This is how I know an Asian South exists: I miss it
As the critic Leslie Bow writes, Asians in the South have long occupied a kind of “social limbo, a segregation from segregation,” by which she means that Asians can rarely tell where they fit within the South’s racial pecking order. One could of course make the same argument about Asians elsewhere in this country. Outside of a few urban enclaves, aren’t most Asian communities so small as to barely register within any local patchwork of social relations? Perhaps the aberrancy of Asians in the South is simply a difference in degree, then—we feel more like a minority here than elsewhere, and so more existentially adrift.