Andrew Yang's Asian American Superpower

[brooklynite]

Politico

When I met Andrew Yang for lunch in front of Shanghai 21, a popular restaurant in the crook of Mott Street in Manhattan’s Chinatown, he seemed visibly nervous under his “Yang for New York” mask. As he delivered terse answers to the professional photographer asking him whether he preferred the Mets or the Yankees, I saw curious onlookers and fans snapping photos from afar, from millennials to immigrant grannies. He kept glancing at them, as if he wanted to bolt from the photo shoot, go back to the Yang Gang and avoid our scheduled interview.

Which was not the best mood for the purposes of our lunch. This was supposed to be the moment when Yang finally opened up about his experiences as an Asian American man — a topic he’d sidestepped, as far as I could tell, his entire life. But now he could sidestep the issue no longer.

Asian grandparents and elders were being accosted and in some cases beaten on the streets of Manhattan, and Yang had agreed to talk about it. Then, a week before our proposed lunch, a man in Georgia massacred eight people, six of them Asian women. A story struggling to break out of the back pages had suddenly become urgent, national news, and the Asian American community — long a fragmented, disempowered collection of subcultures and nationalities — was at once enraged and terrified.

Our dim sum appointment also happened to coincide with an astrologically impossible moment, where an Asian American man was the frontrunner to be mayor of New York City — at a moment when the city he wants to lead has become the nation’s epicenter of anti-Asian violence, with hate crimes against AAPI residents up by 833 percent from 2019.

[Karadeniz]

1. Good luck, Andrew!!!!

[dutch777]

2. His will be an interesting candidacy in NYC and if he wins, great experience for his pol resume'

My concern, probably of others too, is folks like Yang that have great fresh ideas, energy and an appeal to the younger crowd that we all hope to make solidly Democrats for Life, have little to no experience in any public office. And I do recall the same can be said of Trump and look how far he went (and dragged us into the dark underworld with him). But, I think in both political savvy and practical experience and appeal to a wider range of voters, having been mayor, governor, senator or so on has a way to fill in some voids and round a person out. I am as guilty as anyone of, at times, wishing we could get a great leader with great ideas that did not have the baggage of being a party pol and all the skeletons buried from his/her time as mayor or governor or senator or whatever. But I think most of us can see we need to be careful for what we wish for.