At the height of the BLM protests in the summer of 2020, the seeColor team at Pluralsight ran an AMA (Ask Me Anything) survey to gather questions and concerns across the company, and received a flood of responses. That was a time of awakening for a lot of us. No one could close their eyes to the murder of George Floyd. It was the first time I spoke to my parents about the generations of systemic racism that Black Americans face. It was the summer my mom became "the woke one" amongst her friends. The BLM movement made my family reflect on our own immigrant experience within the larger story of racism in America.
Where's the outrage?
This spring, as Asian Hate crimes continue to climb, the seeColor team again sent out the same survey to enable team members across Pluralsight to ask our AANHPI community anything. When I heard about it, I said, "It would be a bigger diss to not receive any comments or questions, because it would confirm that we are indeed invisible."
We received 7 replies, some of which came from the seeColor leadership team, like a consolation prize. I thought, "Where’s the outrage? I’ve been outraged for white folks all my life.”
Why is it that when hate crimes occur, it falls upon the terrorized community to explain and educate? Often the victims themselves are left with unanswered questions which they repeatedly revisit in order to make sense of hate. So here are my questions to you, your family and friends, the people who may sit at your dinner table at Thanksgiving. Say the answers out loud. Own your answers.
Why so much hate towards me or people who look like me? What is our crime? On a scale of 1–10 what is your level of outrage? Why that number? What would increase or decrease that number? Did you talk about it with your family and friends? Do you feel that Asians don’t really have the right to complain of discrimination because we make up about 30% ~ of the population in tech? Why didn't the media cover more of Asian Hate crimes? Do you think calling the Corona virus "The Chinese Virus" or "Kung Flu" contributed to Asian Hate crimes?
Imagine I am sitting in front of you, asking you these questions. When you don’t see people, they are not real humans. When people don’t have a voice, they are invisible. They are an abstract idea. They are foreign and unequal. THEY. THEM.
Perpetual Foreigners
Eric Liu, who was Bill Clinton’s speech writer wrote:
“There is a luxury that most white Americans enjoy, and that is the luxury of ethno-banality. Roots without costs. The Sons of Italy, Daughters of Ireland, and so forth: whites can wear or remove their ancestry like a pendant. I do not feel so free.”
Asians have been part of American history since the California Gold Rush, but will always be viewed as foreigners.
"By 1870, the Chinese represented 20% of California’s labor force, even though they constituted only .002% of the entire United States population." Center for Global Education
The scapegoating of Asian Americans had long been a recurring theme. At the turn of the 20th century, the Chinese were blamed for the spread of the Bubonic Plague in San Francisco. In the 1870’s, low wages and harsh economic conditions were attributed to the Chinese, who took on jobs for lower wages. Chinese Americans also faced violence and lynching because of propaganda that they were taking jobs away from whites (Los Angeles Chinese Massacre). This anti-Chinese sentiment resulted in the Chinese Exclusion Act, banning Chinese immigration to the U.S. for the next 10 years, followed by laws that prevented Chinese from naturalization, voting, owning land, testifying in court against white people, and holding professional licenses.
Only the incarceration of 120,000 people of Japanese descent during WWII made it into the textbooks, possibly because it was tightly entwined with America’s role in WWII.
These themes of scapegoating immigrants are not that much different from what we see today. Resentment and fear are the weapons of racism. It is always easier to blame someone else than to confront our own blindness.
What does being American mean to me?
Writing about the early struggles of Chinese Americans didn’t feel like it had anything to do with me, because I’m Vietnamese-American. I am a poor representative. But I understood that for many people, I’m just Asian #5. The perpetrators of Asian Hate crimes definitely did not distinguish between who is Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Taiwanese, Thai, etc.
The term “Asian American” is a catch-all. All of us who fit under that umbrella don’t necessarily share a common story. We don’t have our own Martin Luther King and “I Have a Dream." Imagine if you are Irish and everyone lump you and the British in the same box of whiteness. What all Asian Americans have in common is the inheritance of being perpetually foreign and the model minority myth. That is the narrative that others have created for us, the narrative that we are allowed to inhabit. Everyone else paint us in varying shades of yellow so we may as well stick together.
I thought I was done with all the existential questions of who I am. Where do I belong in that hyphenated existence of Vietnamese-American? I am the plurality of my experiences, but quintessentially American. The fact that I can choose who I want to be, that I can barely speak Vietnamese, that when I dream and talk in my sleep, it is in English, that I feel more connected to people who don’t look like me, that I’d rejected the old world notions of the ideal woman that my mom had once wanted me to be — that sense of individualism is very American. But this is not to convince anyone that I deserve to be accepted. It’s really just to say, look, I am reflective of my own American experience, because to be an immigrant is to be intentional and grateful for what you’ve gained, what you’ve retained and what you chose to leave behind.
When my brother did the defense of his PhD thesis, his first slide was a black and white photo of a bunch of old men in a village where my father had grown up. During his presentation, my brother flipped a coin and said that it’s only by chance that he’s not in that photo. We grew up with the understanding that our story was bigger than us.
When we were kids, my father launched a non-profit from our home. It started with a single hand-written letter and grew to an organization that sent rescue ships to save 3,000+ refugees at sea and resettled them all over the world. Thinking back, I realized that this was my father’s startup.
When you yourself are an immigrant, and when your father had made it his life’s mission to save refugees, it is difficult not to see that we can be a refuge for each other. I see myself in the Dreamers and all the other immigrants, all the POCs, all “the Others.” I’ve long understood that something had to be lost for me to be who I am today. I can’t explain it, but I’m grateful for it. There’s a lot that’s wrong with our country, but in my family, there’s the fundamental story of America as a place of refuge, that sits uncomfortably with the story of the U.S. involvement in Asian wars in the past century.
Asian American Hate Crimes
When the shootings in Atlanta happened, I was angry. But I was truly shaken when I watched the video of someone stomping on the head of an elderly Asian man and left him laying on the sidewalk in a heap, like discarded garbage. That felt much more personal. That act said that we are disposable. I’ve faced some discrimination growing up, but nothing overt. They’re just words, micro aggressions. I told myself, "No one got hurt. I’ve moved on", but things shape you in imperceptible ways.
There’s a part of me that identifies entirely with the victims from the Atlanta Spa shooting. I know people like that, but if I were honest, there’s also a part of me that wants to differentiate from them. I tell myself that I am much further down the chain of assimilation, that I work in tech. I hear myself saying what my neighbors say, “You are not like them.” When the Atlanta shooting happened, I cried, because I realized I am just like the victims. There is no THEY or THEM.
For the first time in my life, I saw that there are people out there who want to hurt people who look like me. I didn’t know what to do with this anger. I couldn’t work harder. It didn’t matter that I’ve assimilated, that I pay my taxes, that I’m not a burden to society. I can’t prove that I am somehow more white. I couldn’t fix a system that saw I wasn’t enough, even when it told itself that I was the model minority. That version of America didn’t fit my story. Before the pandemic, Asian Americans dealt with issues like The Bamboo Ceiling. But first thing’s first. Let’s first make sure that people don’t kill us. I felt like my country, my friends, and colleagues had betrayed me by being quiet. Where’s the outrage? Where’s the allyship? Where’s your humanity?
Lately my parents don’t get out much anymore. My mother has curtailed her walks at the park because she doesn’t feel safe. To all those who say, “Go back to your country” my mother adamantly professes that THIS is her country, her home. When I was growing up, there was a time when my parents wanted us to embrace our roots, and of course, we rebelled against that mold so that we could redefine ourselves. So it is strange to hear my mother explaining the idea of the melting pot to me in this new climate.
I was telling someone that I’m learning to express constructive anger. I am used to being analytical but this is new territory for me. I’m tired of being the quiet model minority. We’re not invisible. We are not your fucking scapegoat. I remembered that my father started by writing a single letter that launched so many rescue ships. If not me, then who?
“We are inventors, all. We assemble our selves from fragments of story.” Eric Liu, The Accidental Asian
Links:
Stop Asian Hate : Report a hate crime and learn how to be an ally
The story behind Times Cover on Anti-Asian Violence and Hate Crimes
