Youth For Public Health

As an Asian American teenager, I’ve always heard people say that our community is healthy, successful, smart, or that we don’t really face the same struggles other groups do. I used to think of these stereotypes too, but the more I’ve learned, the more I’ve realized how misleading these assumptions can be. A recent study by Carolyn Wang Kong, Jennifer Green, Courtnee Hamity, and Ana Jackson titled “Health Disparity Measurement Among Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Populations Across the United States” helped me understand just how invisible our health issues can be.

The author points out that “Asians were the fastest growing racial/ethnic population in the United States in 2000–2019,” yet our health data is still barely reported or collected. As a teenager, this is pretty surprising to me. How can a population so big and growing so fast still be overlooked?

One of the biggest problems is that when taking our data, we see that states rarely break down Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander (AANHPI) data into subgroups. Instead, we’re combined together into one subcategory, even though our cultures, histories and health risks are completely different. The study even says, “AANHPIs were substantially underrepresented in state health equity data, with rare subgroup disaggregation” (Kong, etc). That means important issues, like higher diabetes rates in Filipino Americans or higher cancer rates in Vietnamese Americans often go unnoticed, which is mindblowing to me. 

Even worse, only 34 out of 49 states that report health data by race include AANHPI people at, and just two states break us into subgroups. As a young Asian American who is half Taiwanese, half Cantonese, it’s frustrating to know that my community’s health isn’t being taken seriously.

A lot of this is tied to the idea that Asian Americans don’t struggle. The authors explain, “a conscious or unconscious assumption… may be that no data are needed because no health disparities exist for AANHPIs.” (Kong, etc). But that stereotype hides a lot of important and real problems. I think it makes it harder for Asian Americans to talk about mental health or stress and pressure from school and family. 

Reading this study made me realize how important it is for young Asian Americans to speak up, which is why I wanted to touch on this topic for one of the blog posts this month. To put it simply, if our data isn’t collected, our problems won’t be seen! And if our problems aren’t seen, they won’t be addressed!

As the study points out, improving AANHPI health equity “requires improved and equitable data” (Kong, etc). For me, that means pushing for better representation. Not just in politics, or in the media, put in public health too. Because our community deserves to be counted, understood, and cared for.