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This article was submitted by Amy Wong, a student at UC Irvine whose goal is to be a human rights lawyer. The granddaughter of Kung Bill Wong, she enjoys baking, drawing, art and makeup.

I watch in horror as a pair of hands on Instagram squeezes the life out of a block of tofu. The tofu has never sinned, yet its fate is to become some kind of breaded chicken nugget replacement, fried in a vat of peanut oil and then eaten with ketchup. 

There are a couple things about it that rankle me. The caption on the Instagram reel that I witnessed this on advertised it as a “healthier” version of chicken nuggets, it being made out of tofu. But it was fried in more oil than I could possibly comprehend, and the amount of salt sprinkled over the finished product was enough to make me jump out of bed and drink two glasses of water. On that front, it just felt false to say it was healthy, so I dismissed it as another gimmick of diet culture. 

The bigger question: why does tofu need to be a chicken nugget? 

It always amused me to see tofu become a veganized version of something that’s very clearly not meant to be vegan, because it’s a perfectly good food on its own. It doesn’t need to be tofu-chicken nuggets, or tofurkey, or any other form of vegan meat. It can just be a simple block of soybean curds that you get for $1.50 a pack at the market. And on top of all the various metamorphoses that tofu was seemingly required to undergo in American cuisine, food blogs and cookbooks frequently disclaimed that they would convince the reader that tofu was delicious – already assuming that readers find it unpalatable. For me, and probably for readers of this essay, tofu has never been something that we’ve needed to acquire a taste for. Only in America was it ever viewed as exotic or needing to be re-branded. 

Being an artist is a bit like being a block of tofu: a blank canvas; versatile, and full of potential. And much like being a block of tofu, being an artist as a career also has an unfavorable reputation – think of the ‘starving artist’ stereotype, so prominent that Google Docs’ text predictor filled it in for me. The starving artist is perpetually poor or struggling, and their careers are tossed around on the ever unstable waves of the job market. 

It’s a running joke among Asian Americans that there’s a trifecta of acceptable careers if you have Asian parents (usually immigrant parents), and that trifecta is doctor, lawyer or engineer. The common denominator here is profitability. There are no stereotypes about Tiger Moms wanting their kids to be artists, writers or non-classical musicians. This is not to say that every Asian parent is overbearing in their need for their child to be a doctor, lawyer or engineer. 

In high school, when we were sharing our career goals, another student told me how shocked he was to hear I wasn’t going to become a doctor, “because you’re kinda whitewashed, Amy. Don’t all Asians want to be doctors?” And recently, in the law office where I work, I joked about being bad at math and was met with “But you’re Asian!” It’s safe to say nobody wants to be a stereotype, but it’s equally uncomfortable to have your validity as an Asian questioned because you’re not a stereotype.

Being an Asian artist or a creative is not inherently wrong or weird. We don’t all need to be doctors, lawyers or engineers. The American stereotypical image of the Asian diaspora is not a yardstick we should use to measure our Asianness. Our identity as Asian Americans is not and should not be defined by anyone but ourselves. 

In the interest of breaking out of the traditional structure of an essay as it’s been defined in school, I will simply leave a few concluding remarks here: please let tofu be tofu. Tofu isn’t something that inherently requires changing — just as the mind of a growing Asian artist does not need to be pressed and molded into a STEM-orientation in order to be considered valuable.