The Land of Opportunity
May is AAPI Heritage month! It’s a time to gather and learn about the role that Asian Americans have played in our nation’s history, and also reflect on the present and future.
I was in Utah campaigning last Fall, and met with a group of Chinese Americans I was rallying for Evan McMullin who was running for US Senate. It turns out that many of the Chinese Americans in Utah descended from railroad workers in the nineteenth century that literally built the tracks that connected one end of this country to the other.
My family arrived much more recently, in the 1960s as students from Taiwan at UC Berkeley. My parents moved East, and I was born in Schenectady, New York in 1975. I showed my children my childhood home this summer to give them a sense of how I grew up - I don’t think it registered, but maybe it will when they’re older.
As the first generation born in this country, I was raised with a deep love of America but also experienced a struggle to belong or fit in. I spent much of my childhood trying to prove my toughness because that seemed necessary to avoid being bullied or picked on. I’d skipped a grade so I was generally smaller than my peers until high school.
AAPI Heritage Month encompasses a very wide range of experiences. We are an extraordinarily diverse community - more than any other in some quantitative respects. Yet I do think there are some common threads that most of us can relate to.
Many of our families came here for better opportunities. My parents came to the US to create a path for my brother and me. It worked. I’ve had the kind of life and career they could only have dreamt of when they arrived here 60 years ago as students. Beyond their dreams actually - they were not excited about my presidential run when I told them of my plans in 2017. Their reaction was one of deep concern.
Months later, when I was coming off of one of the presidential debates, I was told that my father attended a watch party in Taiwan. He told the gathered crowd, “That is my son!” and the crowd cheered for him and bought him drinks the rest of the night. When I heard that story, it pumped me up. We had come a long way.
It reminded me a bit of meeting an Asian American family in New Hampshire that worked at a restaurant. They brought their son to take a picture with me. They said to me, “Thank you. We didn’t know we were allowed to run for President.”
Asian Americans are as American as anyone else, yet we have somehow internalized that certain things are not for us. That’s what I’d like to change. Change not just for our sakes, but for the country’s.
The US is more polarized than ever, and so much of American life has devolved into an ideological struggle. Hatred is on the rise between different groups, and Asians are not exempt. Most Americans don’t want this, but they don’t see a way out. In my view, this land that our families came to for a better life, that has given so many of us so much, now needs us. It needs our spirit of service and love of country in a way that it perhaps has never needed it before. It needs our leadership to create a new set of examples.
AAPI Heritage Month is about reckoning with our history and contributions in this country, so that we can both appreciate our past but also shape the nation’s future. Let that be the message: nothing is beyond us. We are Americans - we build in countless ways to strengthen the fabric of the U.S. This is our country, our children’s country, and we will act and lead in a way that will leave it to the next generation still the land of opportunity that our families came so far to find.
