One of the most striking things about Andrew Yang’s Presidential candidacy, early on, was the extent to which it was not about him. Everyone has a story, and most politicians try to leverage their backgrounds in ways that make their ambition to serve seem inevitable. But Yang, a forty-four-year-old entrepreneur and the American-born son of immigrants from Taiwan, seemed happy to serve as the human emissary of a thought experiment: the “Freedom Dividend,” his market-tested rebrand of universal basic income. In Yang’s plan, every American citizen would be given a thousand dollars a month with no conditions. He has described it as a necessary and humane response to a future in which up to a third of the jobs that Americans have now will be “automated away.” The money would allow people a measure of mobility, or a safety cushion, or even, he has suggested, the opportunity to pursue whatever makes them truly happy. Yang has been giving a Freedom Dividend to families in New Hampshire, Iowa, and Florida; he recently announced plans to provide it to ten other American families.

From the beginning, Yang embraced the novelty of campaigning, frolicking on the trail with a playful wonkiness, steering every conversation back to the Freedom Dividend, bringing the same bemusement to an eclectic range of podcasts and media appearances. His barely serious vibe helped to make palatable proposals that might have seemed radical and strange on paper. With his jaunty affect, he came across as an unfazed expert whether addressing the skeptical libertarians who listen to “The Joe Rogan Experience” or the right-wing trolls who like Ben Shapiro, the liberal acolytes of “Pod Save America,” or the hard-to-impress hip-hop fans of Power 105.1’s “The Breakfast Club.”

In the opening pages of his book “The War on Normal People,” which was published last year, Yang writes about being called a range of anti-Asian epithets as a child. He was “ignored or picked on,” in part because he was “one of the only Asians in my local public school.” (Workplace anecdotes aside, the rest of the book focusses almost exclusively on policy ideas.) In interviews with other Asian-Americans, Yang has talked about the struggle of figuring out his identity.

But when Yang has brought up his identity in front of whiter crowds, it has often been in jest. By the spring, he was repeating a popular line: “the opposite of Donald Trump is an Asian man who likes math.” (MATH has become one of the Yang campaign’s slogans—a backronym for “Make America Think Harder.”) He joked about his fondness for tests. At a Democratic debate in September, he quipped, “I am Asian, so I know a lot of doctors.” Shortly afterward, talking to voters about his U.B.I. proposal, he said, “Many of you think this is impossible, that the Asian man is talking magic.” At the end of an NPR Politics podcast, Yang signed off with the normal pleasantries you expect from an interviewee: “Thank you, such a pleasure.” The host replied, lightheartedly, “You did not make it sound like it was a pleasure.” Yang quickly attributed her inability to read his emotions to his “Asian stoicism,” and made a crack about the “unwelcoming” look of his resting face.

I have been watching Yang’s campaign with fascination, largely on account of moments like these. What stands out about them is that they’re less about Yang’s own sense of his identity and more about what he imagines other people assume about him. Even the line about being Trump’s opposite came from a supporter he met on the campaign trail. Yang has said that “most Americans are savvy enough to know” that not every Asian person is good at math, and has described the line as an effort to “reclaim a stereotype that happens to be true in my case.” He’s conscious of preconceptions around high-achieving Asian-Americans, and sees them as an opportunity for a kind of shared joke, rather than a misconception to be corrected.

Yang’s identity has clearly been a part of his appeal, just not in ways that most Americans might consciously register. Yang could afford to be self-effacing and naïve, for instance, because most people would assume that he was a wonky brainiac. Initially, he was regarded as a fringe figure—at best, thanks to his online Yang Gang, “the Internet’s favorite candidate.” In the course of a year, he has become one of the most prominent Asian-American political figures in U.S. history. Last week, his campaign announced that it had raised ten million dollars in the year’s third quarter, nearly twice what the campaign had raised, in total, before the quarter began. His campaign manager told the Times that the haul insured Yang “will have the funding to compete and outperform expectations through Super Tuesday and beyond.” His background and viewpoints will, presumably, begin to receive greater scrutiny from the press and prospective voters. In the meantime, though, he has offered a case study in the assumptions that people make about Asian-Americans, and the accommodations that Asian-Americans sometimes make when telling their stories.

That the political mainstream underestimated Yang doesn’t surprise me; I underestimated him, too. I made my own mistaken assumptions—that he was a Silicon Valley billionaire, for instance, able to dole out these trial Freedom Dividends as a gesture of personal largesse. In fact, Forbes has estimated that his net worth is around a million dollars; even if that estimate is conservative, many of the other Democratic Presidential candidates are probably wealthier than he is. “I know everyone in Silicon Valley,” the esteemed tech journalist Kara Swisher said to Yang at the beginning of an interview this summer. “I don’t know you.”

But Yang never struck me as mysterious, or odd. In some ways, he was overly familiar. His good-natured vibe reminded me of some of the Asian-American kids I grew up with who just really wanted to fit in. His Asian jokes struck me as a recognizable defense mechanism—defusing potential spots of trouble with a little humor, even if you know better. It never occurred to me that this approach to the world could make an extremely unlikely Presidential candidate come across as the rational, middleman-style alternative to polarization and partisanship. It was stranger still to see that Yang’s sense of humor—a surefire way to distinguish himself from the stereotypes around Asians as stiff and robotic—could be deployed to rally a diverse constituency around the Asian everyman.

My expectations were shaped in part by the modest history of Asian-Americans in U.S. politics. Asians built informal political networks in this country as early as the eighteen-forties, but they weren’t allowed to participate in electoral politics until a century later, when Chinese-Americans were granted citizenship and suffrage in a gesture of wartime amity. In 1952, the McCarran-Walter Act allowed for the naturalization of other Asian-Americans. During the decades that followed, the personal stories of Asian-American elected officials had to fit neatly within the narrative of the American Dream, accentuating achievements over obstacles.

Hiram Fong, the son of Cantonese immigrants and the first Asian-American elected to the Senate, represented Hawaii from 1959 to 1977. “I’m symbolic of the opportunities afforded to a person in a democracy,” he said. Daniel Inouye, whose grandparents immigrated to Hawaii from Japan, enlisted in the Army as soon after the attack on Pearl Harbor as Japanese-Americans were allowed to do so. He lost his arm during the war, and was forced to abandon plans to become a surgeon. He was elected to Congress in 1959, and the Senate four years later; he served until his death, in 2012. Subsequent generations of elected officials, including the former governors Gary Locke and Bobby Jindal, similarly explained themselves as immigrant success stories. Theirs was a patriotism tinged with struggle, the evolution of new Americans.