By the time my parents bought the store, my mother’s mother had died in Vietnam. 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. 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. In a burst of optimism and nostalgia, they named their store the New Saigon. What they carried with them–including some gold and money sewn into the hems of their clothes–they used to buy a house next to the freeway in San Jose and to open the second Vietnamese grocery store there, in 1978. They fled communist Vietnam in 1975, after losing all of their property and most of their fortune. They had been born poor to rural families, and without much formal schooling and using only their ingenuity and hard work, had become successful merchants. ![]() ![]() Part of that dream was being against communism and for capitalism, which suited my parents perfectly. The sign confused me, for while I had been born in Vietnam, I had grown up in Pennsylvania and California, and had absorbed all kinds of Americana: the Mayflower and the Pilgrims cowboys and Indians Audie Murphy and John Wayne George Washington and Betsy Ross the Pledge of Allegiance the Declaration of Independence the guarantee of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness all the fantasy and folklore of the American Dream. It was the early 1980s, and someone had written them on a sign in a store window not far from my parents’ store. Even if I no longer remember how old I was when I saw these words, I have never forgotten them: Another American driven out of business by the Vietnamese. Let me go back in time to a time being repeated today. 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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