A friend from many lifetimes ago tagged me in a post he wrote about his feelings towards recent violence against Asian peoples in the US. My response is too long for Facebook comments, so here it is.

Hi Scott. Thanks for sharing your stories. It’s nice to hear from you. I think the last time we saw each other was near the Sample Gates in 1998 or so, right after you transferred from Albion (?). I have some fond memories from the Edgewood days. The recent racist violence against Asian American peoples actually made me think about elementary school. I certainly had kind teachers there like Mrs. Ward, Mrs. Seip, Mrs. Potts, Ms. (fourth grade teacher whose name I can’t remember), and Ms. Corwin, teachers who challenged me to grow. I also remember teachers who made me feel small and foreign, un-American as a teacher at Rogers once called me, like I was a foreigner despite being born in the same hospital as their own kids, like being a foreigner is enough to make one deserving of contempt. I imagine I had to grapple with things that a lot of white kids never have to experience, such as answering the “Where are you from?/Where are you REALLY from?” question starting at age 4. Chances are, they don’t have a teacher in elementary school cackle with delight and call their mom a “war bride” and insinuate that she is some kind of prostitute (and insinuating that prostitutes are worthy of contempt), or have people make ridiculous sounds to make fun of their mother tongues, or have a doctor ask you in front of your mom and dad, “How did you get to be so articulate?” It’s very confusing growing up as an Asian kid in this country, especially one whose parents didn’t have access to education beyond primary school and endured deep, lifelong traumas. It’s confusing growing up having one’s ethnicity and class lumped in and homogenized with a bunch of vastly different ones. (BTW, I winced a little when I read how you describe Minh as Chinese/Asian. I don’t know him well and maybe he thinks of himself as Chinese, but his name gives him away as Chinese Vietnamese. Chinese Vietnamese people have a very different history than Chinese people who grew up in mainland China or in other countries. I wonder how much of his story and his parents’ story you know. If his parents came as refugees in 1975, like mine, then like my mom and bio-dad, they survived three wars before coming here, two funded by the American Taxpayer.) I learned from the people around me to be deeply ashamed of who I was, yet at the same time I experienced all of the model minority BS. It wasn’t until years later that I saw the connection between the Model Minority and Anti-Blackness. I write all this to make a point: the anti-Asian racism many people are just now noticing is not new. It has been part of US culture for nearly 200 years and is intertwined with much older anti-Black racism and systems that extract and concentrate wealth and power. What is different is that more people are acting on it, are cheered on by people on Twitter, have easy access to weapons that make harming people easy, and more people are witnesses now.

You write that you’ll never understand how people could attack anyone else (on the basis of race.) You’re not the only person I know who feels this way. Perhaps no one has ever slashed your wages or shut down your plant and blamed it on either immigrants or China (to deflect from their own profiteering). You probably don’t have the shame or religious motivations of the Atlanta killer. Further, the standard history curriculum that we went through in school is a tidy mythology centered around warfare where American (Anglo Saxon colonists) are always the heroes. We’re taught about the Pilgrims landing on Plymouth Rock to escape religious persecution and make friends with the Indians (the first time a group of diverse nationalities is presented to us as a uniform blob), the Revolutionary War (150 years later) and gaining independence from our British overlords, whose main offense is often presented as unfairly taxing us, the Civil War (4 score and 7 years later), where Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves from those glamorous and classy plantations, the USA charging in to save Europe from the Germans in World War I (53 years later), the Japanese bombing Pearl Harbor (December 7, memorialized as a holiday), the USA charging in to save Europe, part 2 (this time, with Nazis), nuking Japan, a paragraph on the Korean war and two paragraphs on the Vietnam Conflict (conflict because it wasn’t a declared war, but both were justified because Communism). When we were kids, the Berlin Wall came down, then the Soviet Union, and the Desert Storm in Iraq. Back then, in the 80s, the Japanese were “buying up America” and were blamed for the downfall of US industry as the Chinese are today. Nothing is taught about the interaction of how people and land were exploited and who was doing the exploiting. Nothing is taught about the conditions that led to these events. Nothing is taught about actions the US has taken that were morally reprehensible, or even questionable. This is deliberate.

It has pretty much been ok to exploit and harm Asian peoples throughout American history. Chinese men, refugees from the British Opium Wars (where Britain used force to keep the opium trade alive against Chinese efforts), built the transcontinental railroad, but were forced to live in ghettos (Chinatown), subject to all kinds of abuse and harassment, and were not allowed to bring or start families, become citizens, or appear in court to take legal action against people who committed crimes against them. This was happening at the same time as white plantation owners and traders were buying and selling Black people in chattel slavery like cattle, and the US Army was forcibly relocating and exterminating Native people. In current times, American companies have outsourced all kinds of manufacturing to Chinese companies to exploit lax labor and environmental protections in the name of profit and shareholder value. Then of course, there are Second World War atrocities of the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the firebombing of Tokyo, and the forced imprisonment of Japanese Americans and seizure of their land and assets. In the 1950’s, there was the US funded the French War in Vietnam in a failed attempt to reestablish their colony, the US interruption of the free election after the war and the installation of the despot Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam. Also in the 50’s was the US/UK led coup overthrowing the democratically elected PM of Iran (for nationalizing its oil industry) and installing the oil company-friendly Shah of Iran, who was overthrown in 1979. In 1965, the US supported right wing mass killings of anti-colonialists in Indonesia. The US war in Vietnam that was started under false pretenses (Gulf of Tonkin) in 1963 and ended with hasty withdrawal in 1975. Within that were Agent Orange, My Lai, and countless atrocities that resulted in millions dead in Vietnam, and millions more in Cambodia and Laos. We still feel the effects of this war in my family, as do all descendants of refugees. The US dropped three times more bombs in Vietnam than were dropped in the entire Second World War. The US war in Vietnam was the longest US war until it was surpassed by the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, now nearly 20 years old. So you see, Americans have never had a problem with obliterating Asian people in Asia or exploiting them here or there, and wasting the lives of young Americans from mostly poor families in the process.

It is impossible to disentangle racism, immigration policy, and voting rights. Who gets to vote gets to make the laws. The Page Act of 1875 is the first law that attempted to curtail immigration of any group. This law effectively banned the immigration of Chinese women into the US by means of legalized fondling at the border and denial of entry. The US government characterized Chinese women as promiscuous and as prostitutes. This has been perpetuated in how Asian women have been depicted ever since. A reason for passing this law was so that Chinese railroad workers wouldn’t settle in the US. There is a straight line between this law and how certain nameless Edgewood teachers thought of and described my mother, and the guy who shot and killed 8 people in Atlanta, including 6 Asian women; the killer claimed to be motivated by his sex addiction.

I invite you to read about the Page Act, but also the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which banned all Chinese immigration to the US and was the first law that explicitly restricted immigration into the US, the Immigration Act of 1924, which limited pretty much everyone but Northern and Western non-Jewish Europeans from immigrating until it was repealed in 1965. It also introduced the first visa requirements for entry and played a role in the holocaust by being used as a reason to turn away shiploads of Jewish refugees from the Third Reich. You might see how this rhymes with current attitudes towards immigration. You might also read about how people became citizens before 1924. Basically, from 1795 until 1924, if you were white and lived in the country for 5 years and could get two people to vouch for you, you became a citizen with full voting rights. Remember that the next time you year some (usually white) person say that their ancestors came here “the right way.” Before 1924, if you were white, you could literally be a stowaway on a boat, melt into society, and gain full citizenship 5 years later. There was no line to wait in. You might also be interested in learning about US involvement in Vietnam. Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s The Vietnam War is excellent. A shorter piece on the last month of the war called The Last Days In Vietnam by Rory Kennedy is also excellent. It was the first documentary about the Vietnam War that represented so many characters from my life. If you’re a reader and into historical context, try The Best And The Brightest by David Halberstam. Also, read contemporary takes by Asian American writers. This is an awesome and hilarious video by Ronny Chieng of the Daily Show that totally exposes casual racism against Asian people. Here are pieces by Anne Cheng and Ly Tran about their experiences with the racist sexualization of Asian women and one from Viet Thanh Nguyen about the relationship between US Colonialism and Anti-China policy, and anti-Asian racist action.

I think you will quickly realize that what is happening isn’t surprising at all. What can you do? Call out racism as you see it happening, in yourself and the people around you. Stand up for people. Give a lot of money and time to groups fighting exploitation of BIPOC people, like pivotnetwork.org, raicestexas.org, your local BLM chapter, etc. Support political candidates advocating for BIPOC rights and for programs that make people less desperate. Racism is protected and incentivized. It doesn’t need to be.

I hope you and yours stay well. I hope your son learns his family’s stories. Thanks for writing. See you around.

Tony