being among the asian girls on substack
on Sailor Moon, the hunger for friendship, and the psyche of the lonely Asian female
When I was growing up, I learned that proper writers get picked up by some publisher as they write their manuscripts by night, working odd jobs to make ends meet with a determination brewing inside them to make it big.
They have a dream to tell the world something of note, something that will change it as we know it. Think Jo from Little Women — Louisa May Alcott is a great example of a female classical writer who styled her beloved protagonist after herself, and her ever-present hunger to be published and seen. Other notable examples of other women self publishing ranged from Beatrice Potter to Jane Austen to Virginia Woolf.
But they all had the same thing in common — a dream to make something of themselves.
Me? I wrote to save myself. Sure, I wanted to do that, but I couldn’t save the world if I was a sad, broken child. Because you see, writing was my therapy.
When I was at school, my teachers got mad at me a lot for not following rules, or being slow. Kids would bully me on the playground when I tried to play with them because I had trouble fitting in. People made fun of me behind my back at church.
When I wasn’t crying, I was writing. Page after page. I would fantasize about what it’d be like to not be alone, to have real friends, to belong.
And I fiercely told myself, maybe I’m not supposed to belong. Maybe being good at writing is the reward you get for not being a regular person. Maybe I benefit from being a freak by being better at writing. Maybe I need to exist outside of society.
While I was angry, I could go for hours and hours creating worlds.
When I was done, I got to relax by grieving via watching…
Sailor Moon. A show about a squad of fabulous, glamorous, but relatable superhero girl next doors.
I fantasized about how Usagi didn’t have to be particularly smart or gracious to deserve love. That the power of her heart helped her save the world. That her being Sailor Moon was the least interesting part about her, because she had friends.
I would always dream about how cool it’d be to be Sailor Moon. Sure, she was a hero to all, but mostly, she was a hero to those who loved her the most. No matter how dumb she was, how annoying or weird, she still had love around her.
It was the highest ideal of camaraderie, of female friendship, of so much I wanted for myself.
If only I had that…
I’d wipe the stars out of my eyes for long enough to write my way away from the sadness, the grief, the loneliness that that felt so far away and unattainable.
I felt made to believe that I would never belong, that I wouldn’t have friends like Usagi. Because I’m not good enough inherently to have the things other kids have. And the best thing I could do is profit off of being not good enough by becoming a really good writer. It seemed costly to try to stake my worth on being published eventually, but I knew that I must continue to write, somehow, forever and ever to make the feelings feel worth it.
My mother laughed at my dreams, out of fear and protectiveness. “You’re going to have a long and harrowing journey if you go this route, especially because you’re not white,” she chided me. The other practical Asian kids are over here doing math and science! They’re conforming! Why should I not do the same? Why am I so different?
“You can belong,” she told me. “If you try harder.”
I cowered, but refused on principle. I may be sensitive, but I wanted to be courageous. I believed I’d already tried hard enough. I would never be this idea of a “good Asian girl!” It would make me sick forever to keep letting myself striver for it, when I would simply just not belong instead.
I noticed and assumed I was the only one in my small suburb getting bullied, so I decided I just needed to read more books. Write more things. Get even better at writing.
If this life meant I was unworthy of being a good Asian girl, and that good Asian girls don’t be writers, so be it. I’ll be alone. I’ll save the world, even without a squad. My own world would be saved by me.
“Does the world really need another Asian girl on Substack?”
I saw this tweeted by a mutual recently. She was considering putting her writing online.
Now, 20 years later, there are so many Asian girl writers that we are a stereotype implicitly. Imagine how shocked my 13 year old self was when she found out that there are so many other Asian girls writing now that there’s literally a joking catchphrase about them on Twitter.
I’ve seen others mention the “Asian girl on Substack” on my Twitter feed. It makes me shrink a little, reluctant to share my own writing. It also makes me reluctant, sometimes, to speak up.
The question this mutual asked echoed my own misgivings when I got on this platform. I thought about it. I still think about it all the time.
I still fear that this space isn’t really for me, that I shouldn’t even try because I’m not going to have a seat at the table.
When I really let myself sink into the interiority of how this question affects me, I know my first instinct isn’t yes please.
Everyone’s assumption is that I should be here to empower women, here to support my sistahs, here to be an ally and subscribe and do a lot of uplifting.
And I do genuinely feel this way. I do. But I also know I’m scared to feel this way. I’m scared to be supportive, because there’s a small toxic part of me competing for likes with the other Asian girls on Substack. It’s unfair! I’m not doing it with the other girls. The other Asian guys. The other people.
But it really is just vestiges of grief.
I learned to identify myself as “the writer” in my high school friend network of primarily Asians. While everyone else was at each other’s throats, splitting hairs over who’d taken enough AP classes in the hopes of getting into an Ivy League school, I wanted to do different things. I perked up at the idea of going to journalism school, and I had my dreams shut down by my peers. Not just my parents, but my own friends became oppressors of the dreams I’d had.
Even more so not having a true “squad.”
And suddenly, I felt my perceptions colored irreversibly. Suddenly, I subconsciously believed that even other Asians my age don’t support my profession.
It wasn’t just a “generational” or “cultural” thing. I literally felt so pigeonholed, suffocated, trapped in the feeling that I would have to do it alone if I’m going to be successful. There were no writer’s support groups as a 17 year old to remind me.
Thus, I vowed I would make a living as a writer somehow, I bellowed constantly. I would prove you all wrong! I would show you. I would turn the dials of public conversation in such a way that it’d make my loneliness bearable.
I wanted to believe it was possible so badly. I wanted to believe that I wasn’t letting down my entire family dynasty just for wanting to be a creative.
As an Asian woman who thought everyone wanted to do STEM and engineering and not be a fellow writer, I don’t know how to fit into my framework that I was not the only one, this whole time. That now others are speaking up, connecting with the world, talking about their novels.
Does this mean my sick fantasy of being alone was moot? That I’ve… never been the only one? How does that make me feel?
Well… to be honest, I feel guilty that I am not always feeling rosy likely towards other Asian women.
When I meet an Asian girl writer on Substack, if she doesn’t immediately become my friend, I get stuck in a liminal space of fear and anger and yearning.
Fear: You were allowed to be a writer and got support in a way I didn’t
Anger: Does this mean I have to try even harder in a profession that doesn’t reward Asian writers, to someone who had it “easier” than me?
Yearning: What was it like for you?
Now I’m a trope, a stereotype? Compared to other Asian girls on Substack in the same age bracket, who also talk about their emotions.
It infuriates me. It angers me. It makes me feel insignificant, as if I don’t have a real identity because I’m just a statistic now.
I feel erased. I feel enraged. I wonder if my story matters. And so, it’s really hard to admit this, but when I see an Asian girl on Substack, my first irrational worry is I’m losing something.
I fear: “you had it easier than me.”
I spent so many years believing that I had to do it alone, that the thought that I’m not alone makes my ego shirk back.
And I spent so many years believing that because I am doing it alone, I don’t have any point of comparison. Now, do I?
I wonder if the other Asian girls on Substack will be more successful because your parents supported you more. You’re a better Asian than me, a smarter harder worker. I wonder if the other Asian girls on Substack cry because they are of the blocked artist’s way, with something to prove.
It’s easy for me to falsely believe: you other Asian girls don’t grapple with your identity the way I do, because you’re not writing only about that. You’re writing about other things, things only white girls should be writing about! Why aren’t you obsessed with your Asianness like I am?
A shame bubbles up. A shame it’s not all roses inside, all abundance. It’s not a convenient time to talk about being an Asian woman. Anti-Asian violence is up, and we’re supposed to stick together more. A lot of literature out there is about how whiteness clouds the publishing industry.
But beneath all of this, I cannot deny I have paradoxical anger and desire brewing inside me. I want too many things of the Asian girl that I feel go unsaid. The archetype that I project is sister. I am harder on her because I identify with her so much.
The sister who could’ve saved the world with me. The sister of the Sailor Moon series. The allies, I didn’t have when I needed to be told you can do it, you’re allowed to be different, because I’m different too.
We were all raised by this idea of who we should have been. Often an idea of what our parents needed us to be, no matter our class or age. All this comes back to being an Asian girl who feels an infinite chasm with other Asian girls.
When I complain that [insert popular Substack here] is so well-liked, I think about what I’m really trying to say here. What need is being unmet? Why must these Asian girls on Substack trigger me more than the others?
And I know what it is now: it’s the wordless yearning for family. For community. For a sense of belonging as a black sheep who let everyone down when I chose writing.
It’s the same loss and helplessness I experience when I hear my native tongue spoken at a restaurant, the same heart lurches when a Chinese friend abandons me compared to when a white friend tells me off. It’s that implicit sense of family values that I still feel enslaved to, that guilt and desire for freedom that makes me place higher expectations on the Asian girl on Substack.
I want these Asian girls, this “monolithic” mass, to not have had it harder, yet also have had it hard too. I want them to make me better through us talking through it together.
I want them to be my friends, to be Sailor Scouts with me, fighting to write in spite of how some part of us must be furious we are doing it. I need them to accept me and help me further my dreams, because for so long I had to accept myself in place of others’ approval. If someone else relates, I want to be done with doing it on my own.
I know that because I had a hard time as a writer when I was growing up, when I see an Asian girl online who’s a sensitive writer, who’s more popular than me, I inherently expect more of her because she looks like me. I want more wisdom to come from someone who lived like me. I hold her to a higher standard, of deserving my respect, even as I find myself craving to hand it out like candy. She looks like me in the way that signals to me beyond the shared experience of gender — she has my almond shaped eyes, my raven black hair that I mercilessly bleached blonde in an effort to feel optionality in my appearance, and which I hoped would translate to how I was seen by everyone else. I want her to see me so bad, that sometimes I forget I must let myself see her.
She looks like me, but is she me?
I wonder: did she also walk with her head down and secretly read books when she should have been practicing piano? Did she also cry when her parents yelled at her for getting a C in math because she spent all her time writing ? Does she also look wide-eyed at all the other Asian American writers and go, that could be me? Does she also feel the blocked artist’s way of if I don’t make it in some way, I’ll have wasted my life for nothing, and my parent’s sacrifices will be in vain?
This doesn’t matter if I only want you to have suffered like I did because I am afraid I am still alone.
There’s resentment that comes up about the choices I’ve made from time to time. I beat myself up that I wasn’t good enough to be a woman in STEM AND also be working on a novel. I lament that I didn’t have it in me to try to code when I wished to be writing instead. I am angry that I strayed away from my dream of being a novelist to pursue journalism. I grieve also that this is an experience I can’t convey to many people.
So when I think about “Asian girls on Substack” these are the girls I want to understand me.
I now know that it’s my mess I have to reckon with. I can’t obsess over what I didn’t have or what I believe others had.
The most toxic belief I have is that only people who relate to my suffering have the right to critique me. But it hurts so much more when they do! Yet I crave this so much.
My dream is to have a group of Asian girls on Substack who grow their work together, who perhaps even write about the experience of being both universally relatable enough to be loved, but also grieve together how here in the West it’s not an easy game — grieve how our parents’ survival instinct was often to put aside dreams of writing, that writing would not be a suitable profession. Writing isn’t a proper way to have a stable, secure life in America, is what we must think each time we put words to paper. Yet I owe it to myself to believe that it is! I owe it to myself to make my life easy.
And what if ease could be with others?
If having a crush is misplaced ambition, is envy — here, of the Asian girl on Substack — just misplaced desire for camaraderie?
I see now that the introspective, often halting tone of thoughtfulness that characterizes the Asian girl on Substack is because we had to hold back so many big feelings — work through so much immigration-related generational trauma that we couldn’t express it into the world. The same “navel-gazey” vibe I’ve often critiqued is just my own projections that their introspection belongs to them — that they don’t care to speak to an outgoing offshoot of a black sheep like me, one who is more loud and open and eager to connect. I tell myself these Asian girls on Substack have their Substacks, and that’s enough. They don’t want camaraderie. They don’t want community. They don’t want the things I want. For them, writing is enough.
Maybe I’m sad that writing isn’t enough for me.
Maybe I’m sad I wish my entire life were magical, as magical as the stories I used to write. I’m sad my own writing wasn’t enough to satisfy me, because I wished to have the fantasy of what Usagi had in Sailor Moon.
It’s humbling to ask myself — what will I do with my judgments of the Asian girl on Substack? Why am I still hanging onto gatekeeping this space, to putting restrictions on who it should or shouldn’t belong to?
Am I not a fussy younger sister, whining that her older sibling isn’t mentoring her enough? Am I a weary mother, hoping desperately that her daughter doesn’t forget to connect with her?
I’m all of these things, when I think about what it means to be an Asian woman.
I sit here, and I feel somatically into my body. I close my eyes, and I lean right into this yearning, this wish, this sadness.
Beneath everything… the image that emerges is a handful of pretty, excited, cheerful Asian girls. Patting me on the back. Cheerleading me on, reminding me that I can do it. That they understand the burden and pressures I put upon myself to be everything I feel I must be to “deserve success.”
One such friendship with one friend has really changed my life in this way. We got dinner recently, and I walked away thinking about how every time I’m angry about Asian girls on Substack, I don’t feel that way when I read her Substack.
But maybe from a distance, I would’ve idealized her. I would’ve assumed about her life if I didn’t know the thoughtfulness she had, if I didn’t recall the warmth with which she hugs me, the excited way she talks to me over the table.
I also recall realizing another “Asian girl on Substack” found me significant, enough to ask me to hang out when she came to town. I recall her writing candidly about jealousy, and the harrowing way her parents had treated her.
My heart clenches. Are we all just ghosts to each other? It hurts me to remember the grief I carry, but it hurts me more to continue assuming.
“Where were you when I was a little girl, and I needed friends like you?” I sob.
I realize I don’t need more likes on my Tweets or Substack. I need to create community where I don’t see it, community that’s willing to talk about the collective trauma we had as artistic young girls, who could’ve played together but never found each other til now. The girls who post the Sailor Moon memes, who also needed to create their magic.
But it’s not too late. It’s never been earlier.
I want Asian female friend aunties to help me birth my characters, to remind me I can’t define myself by how my parents wanted me to be, to celebrate with me as I improve my Mandarin so I can one day write a memoir on my great grandfather.
Next time my chest twists like a knife at the sight of an Asian girl being on Substack, I’ll remember this.
I will remember how unfair it is I won’t just cheer for her — I’ll focus gently on the yearning I have, to be seen by these women. To be respected. And to remember how it really is friendship I crave.
And I’ll bellow to the next generation that it doesn’t have to be hard. It doesn’t have to be hard because you have me. You have us, a flawed but valid collective of Asian female writers that want us to write even though we didn’t feel like we deserved it, that write with the shadow of impracticality and their parents’ disapproval and feeling like they still have something to prove in such a white space. If you will refuse to conform, with trembling hands gripping your pen, you belong here.
Get the fuck on Substack. I will read your work. I will never let my own anguish and grief color that at the end of the day I choose, again and again, to embrace the magic of my brethren.
I can find that whether or not I have a thousand likes. I am a fellow Asian girl on Substack.
I UNDERSTAND
🤍