My great-great grandparents came in 1876.  They were laborers on sugar cane plantations and pig farms in Hawaii.  Like many Asian immigrants to Hawaii back then, they were deliberately recruited in waves from different ethnic groups so employers could more easily exploit them.

My great-grandfather came in 1913 as a Paper Son, an illegal way of circumventing America's racist immigration laws.  At the age of 15, he started working in LA as a servant for a wealthy Mexican-American family that took him in and encouraged him to get a high school degree.  To this day my family speaks of that family with gratitude.  

My grandfather was the last of my ancestors to immigrate, in 1948, on a lucky scholarship to Pepperdine.  He flunked American Literature, twice I believe, in his final year.  Without a degree and soon without a visa, he applied for permanent residency.  He was denied, then reapplied under the Refugee Relief Act of 1953, was denied again, then appealed, and finally was allowed to stay.  If he'd been deported, he would have left behind a wife and newborn daughter, my mother.

I grew up not knowing most of this, although I knew of course that we had come from China.  America reminded me in myriad ways, both subtle and obvious, that we were from somewhere else.  It was like having a hole in my identity that needed to be filled.  I read books about China, obsessed about Confucius, collected Chinese things like red laisee envelopes, old coins with holes in them, and cheap folding paper fans from Chinatown.  I tried also to be more like white kids.  I wanted to have parents like them, own video game consoles like them, get ten dollars for every A on my report card.  White friends from these early days would, I think, be surprised at how much race played a role in my consciousness.  And I, looking back, am somewhat surprised how easily they were permitted to forget that they too are from somewhere else, someplace foreign and different, that their sense of belonging and rightness in a multicultural nation shouldn't be anymore a given than mine.

I think about all of this when immigration is in the news---diversity lottery, chain migration, kids separated from parents, people kept in cages, DREAMERS, refugees and asylum seekers vilified and denied.  I think about it when racism is in the news and a small vocal minority of you make it depressingly clear you have no serious understanding of race and history.  But I also think about it when I walk around my neighborhood in Jersey City.  Here there are signs in at least six or seven languages.  On the streets you'll hear people speaking Spanish, Bangla, Hindi, Urdu, Egyptian Arabic, Gujrati, Punjabi, Tagalog, Cantonese, Mandarin.  I think about my ancestors, my friends and family, about our shifting and manifold identities in America.  It seems insane to imagine that we all might have something in common.  But here we are in this beautiful if deeply imperfect corner of the world, struggling and living, and somehow, to me at least, making it feel like home.

July 2020