They called strangers and navigated bureaucracy in order to find the owners and persuade them to sell, all while suffering from the trauma of having lost their country and leaving almost all their relatives behind.
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But there was no manual telling them how to buy a store that was not advertised as for sale. Survivors of war, my parents fought to live again as aliens in a strange land, learning to read mortgage documents in another language, enrolling my brother and me in school, taking driver’s-license examinations. In the age of coronavirus, I am uncertain how to sew a mask and worry about shopping for groceries. What they did looms in my memory as a nearly unimaginable feat. I am now older than my parents were when they had to begin their lives anew in this country, with only a little English. Does our being Asian bring us together across these ethnic and class divides? Does our being Southeast Asian, both our communities brought here by an American war in our countries, mean we see the world in the same way? Did Tou Thao experience the anti-Asian racism that makes us all Asian, whether we want to be or not? He was a police officer and I am a professor. Our strength in numbers, in solidarity across our many differences of language, ethnicity, culture, religion, national ancestry and more, is the basis of being Asian American.īut in another reality, Tou Thao is Hmong and I am Vietnamese. So it is that Tou Thao and I are “Asian Americans,” because we are both “Asian,” which is better than being an “Oriental” or a “gook.” If being an Oriental gets us mocked and being a gook can get us killed, being an Asian American might save us. We take what white people hate about us, and we convert stigmata into pride, community and power. In response to endemic American racism, those of us who have been racially stigmatized cohere around our racial difference. Racism makes us focus on the differences in our faces rather than our similarities, and in the alchemical experiment of the U.S., racial difference mixes with labor exploitation to produce an explosive mix of profit and atrocity. The face of Tou Thao is like mine and not like mine, although the face of George Floyd is like mine and not like mine too.
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