Trains of Thought on Asian American Representation in Comics

Then. A couple weeks ago, I did a tour along the West Coast. I started in Los Angeles to spend time with my maternal aunts and my cousins, and then slowly worked my way up North. I took a bus from LA to the Bay Area, where I read a series of tweets about a “transracial” Filipino straight out of that episode of Atlanta, and I was just sad as the bus marched on. After aforementioned stay in the Bay, the next leg of the trip included an overnight train from Northern California to Oregon, where I struggled to watch the then latest episode of DC’s Legends of Tomorrow on my phone due to spotty cell signal. The episode, Welcome to the Jungle, is set during the Vietnam War, and the most prominent Vietnamese character is a thrall for the villain until the last minutes of the episodes. Given that I was essentially in the mountains, my phone failed to load the video right before the denouncement and I decided to check the less data intensive apps to pass the time. I noticed a text message from a friend. It was a link to an article Marvel Editor-in-Chief Admits He Used Japanese Pseudonym to Circumvent Company Policy. And my first thought was “weeaboo.” And my second thought, why does keep happening? Even before finishing the article, I was already thinking about how in 2015, Michael Derrick Hudson (a white man) gained notoriety after it was revealed a piece of his was published in Best American Poetry under his “pen name” Yi-Fien Chung (ostensibly, a Chinese woman). And then I finished r…