When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.
This note was a promise that all men would be guaranteed the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. (Martin Luther King Jr., “I have a Dream”)
It would be nice if my memories of the past were all pleasant. But, of course, life isn’t fiction and even fiction—to give it lifelike verisimilitude—isn’t devoid of unpleasantness. The day that I was denied a class for the following year (or so it appeared then) at my university automatically triggered memories not only of the recent past—including, of course, the previous year when my class was initially given to another faculty member and I had to fight to get it back—but more distant years, stretching all the way back to my early childhood. Although some may accuse me of playing the race card, as my mother sometimes did, half seriously, half jokingly, I have come to simply ignore it: just like I’ve come to ignore the rebuttals of those who don’t believe in evolution, climate change, or any other fact that is accepted by the thinking world. I say this because for many years, my claims of racism have been denied or dismissed in much the same fashion as the claims of that Twilight Zone protagonist in “Nightmare at 20,000 feet” who sees a terrifying gremlin on the airplane that no one else does initially: like the effusions of sheer madness. The silver lining of the Trump presidency is that many have finally begun to acknowledge the existence of racism in our “post-racial” and “colorblind” America—just as there is a gremlin on the wing of the airplane. In fact, on this Martin Luther King day, I might go so far as to say that racism IS and remains America’s gremlin.
In looking back at my experiences with racism stretching from the late 1960s to the present, I not only understand all too well how I came to develop the tastes, attitudes, political, social, and intellectual leanings that I did, but also how they inevitably pushed me closer to my mother over the years: even if we did not always agree. After all, when others turn their back on you, as Helen Reddy sang, you have no choice but to lean into those you love as you realize it’s only the two of you against the world. And yet, this post and others to come will also show how we learned from each other at times—and how we diverged as well.
Racism reared its head as early as my nursery school days—that is, when I was first exposed to people not only outside of my immediate family and tiny circle of relatives, but outside of my race, for an extended period of time. The problem was not so much bullying children, but rather judgmental adults. What I did notice even as a 4-year-old was the attitude of some of the teachers. I couldn’t help but notice how they smiled more and interacted more amiably with other kids, particularly white kids. And since I was used to the attention I received in the adult company of my parents, grandparents, and uncles, I often wondered to myself what was wrong even if I wasn’t treated poorly per se. After all, I didn’t behave badly. I never cried or threw tantrums like other kids did.
Although I didn’t realize this then, my nursery school teacher had already informed my parents that I was developmentally behind—which shocked them. After all, I could add, subtract, and read better than other 4-year-olds. So what was the problem? The teachers answered that I had an inappropriate and rude sense of humor. You see, I supposedly laughed at others when they spilled juice or fell down. (Quite honestly, I still despise clumsiness more than 50 years later—especially in myself.) I can only assume that none of those teachers had ever watched weekend cartoons where slapstick humor abounds—because it is the most elementary form of humor. (One only wonders what they would make of comedy today, which has absorbed even more slapstick humor than ever.) Anyway, to my parents’ credit—or more specifically, my father’s—they refused to accept the teachers’ advice that I stay behind. In many ways, this attempted demotion would set the pattern for my life: a chronic underestimation of my abilities—sometimes accompanied by disbelief that any excellent work I produced was either produced by my parents or plagiarized.
The same drama, I am told, was repeated a year later in kindergarten. Once again, I was the only Asian child in the classroom during an era that predated the Asian “model minority” myth by at least a decade, there is little doubt that many teachers still clung to the belief of white intellectual superiority in the face of a civil rights’ movement that was in full momentum: a belief that sadly remains alive and kicking today, when the cleverness and originality of whites is contrasted with the unimaginative, nerdy, and prosaic dullness of Asians—one not entirely unrelated to the alleged Harvard admissions assumption that Asians are sadly lacking in “personal qualities.” (I won’t even go into the treatment of Black students who are disproportionately underestimated, held back, and forced to serve detention to this very day!)
But the one incident that rankled me more than anything else—more than the kids who called me “Ching chong”—took place around kindergarten or first grade when a teacher from another class took me aside to scold me for bothering a girl I barely talked to. I was hurt and astonished. If anything, I thought to myself, I was always friendly to her. So why was I being blamed? I recall feeling “bad”—the way I would feel after being reprimanded by my mother. Yet, I did nothing wrong. Little did I know yet, that to be an ethnic minority is to be presumed guilty.
It was not until I moved to the outskirts of Princeton that I began to experience childhood bullying on a much fuller scale—although I think at least much of it had to do with my new kid status as much as being the only Asian child in a unit of some 200 3rd to 5th-graders, the vast majority of whom were white. (I entered as a 4th-grader then.) Of course, I had already been called the usual names like “chink” in the Bronx, but there was no physical bullying—partly because o was not entirely friendless. But here, I was hit, punched, kicked, and spat upon when not being insulted.
As a child who never had siblings to pick on or fight back, I was at a loss. No matter how friendly or inoffensive I tried to be, I would be called names or attacked after being taunted with “Go back to China” or “Japan.” When I told my parents, they would answer, “don’t do anything. They just want you to react. Ignore them and they will go away.” None too helpfully, they would sometimes add “just focus on your homework and do better than everyone else.” But how was it possible to concentrate? It wasn’t until a few years later when being bullied in another school that I realized that my parents’ advice was possibly the worst advice I could have gotten. To NOT hit back or retaliate in any way was actually tantamount to sticking a huge KICK ME target on one’s back.
Things got to the point where my father decided to see the teacher about the bullies. She must have done something very quickly and efficiently since the kids stopped that very day. Looking back now, I suppose I was lucky to be growing up then rather than now. Today, the teacher would probably be admonished by the parents of the bullies for “impeding my child’s right to act freely!”
The following year in 5th grade was a much easier time for me—I had even made the cheerleading squad—but it wasn’t entirely without issues. I was reminded once more of the incident I encountered as a younger child when a white teacher came to reproach me for bothering a white girl whom I also barely knew. I guess today we’d call these girls and teachers “Karens”: always eager to malign or tattle on people of color. This variety of females, one might say, is as American as apple pie.
But it wasn’t just school where I experienced discrimination. It was alive in our complex of garden apartments too. I still remember the young woman who never responded to my hi’s. (How different from the people in our old Bronx apartment building, with Filipinos, Irish folks, Jews, Puerto Ricans, and more!) I recall complaining to my mother to which she answered “maybe she didn’t hear you.” But even as I said it in a tone which I knew she must have heard, she still ignored me. It wasn’t until a year later that her daughter, who was otherwise a sweet girl, informed me “Mom hates Orientals.”
Then there was the Italian family a further few doors down, whose father (not the kids, surprisingly enough) would spout some pseudo-Chinese gibberish when I passed by. Ching Chong chop suey! Years later, I would read a story about how a white father taught his adopted Chinese son how to exchange ethnic slurs. “If they’re Italian, call them wop and tell them their mama don’t shave and she’s fat and ugly.” And so the son silenced his bully. Damn! Why didn’t my parents know stuff like that?!
Yet, I was sorry to move when my father found a tenure-track position in Chicago, which meant going to a different region of the country—after I had gotten used to my school, made friends, and excelled in my classes. It felt like a hard won victory after that extremely difficult first year.
I remember feeling excitement when we eventually moved to our half-brick colonial house in Evanston—our very first house. My parents, it seemed, had finally achieved the American dream, seventeen years after Dad’s arrival on these shores and three years after he and Mom were granted citizenship. What could go wrong?
As excited as I was about our new house, I could sense that there was something not quite right about our neighborhood. To the 12-year-old me, there was less of a welcoming feel than New Jersey, to say nothing of the Bronx—which was still my yardstick for assessing our neighbors. When the “Welcome Wagon” lady came to present us with a chocolate cake, she looked anything but welcoming. In fact, she looked like she was ready to spit in our cake.
It took a while to meet our neighbors. Although no one was outright hostile, there was an unmistakable lack of congeniality. Of course, some of this may have had to do with the fact that a neighborhood was not the same as a housing complex or building where there are common facilities or shared entrances; I was old enough to grasp that. Was it the fact that my dad, never one to care about appearances, drove a Dodge Dart as he was obsessed with fuel efficiency? But then I noticed how the new Black neighbors—both of whom were also college professors—were not treated much better than us. And they had beautiful, late model cars.
Indeed, over time, I couldn’t help but notice how the neighbors—nearly all of whom were white—seemed friendly with one another as they stopped to chat amongst themselves but only rarely with us or with the Black family: unless it was to ask me to babysit. I guess I must have been the hired help! Even today, I still recall the middle-aged woman who barely cracked a smile upon my entering and leaving.
And yet, I can’t say my parents were much better. I recall feeling a pang of regret during college when Mom told me that the Black wife once remarked to her that people on our block were not very friendly. She asked Mom what she thought—only for Mom to shrug. I was angry. “Mom, that was an opportunity for you to be friends with her! Who else here is going to do that? Not those stuck-up white bitches!” Mom answered, “They’re ok. They haven’t done anything to us.” “Oh, you mean at least they haven’t burned a cross in our yard?”
And yet, Mom was not completely oblivious. It was she, after all, who had told me how our very first house-hunting trip in Evanston had started on the wrong foot as the real estate agent began by showing my parents houses in dilapidated neighborhoods: never mind that Dad had just been tenured! In fact, I was even with my parents on that trip but did not notice anything since the agent seemed so genial which one might say is just another example of racism with a smile.
It wasn’t until much later—after 2006–when I met a Jewish acquaintance of my Dad that my suspicions of racism were not unfounded. He told us that he wanted to move to Evanston after graduating from Northwestern in the 1960s but Jews were not allowed to buy property there: so he had to settle in nearby Skokie. No wonder, then, that in 1975, our real estate agent had little inclination of selling us property in a middle/upper-middle neighborhood. And that our white neighbors weren’t too fond of having either Asian or Black neighbors, regardless of how well-educated or professional we were. People like us, they most likely feared, would bring down property values. In short, things really hadn’t changed much since Malcolm X made his famous quip: “What does a white man call a Black PhD? A n****.”
I will have more to say in my upcoming posts about race, but I do want to wrap up this one by observing how so much of what I personally encountered in the 1960s and 70s was only a tiny microcosm of everything that was happening then—which, of course, I was too young to recognize or process. It was only years later that I would attempt to piece everything together. Perhaps it wasn’t surprising at all that my early teachers underestimated me at a time when public schools had only been desegregated for less than 15 years. Perhaps it wasn’t surprising that our family was looked down on in the wake of the near-genocidal war in Vietnam—a war in which Americans profoundly underestimated the will and capability of North Vietnam.
And so perhaps it wasn’t surprising either that only a few months before I was born, MLK had expressed his frustrations on racial progress in Birmingham: “when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro…never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of ‘nobodiness’--then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.” And that in April 1967, not long before I entered school, and not too far away from where we lived, he preached at the Riverside Church on the need for a true radical revolution in his criticism of the Vietnam war:
I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin...we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered (“Beyond Vietnam”).
Today, these words remain as relevant as ever—if even more so than in my childhood days. Perhaps that alone is more frightening than anything else.
Thanks for sharing your experiences, Frances. Racism is so frustrating and painful to relive, but it's so important that these stories be told.