This paper provides an overview of the shifting cultural representations of Asians in the United States through the lens of the COVID-19 pandemic. Although Asians have long been vilified as forever foreigners and contaminants or extolled as efficient laborers and docile political subjects, the pandemic brought into sharper relief how misalignment and contradiction define Asian racialization in the US. Through readings of a selection of Asian American and Asian diasporic works, including the K-pop group BTS and Weike Wang’s novel Joan Is Okay (2022), I argue that the contranymic quality that defines Asian racial difference is crucial for understanding Asian racialization in an era of high-tech spectacle and the globalized movement of objects and biological material.