May is Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month. To fully honor those resilient and brave Americans, it is our duty to learn more about our nation’s past and current relationship with them.
My pandemic hobby was to do the work myself rather than to lean on my Black, Indigenous, people of color friends to teach me. Through this focused journey I have come to better understand more about the gap in what I knew about our history. Perhaps, I will pique your curiosity as well.
A Spanish philosopher, George Santayana wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” The first time that I read those words was on a wall at Auschwitz. When I visited Auschwitz, I was a confident twenty-something serving in the U.S. Army in Germany and shockingly naïve in my understanding of U.S. history.
I would have told you that I knew my nation’s history based on a personal assessment that I scored well in an advanced U.S. history course. I would not have imagined that there were holes in my comprehension that I am discovering some 20 years later.
At that time, I did not have any idea that the sins throughout history in our nation to Black, Indigenous, people of color would have been comparable, en masse, to the cruelty that occurred at Auschwitz. I thought we were the “good guys” and was unaware of the battles waged on our soil.
Yet, here I am, a fully grown adult, white woman with a new awareness of our violent and exclusionary past. The Asian Americans’ path to citizenship was missing from my textbooks in high school.
I was unaware that just 17 years after the abolition of slavery (13th Amendment in 1865), our nation adopted a law to ban another group from citizenship. The Chinese Exclusion Act (1882 -1943) banned those with Chinese ancestry from becoming citizens, owning land, voting, immigrating, and if you were a laborer — from marrying or having children.
French and Irish laborers were not similarly banned from immigration or citizenship. During this time, towns expelled people of Chinese heritage under the threat of violence, including mass lynching and mob justice (1871 Chinese Massacre, Los Angeles). And let us remember that U.S. cities were also banning Black Americans from resettlement as they escaped from the violence against them in the South.
We continued targeting Asian Americans during WWII, deciding that all people of Japanese heritage were to be moved to internment camps (1942-45). There was a paragraph in my history books that mentioned internment camps, but there was no mention of the anti-Asian laws and violence that preceded it.
In the past year, the incidences of Asian Americans being harassed, subjected to violence, and murdered is at an all-time high. Adding to their fears of violence is being treated as an outsider. Imagine for a moment being asked on a regular basis “where do you really come from” when your answer to the question is “I was born here.”
So, during Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, let’s all learn more about our full history. For anyone looking to deepen their own understanding, here are a few recommendations:
Films: “A Thousand Pieces of Gold” (1991); “The Joy Luck Club” (1993); “Tigertail” (2020); “The American Experience: The Chinese Exclusion Act” (2017).
Books: “Asian American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People” by Helen Zia; “The Magical Language of Others: A Memoir” by E.J. Koh; “Paper Wishes” by Lois Sepahban; “Living for Change: An Autobiography” by Grace Lee Boggs; “On Gold Mountain: The One-Hundred-Year Odyssey of My Chinese-American Family” by Lisa See.
Sarah Fox has been a Vancouver City Council member since 2020.
