinsider.com/tall-people-are-richer-and-successful-2015-9) and more successful, and Western culture has a long history of trying to emasculate Asian-American men (East Asian men in particular) that can be traced to the 1800s, when Chinese men emigrating to the United States during the gold rush were viewed by whites as an economic and racial threat. Anti-miscegenation laws, formed in the 1660s to bar marriages between white people and black slaves and codify white racial purity, quickly expanded (https://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1075&context=aalj) in the early 1900s to include the small but growing population of Asian-Americans in an effort to preserve whiteness. These laws remained on the books even after segregation ended, until 1967, the same year my Dadaji brought his wife and three children to Canada. Such laws are now relics of the past, but the stereotypes they codified persist. In American movies and television, Indian men have historically been portrayed as nerdy and unable to attract women, like Raj in the Big Bang Theory,or as thickly-accented human punchlines, like Apu on the Simpsons. On dating site OkCupid, among men, Asians have the fewest responses—a statistic that Yush often cited, before he created an algorithm to attempt to improve his odds on the dating site.
While Yush and I saw some of the same problems in society, our responses were opposite: I have found a community of people who reject stereotypical gender identities, roles, and behaviors, whereas I think Yush internalized these messages, deepening insecurities that burrowed even further due to unmanaged depression. As a boy and then a man, he was discouraged from connecting with his feelings and saw that to express vulnerability is to be feminine and weak. Rather than blaming a greater system of patriarchy and white supremacy for these double standards, under which we all suffer, he blamed feminists like me.