As Biden death-marched to the podium he seemed to be communicating his greetings to the moderators via grunt. Online Only. Ken Chen. I did not really believe that Corky Lee would pass away. I heard early reports that the radical photographer had contracted Covid and stayed overnight at the hospital, but then he began to recover. His opening gambit was to school you.
His knowledge was not the ideological preciousness encouraged by social media. It was scrappier, a shrewdness of the street. His images captured fifty years of Asian American radicalism, and perhaps because photography preserves a vision of its subjects against erosion, age, and death, I realized that when he passed away on January 27, , I had long assumed that Corky Lee himself would be immune to time.
A decade ago, we met for dinner with his longtime partner Karen Zhou and his friend, the historian Peter Kwong. I was bemused when he began flipping the pages of the menu back and forth and asked me, almost timidly, if I could recommend what to eat. He was a second-generation Asian born before the borders loosened in , which made us both ABCs: assimilated, educated, clueless.
I loved the knowing wink of this line, its carefree shrug at racial fronting, ancestry, and supposed traditionβthe way it packed a treatise about the social construction of race into a single spat-out wisecrack. Here was a theory of ideology. Rather than searching for a dubious authenticity, essence, or nationalism, Corky suggested that Asian American identity did not possessβand also did not needβany underlying reality beyond solidarity.
The Asian American project was an invention, a provocation thought up by small bands of liberals and radicals who came together despite their divergent homelands, ethnicities, and languages.
