Artwork by Sresta Aitharaju
When I was in 6th grade, I had two seat partners in my table group. We were all acquaintances, but I found myself teased by them more often than not — though, as a naive 11 year old, I couldn’t really recognize that. One day during class they tapped my shoulder and told me they’d come up with a new nickname for me — I thought it harmless and wanted to hear. “Kim Jong Un,” they’d said, giggling. At the time I had no idea who that was, and figured that it was just another “joke,” akin to the attempts others had made in the past to speak the language I spoke at home, akin to the attempts others made to simulate my smaller eyes and crooked front teeth.
I often leave it at this and tell this story as an innocent, funny thing, but it also serves as a great opportunity for opening a larger can of worms. It’s hard to equate a microaggression to someone calling you a slur or physically assaulting you for your race, but it all largely comes from the same place.
Why were White kids pulling their eyes back and saying “ching chong” in the first place? At school, in the playground? Why did they hold their noses when I took out dumplings from my lunchbox? Why did they say they didn’t want to play with “people like me?” I mentioned that “as a naive 11 year old, I couldn’t really recognize [that I was being teased].” The same logic applied to the offenders. The idea of blaming age for misgivings and equating youth to irresponsibility and insensitivity is a passing thought for most — because children grow up, right?
When we’re younger we don’t truly understand the weight of our actions. I used that as an excuse for the longest time. Yet, even when my laughter started to die down, the stereotyping, the name-calling, the microaggressions didn’t — they evolved to something bigger, something larger than the schoolyard, something seemingly larger than myself. Suddenly instead of finding myself the butt of “all Asians are smart” jokes, instead of witnessing my classmates perpetuating a poorly executed racist caricature of my mother with an accent she didn’t have, I was watching the news of a new racially-motivated attack in New York, Chicago, Georgia,Monterey Park , listening to Fox News make fun of Asian elders in interviews they couldn’t understand, hearing another wayward White politician demonizing my ethnicity, calling us “bat eaters” and “enemies of America.”
No longer could I use the excuse of being too young in congruence to accept the seeming faultlessness of those that had made passes at my race. I was left with the gaping question: why does this happen?
Before I dive too deep, I want to ask you, the reader, a couple of questions about some historical events. Count on your fingers how many of these listed events and facts you know in some detail. Do you know about the Revolutionary War? Can you name at least five presidents from 1789 to 2009 and what they did? Does the Enlightenment sound familiar? The Industrial Revolution? The moon landing? Can you name at least three names on the Declaration of Independence? Do you know who wrote the Bill of Rights? Does Robert McNamara ring a bell? William Westmooreland?
Now, I want you to start over and count if you’ve heard of these events — no details needed, if you’ve either heard of them or just know them from passing conversation, I want you to count. Who knows about the Japanese internment camps during World War II? What about the ban on interracial marriage between Chinese and White Americans? What about the Chinese Exclusion Act? What about People v. Hall? Or the Alien Land Act? Does the name Vincent Chin ring a bell? The Delano Grape Strike? The Bellingham Riots? Who was Yuri Kochiyama? Ajay Bhatt? Chien Shung Wu?
I conducted a poll specifically targeting communities in which Asians were not the majority to better reflect the ratio of people of color versus white people in the United States. Over the course of three months I selected a sample of 100 students from my old school, a predominantly White institution, and interviewed them about Asian American historical events.
Out of the selected population, 97 knew about the Japanese internment camps that were held during World War II, the best statistic by miles. Only 23 knew of the ban on interracial marriage between Chinese people and White Americans during 1850 until 1950; 20 recognized the Chinese Exclusion Act, prohibiting the recruitment of laborers from “China, Japan or any Oriental country” who were not brought to the United States of their own will or who were brought for “lewd and immoral purposes”; 4 vaguely recognized People v. Hall, a defining court case in 1854 which ruled that Chinese people couldn’t testify against white defendants, and 2 could loosely recall California’s Alien Land Act, a bill passed in 1913 that prohibited Japanese Americans from owning agricultural land and limited their lease term to three years.
What scared me the most about this census was that nobody knew of the killing of Vincent Chin in 1982, a testament to the consequence-free killing of Asians during this time. Not a single person had heard of the Delano Grape Strike, a predominantly Filipino workers’ strike for better wages and more rights, or the Bellingham Riots, when the predominantly white Asiatic Exclusion League attacked the homes of South Asian Indian immigrants in an effort to drive them from the workforce. And Yuri Kochiyama, a revolutionary Japanese American activist that fought tirelessly for the rights of minorities within the U.S. following World War II, Ajay Bhatt, an Indian American computer scientist who helped develop the USB among other modern technological advances, and Chien Shung Wu, a Chinese physicist who was instrumental in the Manhattan Project — they might as well have been the names of strangers.
And of the 100 people I interviewed, two of them were the same classmates that had called me “Kim Jong Un” in 6th grade, and still recognized me by that moniker when I approached them nearly 6 years later. Both White boys, they didn’t recognize any of the aforementioned events, save for the internment of Japanese people during World War II, to which they responded with a casual “Oh yeah, that,” and “I guess,” and didn’t elaborate further when I asked them if they knew any details.
This doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of the damage done. Beyond stereotypes, beyond violence, a more personal issue that many Asian people experience as a result of this lack of information about ourselves in society is displacement, that feeling of not belonging as ourselves, as Americans that so happen to be Asian.
Cathy Park Hong best describes the effects of a lack of history about Asian American people in her book Minor Feelings. She dissects the imbalance between the presence of Asian American history versus White history in the U.S., and in turn how it affects the relationship between these people in society.
Patiently educating a clueless white person about race is draining. It takes all your powers of persuasion. Because it’s more than a chat about race. It’s ontological. It’s like explaining to a person why you exist, or why you feel pain, or why your reality is distinct from their reality. Except it’s even trickier than that. Because the person has all of Western history, politics, literature, and mass culture on their side, proving that you don’t exist. (Park Hong, 153)
And this is no new thing — even on a systemic level, we have long been the target of harmful stereotypes that curate an image of us that panders to what people want to see. It didn’t stop at the Chinese Exclusion Act, a ten year moratorium on Chinese migrants put into law because of the insinuation that the only other purpose for our immigration other than being brought over not of our own will was sex work.We were also called the Yellow Peril, a wave of immigrants deemed unfit to live in the country because we were “dirty.” And in the early 20th century, American officials in the Philippines, then a formal colony of the U.S., denigrated Filipinos for their supposedly unclean and uncivilized bodies. Colonial officers and doctors identified two enemies: Filipino insurgents against American rule, and the“tropical diseases” festering in their native bodies with no evidence behind the accusation. By pointing to Filipinos’ supposed political and medical unruliness, these officials justified continued U.S. colonial rule in the islands. This ruling’s message spread to San Francisco, a place with a dense Filipino population, and the rate of violent hate crimes against Asians spiked in the area.
So when Asian Americans in the present are faced with a lack of information about the truth in our history, and when Western society dictates what we should be — when we are surrounded by a setting that forces us to conform to some stereotype — this pressures us to fall in place under some paradigm to be accepted. And that feeds the fire for others to create more false images of our race — that we’re subservient and nice and submissive under the hand of a “mightier” White society, that we’re the “best” of minorities because we take what is thrown at us.
These interpretations of us place targets on our backs. But even after all this, we find that we can’t fight back. Because there is no middle ground for us to stand on — there is no history of Asian Americans, only the history of Asians, and the history of White Americans. So we’re faced with the question of what we would rather do: assimilate, take the stereotypes that are shoved down our throats, embody the image of what America wants us to be? r be Asian in America, a symbol of defiance against the system, and take the inevitable punches as they roll?
Should we wait for another hate crime to be inflicted upon us, another shooting, another slur, another wave of anti-Asian sentiment to wash over our communities when a new variant of Covid is announced in the news? Should I wait for these two boys from my old school, just on the cusp of being adults, to one day magically wake up and realize that I’m not even Korean, never mind that calling me the name of a genocidal dictator is beyond insensitive? Should I forget what connects me to the country where I can see and speak with people that love me as I am, just to be accepted in a society that has no concern for me as a person, only valuing me as an ideal, an image, a paradigm?
Even now, I wonder when the peril will end, if the so-called “justice” of earning the respect that we intrinsically deserve as people will ever come. Change is happening, that I know, but the situation leaves much room to speculate if any action my community takes in reform will ever be enough.