“Taking Up Space” (2021-2022)

I began drafting this essay in late March of 2021, barely a week after the Atlanta spa shootings resulted in the death of eight people, including six Asian women. I didn’t turn it in on time because the draft I had prepared to submit, although completed, wasn’t a complete narrative. It looked to assign blame to people and politicians for how Asian Americans had been excluded from our own country, and in rereading it, I realized how the anger and confusion in my writing was a far cry from the objectivity usually expected in academic writing.

I grew up in a predominantly Asian community in California, and now as a student at NYU, I am part of the 18.7% of undergraduates that identify as Asian. When the pandemic started, the scapegoating of Asian Americans and the rise in hate crimes instigated some mixed feelings in my family and friends: disappointment, resentment, and fear were just a few of them. I asked for time to edit this essay because I wanted to filter out how present these emotions were in my writing, but I soon realized that when a community collectively feels this way, it’s a response to patterns that have to be addressed.

While I don’t think this draft is necessarily less emotional than the one I deleted on the due date, I hope that understanding the research and analysis that went into this piece is a start to repairing the hurt.

Brooke Nguyen (CAS ’24) attends the College of Arts and Sciences and is pursuing a degree in economics and psychology on pre-law track. Having completed the minor in psychology by the end of her first semester at NYU, Brooke’s coursework in linguistics and cognitive bias heavily influenced her writing, with her first essay in her expository writing course focusing on the impact of outgroup bias in the justice system. This essay applies the research methods found in psychology, economics, and law in order to identify the root of the problems faced by Asian Americans living in the US.