Hey. I’m Jason Chu - and this is the story of how rap music made me Asian American.

My Chinese parents didn’t grow up Asian American. They were born in Southeast Asia - my dad in Thailand and my mom in Malaysia. They came to the US in the ‘70s for college, where they met, started dating, and got married right as my dad finished his PhD. We moved around a couple times then settled in Delaware - where my sister and I grew up. We didn’t have any kind of Asian community there. Now, I knew I wasn’t White, but I wasn’t ever taught how to talk about what I was. Yeah, we were encouraged to be tolerant and welcoming to people with different cultures and skin colors, but we never talked about what it meant to be Asian. Not at home, and definitely not at school. That all changed the day Useff leaned over in Mr. Messinger’s classroom and handed me 3 burned CDs: Jay-Z’s The Blueprint 2. Deltron 3030. And Aesop Rock’s Labor Days. I’d always liked writing and poetry and literature, but this was a whole different approach to the English language. These guys weren’t tailoring their vocabulary or content to someone else’s idea of what was proper. Their songs were made for their community, where they were from, and if you didn’t get that? They didn’t need your approval. It was super cool. It was literate, eloquent, and confident but also so different from the examples of “good writing” in my AP lit textbook. I started hanging out with Useff more, and some of our buddies who were also into hip hop. And I also started asking questions about race.

See, I’d started to realize that the rappers I liked the most were the ones who had something to say about the world around them. And a lot of what they talked about was being proudly, explicitly, Black. When these artists talked about race - their experiences, their community, their history - it was like it was a source of strength for them, like a superpower. It was such a different vision of race than I’d been given in our high school textbooks, where racial conversations were either about long-ago historical oppression or… just ignored entirely.

It made me ask: what’s my version of this?

See, I knew I wasn’t Black. And I was self-aware enough to know I wasn’t gonna find my own superpower just copying and pasting someone else’s history. I knew my family - but when it came to a history of our community—our Asian American heroes, struggles, and victories—I had nothing. So I started looking around for what I could find.

Today, 20 years later, I live in Pasadena, California. I’m a full-time rapper and content creator, and I’m really proud to have built a career making songs and videos about Asian America. And it all started with 3 burned rap CDs from Useff in Mr. Messinger's classroom.