While growing up in the American public school system, I learned certain things about Asian identity. First: that it was collapsible; other people neither knew nor cared about the distinctions between nationalities or ethnicities. Second: that the history of the region was defined solely through American colonialism or war, or otherwise as narratives condensed into a sidebar in a textbook.

But as I grew older, I began to engage with Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) history in a way that I’d never been taught. Part of this included learning about the Asian American Movement that began in the 1960s. Another part of this was thinking critically about AAPI identity in dialogue with colorism, anti-blackness, and holdover cultural conservativeness.

And yet another part was learning that AAPI heritage was already being examined in America, and celebrated during Asian Pacific American Heritage Month. I’d never grown up knowing that May was anything special for AAPI communities; it simply wasn’t taught or shared, part of a larger erasure of AAPI identity. So in celebration of APA Heritage Month, I’ve asked eight AAPI creatives to share their work, their perceptions of representation and visibility, and how their respective creative fields can improve in both regards. After all, the first step to understanding your place in the world is to see others like you, already in it.

Soleil Ho, 29, Vietnamese American, she/her, chef, podcaster, and writer

Representation is validation. Seeing yourself and your experiences reflected in culture is incredibly affirming, because then you know you’re not alone: someone else has seen what you’ve seen, has felt what you've felt.

Within the food writing world, I’ve seen so much change since I started writing eight years ago. The conversations we’ve had among ourselves about food appropriation, family histories, and immigrant and refugee narratives are now appearing with more frequency in mainstream publications. There are a lot more AAPI folks in the writing business, which means our stories have more opportunities to get told. At the same time, there are still "Asian salads” on menus across the United States; I still don’t get that.

I think AAPI people need to push for more than our own representation though. We need to make sure that, just because we get a little piece of the pie, we don’t consider our jobs done with regard to equity, with regard to our Black and brown peers who are also struggling. Because it’s easy to fall prey to the idea that just because you have some AAPI representation on a masthead or arts committee, the work of diversification is done. But the truth is that AAPI visibility should never be the sole endgame for us, because then we run the risk of perpetuating the same marginalization that we’re fighting against.

Creative crushes: Amanda Yee, the chef and writer behind the upcoming Copenhagen restaurant, The Blues Woman; Stacey Tran, poet and organizer of the Tender Table storytelling series in Portland, OR; Mazzy Chiu, the super-cute and capable toddler star of The Mazzy Show, a online cooking video series.

Ryan Lee Wong, 29, Chinese and Korean American, he/him and they, writer and cultural organizer

When people say representation and visibility, I wonder who are we representing ourselves to, and why. I suspect that a lot of times, because it is the default definition of a person in American society, "representation" means representation to a white, middle-class spectator. I'm not interested in fighting for a share of that limited market, or jockeying for a visibility slot.