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Oh, Say Can You See?
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“At least it’s not Chinese this time.” Those words, spoken by a
fellow Chinese American, greeted me when I finally reached home on
September 15, 2001, after five harrowing days spent stranded in
Washington, DC, after the terrible events of September 11. I knew well
enough the intended meaning of his remarks and their lame offer of
comfort. After years of unrelenting innuendo that cast Chinese
Americans and other Asian Americans as the evil invaders, “at least
this time” some other group would play scapegoat. I suspect that many
other Americans felt the same awkward relief that the terrorists were
not “their kind.” Even so, the words were painful to hear.
I had spent those five days after the attacks in the confusion and
rapid militarization of the nation’s capital. Much of that time, I sat
among strangers in the lobby of the charming Tabard Inn, which
ordinarily boasts of having no televisions or radios in the guestrooms.
So I watched the horrifying news in the lobby, on the only television
in the building. With the exception of one other guest who was in town
for the same event as I, everyone else watching the news was white,
European American. Some of these lounge mates were lobbyists from
the Corn Belt—young, blond, well-fed, and so eager to declare war as
they cheered the notion of “ending” other nations. A few of us
“left coast” folks expressed our dismay.
I, too, wept as I watched the dreadful images of the fallen Twin
Towers, whose energy and bustle were part of my daily commute from New
Jersey to Manhattan for years. Yet in this hotel lobby among these
strangers, I felt that familiar stab of self-consciousness. Will
the real American please stand up? My Asian face is so unremarkable in
the San Francisco Bay area. But elsewhere in America, in DC and the
Mid-Atlantic states where I grew up, or even in much of California, an
Asian face still signals “Foreigner”—especially at key patriotic
moments. September 11 was unquestionably one of those moments.
Washington in particular was well primed for xenophobia on the heels of
the campaign finance probes, the bombing of the Chinese embassy in
Belgrade, the persecution of Wen Ho Lee, and the spy plane showdown.
But I also knew that my own sense of racial vulnerability was nothing
compared to the fear and distress of Middle Eastern, South Asian,
Muslim and Sikh Americans. Reports of violent assaults were already
multiplying. I couldn’t wait to leave the uncertainty of this
emotionally delicate, partisan environment, to return to the comfort of
family and friends.
During the plane ride home I debated whether I should attend a
community event that same evening, something I had promised many months
ago. All I wanted to do was to stay home with Lia, my life partner, to
create the illusion of a safe haven from the madness. But with my
ethnicity that is often played as the “perpetual foreigner,” I also
knew that Asian Americans could ill afford to retreat and be silent. I
willed myself to go. When I arrived at the event, I ran into a Chinese
American colleague from the state capital who gave me a conspiratorial
look. “At least it’s not Chinese Americans this time,” he said.
His words made me feel ashamed to be one.
***
As a nation, our collective memory of shared history is so perishable,
replaced instead by “instant” news, factoids, and MTV-like graphics
that stimulate but fail to educate. This is true for Asian Americans.
“The Chinese seem to have a spy problem,” was the word in some parts of
the Asian American community during the Wen Ho Lee case. “Campaign
finance is not our problem,” wrote a columnist in the JACL’s Pacific
Citizen. “What is it with the Koreans?” asked other Asian Americans
during the rash of store boycotts. “It’s not my ox that’s being gored,”
an African American feminist colleague said to me after Jimmy Breslin’s
racist and sexist tirade against a Korean American woman journalist.
“Me not Japanese” was the sad little window sign scrawled by a Chinese
American shopkeeper during World War II, a sentiment shared at the time
by some Korean Americans who wore buttons declaring, “I hate J-ps more
than you do.”
There is no escaping the fragility of cross-group unity at times of
crisis. Yet there are reasons for optimism as well. While I was stuck
in Washington, I had the privilege of attending a hastily called
meeting of concerned Asian Americans—most of whom were civil servants
at various government agencies and Congressional offices, or
representatives of the various Asian American advocacy groups in DC.
The meeting was held at the offices of SEARAC, the Southeast Asian
Resource Action Center, and among the organizers were several South
Asian Americans, including Sikh Americans. Indeed, the meeting’s chair
was an Indian American woman.
Only two days after the horrific September 11 events, these organizers
pulled together an impressive pan-Asian coalition to plan a press
conference and a national candlelight vigil at the Japanese American
National Memorial on the mall. The site memorial was built to
commemorate Japanese American soldiers who fought and died for our
country during World War II, as well as the Japanese American families
who were interned in American concentration camps after Pearl Harbor.
Their purpose: to draw attention to the need for tolerance and
restraint in the face of hate crimes and domestic terrorism against
Arab, Muslim and South Asian Americans. Their truly remarkable efforts
succeeded in garnering the attention of the national media, other civil
rights groups, members of Congress, and even the White House.
This example stands in sharp contrast to those Asian Americans who
might find solace in the false notion that yellow Americans won’t be
racially profiled—at least not right away. These folks must not
have noticed how the news blared “SECOND PEARL HARBOR,” a comparison
that was thin on facts but full of the venom reserved for especially
evil enemies. Even as pundits grasped at the Pearl Harbor metaphor,
their studied failure to name the architect of the World Trade Center
was glaring. The acclaimed Minoru Yamasaki, a second-generation
Japanese American, had designed many American architectural landmarks,
and the World Trade Center was his crowning glory, dedicated to
peace—as just about every website on the towers prominently recounted.
Regarding this omission, I am certain of two things: first, every
newsroom covering the continual imagery of the Twin Towers’ destruction
possessed the knowledge that Yamasaki designed the fallen skyscrapers.
Second, I am sure that deliberate decisions were made to withhold this
detail, lest the Asianness of the World Trade Center’s creator detract
from the theme of an America under kamikaze attack.
***
I had arrived in Washington on the evening of September 10 to be part
of a panel discussion at the Smithsonian on the occasion of a new
exhibit, On Gold Mountain, tracing the history of Chinese Americans.
The Asian American exhibit and the panel discussion were the result of
historian Franklin Odo’s efforts to keep Asian Americans in American
history, to reclaim our “MIH” Missing In History past. On September 11,
we were to discuss issues facing Chinese Americans.
There were certainly no shortage of topics—the spy plane incident over
China’s Hainan island had occurred only a few months earlier,
disgorging a subcortical anti-Chinese, anti-Asian racism that would
have made the Exclusionists of the 1800s proud. Talk show hosts called
for the internment of Chinese Americans and made on-air “ching chong”
calls to people with Chinese surnames, picked at random from phone
books. Members of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, the top
editors of the nation’s newspapers who are supposedly dedicated to
“objectivity” in the news, hooted and howled at a performance featuring
white actors in yellow-face, pretending to be Chinese as they bowed and
scraped. They refused to acknowledge their biases even after one of
their employees, a Chinese American student intern, called them on
their racism.
But even before the spy plane incident, the Committee of 100 had
conducted its landmark survey on American attitudes toward Chinese and
Asian Americans. The results included these points:
34% of those polled believe Chinese Americans are more loyal to the
People’s Republic of China than to their country, the United States of
America.
32% believe that Chinese Americans have too much influence on high technology
42% believe that Chinese Americans are likely to pass US secrets to China.
68% feel negative about Chinese Americans and Asian Americans.
The poll had some other “surprises.” Pollsters Yankelovich and Co.
asked two separate samples of Americans the same questions--one group
was asked about Chinese Americans and the other about Asian Americans.
There was no statistical difference in responses by the two samples. So
here was hard evidence of the “racial lumping” that is so well-known to
every Asian American kid who was ever called the slur of another Asian
ethnicity.
Then there was the racial profiling of former Los Alamos nuclear
scientist Wen Ho Lee. Dr. Lee was born and raised in Taiwan with no
known family in China, but his ethnicity was enough to single him out
as a suspected spy, even though there were dozens of other European
Americans at Los Alamos who had the same access to nuclear information
and to PRC scientists. The book I co-authored with Dr. Lee, My Country
Versus Me, details how he was racially profiled by the US government in
the name of national security. When the FBI couldn’t find any evidence
of spying, they charged him instead with 59 counts of
“mishandling of classified information,” including 30 life sentences,
even though no one had ever been similarly charged for mishandling
classified information. John Deutch, the former CIA director, had
downloaded details of the CIA’s international intelligence network,
onto diskettes and his home computer, which was linked to the Internet.
He could not account for what happened to those diskettes. Deutch, a
white male, received mere a slap on the wrist, and then a Clinton
Presidential pardon; he is now teaching at MIT. In contrast, Wen Ho Lee
spent nine months in solitary confinement, where he was held in chains
and manacles under “pretrial detention.” He was only released after he
pled guilty to one of the counts against him; the government dropped
the other 58 charges. Unfortunately, there are many reports from other
Asian American scientists and technical workers who have also been
racially profiled.
Looking forward, it seems clear that the chill over Asian Americans
during the campaign finance headlines of 1996-99 and the spy mongering
years of 1999-2000 were only the “tip of the egg roll,” as Senator
Robert Brownback (R-Kansas) quipped. Those disturbing and harmful
episodes have set the stage for something worse yet to come.
Historically, xenophobia and racism heighten during times of economic
depression. Yet the 1990s were marked by unprecedented prosperity, a
high tech boom driven by the intellectual and entrepreneurial
creativity of Asian Americans, especially immigrants from China, India,
and Pakistan. Would the economic tailspin of 2001 bring more racial
scapegoating in America?
These were some of the issues to discuss on September 11, 2001 for the
panel at the Smithsonian. The event, of course, never happened. But the
racial profiling against “Middle Eastern- appearing people” followed
with a vengeance—more than 700 reported hate incidents in only a few
weeks, with several deaths. Among them were South Asian Americans,
particularly those of the Sikh faith. To the list of those killed by
international terrorists, we now have a growing list of those killed in
hate crimes by domestic terrorists.
***
Each day after September 11 has brought on some new uncertainty—and
some new erosion of the principles that have made our country great.
Yesterday it was the argument of Peggy Noonan, a Wall Street Journal
columnist who claimed that we must all “accept the necessity of racial
profiling.” She said that all Americans have to sacrifice some of our
liberties in this post-September 11 world. If it turned out that blond
women in blue jeans like her were profiled as terrorists, she said, she
wouldn’t like it but she would “suck it up” and accept it. I said to
myself, yes, so generously said by someone who doesn’t truly expect
such a request to be asked of her.
I wondered how she would respond if the blond teenage son she mentioned
in her column were subjected to profiling at high schools because law
enforcement finally noticed the profile of teenage mass killers in our
high schools. I wondered how she would respond if her sons were
subjected to the same police scrutiny that young men of color
experience each day. I wondered if she would just “suck it up” if every
blond family was rounded up and imprisoned indefinitely, living in
horse stalls for the next several years. That was in yesterday’s news.
The next day, I read that the government is considering using torture
to obtain information from some of the estimated 1,000 prisoners who
are currently being held in indefinite detention for unnamed
charges. It may be necessary to drug them or to use force or
other torture to get these prisoners to talk. If the American people
can’t bring ourselves accept the use of torture by our government, then
the suggestion of one official was to ship the prisoners to another
allied country, like Israel, where torture is used in interrogations.
Then more news: the White House and National Security Advisor
Condoleeza Rice warned the nation’s news executives against publishing
or broadcasting "propaganda” from the enemy, including possibly "coded
messages," from Osama bin Laden. The implication was that the news
media is playing into the enemy's hands. Within hours, network
executives promised more judicious “editing” [read: self-censorship] in
the future.
This bit about “coded messages” from Osamu bin Laden reminded me of the
accusations made against Los Alamos scientist Wen Ho Lee. Until
September 11, Wen Ho Lee was the poster child for excessive government
law enforcement powers and racial profiling. FBI agents had to
persuade a federal judge to imprison Dr. Lee because he was so
dangerous, so inscrutable, such a threat to national security he should
be locked up, pretrial. There arguments were so chilling that Dr. Lee
was held in solitary confinement and maximum security, complete with
shackles and chains. The FBI argued that Dr. Lee’s mere “hello” might
contain a secret message for agents from China—messages that could
result in the production of an advanced nuclear warhead. The FBI warned
that Ninja warriors from China might arrive in black helicopters at the
mountaintop laboratories of Los Alamos to spirit Wen Ho Lee away. Never
mind that Ninjas are Japanese warriors, not Chinese, or that it would
be very tough for enemy aircraft of any kind to go unnoticed in the
secluded and heavily guarded laboratory town perched atop thin, finger
mesas.
This was the same FBI whose intelligence failed to detect any clues of
the events of September 11, and which now has unbridled policing
powers, thanks to the new anti-terrorism law. Among the many additional
powers granted to the FBI and law enforcement, the Patriot Act allows
those under suspicion to be imprisoned indefinitely. It allows the
government to detain individuals without charging any crime or
immigration violation. It also provides no meaningful opportunity
for a hearing to determine the reason for an individual's
detention. All details of arrests and detention are secret,
sealed under court order. All in the name of national security. Of
course, "threat to national security" was the same justification used
to incarcerate 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II, and to
keep Wen Ho Lee in shackles and chains.
***
During World War II, politicians and the media had a special beat for
the patriotic drum. Newspapers ran headlines about Japanese American
farmers who could grow tomatoes that would point to US airbases,
guiding enemy pilots to their targets. The esteemed Edward R. Murrow,
patron saint of American journalism, announced on his radio broadcasts
that any Japanese fighter pilots who made it to Seattle would surely be
wearing University of Washington sweaters. And the news media is no
different today.
There is great danger in the calls from the White House and Condoleeza
Rice to news executives, seeking to restrict information to the public
and to increase the self-censorship that already takes place inside the
newsroom. Some 78 percent of the American public relies only upon
the television news or the Sunday paper for information about the world
beyond their homes. An entire worldview is shaped from newspaper
factoid journalism and the eight minutes of evening news—the actual
news time that gets crammed between commercials and infotainment. While
the dumbing down of news has lead to the dumbing down of the public, it
also places tremendous power on the factoids and those eight minutes.
So the media is losing whatever arguable independence it had before
September 11; some 20 national journalism organizations have signed
letters criticizing the government’s overt efforts to limit what the
media makes available to the public.
Sir Edmund Burke of England had it right when he first coined the
phrase “the Fourth Estate” in the 1700s. The first three estates were
Church of England, the House of Lords, and the House of Commons—all the
basic institutions of England. The Fourth Estate was the reporters’
gallery, and there was clear recognition the media’s institutional
power, even then.
All Americans should be concerned about and actively watchful over the
media’s power. Asian Americans know this lesson well. Those rare
moments in our history when we arose from media “invisibling” and
obscurity, we were used as a hammer, a wedge, toward someone else’s
divisive agenda. We’ve been the ‘heathen Chinee,” the “hordes of hungry
Hindoos,” and the countless string of other hateful names that raised
the ire of white workers; we’ve also been labeled the “model minority”
to divert the civil rights movement and bring down affirmative action.
Asian Americans have been played both as the bystander and the weapon.
Indeed, the miracle of modern media was the overnight conversion of
Asian Americans from the Fifth Column and the Evil Enemy Within, to the
Modern American Success Story.
Today, we find news stories of yellow Asian Americans attacking brown
Asian Americans—sick players in this patriotic zealotry, weird mutants
of equal opportunity hate. This is not the time for any Asian Americans
to breathe easy and sigh, “At least it’s not us, this time.” It is us,
every one of us. If Americans of every color and religion aren’t
speaking out against these travesties, then we are part of the problem,
collaborators in our own oppressions.
***
Not long after September 11, I drove down to San Diego from San
Francisco with my life partner, Lia. We didn’t want to fly—not because
we were fearful, but to avoid the camouflage uniforms, the automatic
weapons, the searches and the reminders of the military state we are
rapidly becoming. Near San Diego, I pulled into a gas station. The
entire shift was immigrant labor—Latinos, Arabs, East Asian. The young
Latino cashier shoved a plastic license plate flag into my face. It was
decorated with a painted American flag. “You should buy this, only
$3.95.” I muttered a no thank you, and he tried again, “Don’t you love
the flag?” This time I said, “I wear the flag in my heart, not on my
car.” He tried again. “You can show you are American.” I thought
of my immigrant parents and felt sad for all the immigrants who are now
so compelled to have the most prominent American flags. I took my
change and said, “I am American. You are too. Even without a flag.”
I actually do have an American flag, made of heavy canvas. It’s folded
in a neat triangle. The last time it was unfurled, it decorated the
coffin of a laundry worker and a World War II veteran, David Bing Hing
Chin—the father of Vincent Chin. He died six months before Vincent was
beaten to death by two white autoworkers in 1982. His mother, Lily
Chin, gave the flag to me when she moved to China, after spending 40 of
her 60 years in the US, as a naturalized American. She left her home
here because it was too painful to be reminded that her son was killed
out of hate, struck down like an animal, and then discarded by a
justice system that didn’t believe an Asian American could be the
target of racism. She gave the flag to me because she didn’t want it
anymore.
For almost fifteen years now, I have kept this flag in a safe place. I
took it out a few weeks after September 11. Not out of sentimentality,
I confess, but because a professor asked me to find a document related
to Vincent Chin’s case. When I searched through my files, there was the
flag. Its colors were as vibrant and strong as ever. The indigo blue.
The deep blood red. As I held the canvas triangle of red, white and
blue, I gave silent remembrance to Vincent and David Bing Hing Chin.
Other names came upon me as well, those of the new victims of domestic
terrorism, new names and stories keep popping up in my email—Balbir
Singh Sodhi, a South Asian American; Adel Karas, an Arab American;
Surjit Samra, a Sikh American; and so many others. I remembered those
who died in the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the hijacked
planes…as well as those killed by the Taliban—for example, the
countless women stoned and executed over recent years. The US and
member nations of the International Coalition against Terrorism had
ignored the demands of women around the globe to stop the Taliban’s
femicide. I hugged the flag and remembered that this country was
founded in defense of liberty, against tyranny. This is also what it
means to be American.
As I finish writing this, the book on what happened to Wen Ho Lee will
be published. I hope it will dampen some of the exuberant demands for
racial profiling, some even made by those who have been racially
profiled themselves. I hope Asian Americans will use our special
experiences in this nation’s history to speak up, as Americans, to
offer some light on these dark topics. We have much experience to share
that will strengthen this nation. I hope all Americans will remember
the words of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King: “Darkness cannot put out
darkness. Only light can do that.”
This article is adapted from an essay that first appeared in AmerAsia Journal, Spring 2002, published by the UCLA Asian American Studies Center.
Copyright © 2002 by Helen Zia.
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