Asian Americans: We have been called both the model minority and the meek minority, commended for gliding unaided into the middle class yet criticized for too eagerly conforming to the ways of our adopted culture. We’re long familiar with such double-edged perceptions, the slap and tickle of such cultural cliches, which is partly why we don’t rise up against racism but mostly look uncomfortably the other way. In our case, hate comes swathed in harmless ribbing. Just take a look at this pair of Colorado University opinion pieces: Max Karson’s white-on-Asian hate essay “If it’s war the Asians want… It’s war they’ll get” set against Felix Im’s Asian-on-white counterpoint “A few words on the Asiaphilic plague.”

The numerous over-engineered offending points of Karson’s daft post are too ridiculous to meaningfully incite. More insidious is the camouflaged hate in Korean-American Felix Im’s companion piece, which by comparison has received scant attention.

Obscurely subtitled “A weak exercise in scapegoat tactics,” Im’s essay briefly dissects the cultural baggage that plagues the author. Growing up “one of three yellows” among whitebread classmates and buffeted with typical kid ignorance such as the “Are you Chinese or Japanese” questions, Im spurned his native tongue and underwent a willing and thorough whitewashing. A couple decades later, older and wiser, he looked back with chagrin at his “formerly being ashamed” of the “skin/culture” he had inherited and set off to reconnect with a “long-suppressed childhood.”

Yet the times they have changed and all things Asian are now the rage. Still, according to Im, the Caucasians remain obtuse, mangling pronunciations as they try their hand at Korean, making “gross attempts at understanding the Eastern mind through university lectures and the Thai restaurant down the street,” tattooing mystical Chinese characters on their arms and, in his mind, taking his women.

Im reports that he “spent this past summer engrossing [him]self in the guilt and release of a two-month stay in South Korea, living with relatives, and studying the language.” Glossing over the events of those months, Im continues, “all the reader needs to know at this point is that it involved an induced psychological regression to my 6-year-old self … thinking exclusively in my limited Korean, childlike and wonderfully naive…” That’s apparently when he discovered his bitterness toward white people.

In the case of Im, such a trip seemed predestined to end in one form of bitterness or another. In Korea, he wasn’t going to feel Korean. Indeed, what right has Im to so righteously reclaim the cultural identity that he despised and rejected for so many years? After his summer sampling, did he really expect to know significantly more about the intricacies of his “native” culture? When he refused to learn a word of Korean and declared that he wished that he were white, did he not effectively join up with his Caucasian peers?

Im seems bereft of irony in telling this story. Clearly it cuts close to the bone. It is personal and emotional. Still, it is absurd. It is the story of a damaged child who grows into an adult who indulges in a fantasy of reverting to childhood to avenge the children who still haunt him, the kids whom he claims “raped” him of his “linguistic eloquence.”

Long ago, Im disowned one cultural identity to embrace another. He feels guilt over his complicity in making himself a hybrid, neither a Korean person nor a white American. Rather than directly addressing that thorny phenomenon, rather than writing about— there’s no other words for it— his self-loathing, he recasts his hate in the terms of his current politics. “Dear Asiaphile,” Im concludes. “I hate you.”

He is talking about himself.

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Jean Yung is a graduate student at the Annenberg School of Communication, USC. flickr: Nathalie Pahud-Briquet of one of her students at Laney Community College, Oakland, Calif., 2005-2006.