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<\/p>\nBy Carolyn Bick
NORTHWEST ASIAN WEEKLY<\/p>\n
Frank Wu was born in Cleveland, Ohio. But when certain people ask him, \u201cWhere are you from?\u201d they\u2019ll follow his answer with, \u201cWhere are you really from?\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u201cThe addition of that one word speaks volumes, because it says you\u2019re a liar, you\u2019re not who you claim to be. You\u2019re somebody else,\u201d Wu told audience members, in the course of explaining \u201cperpetual foreigner syndrome,\u201d during the Committee of 100\u2019s webinar<\/a> on Feb. 3.<\/p>\n Wu is the first AANHPI president of Queens College in New York, and a first-generation American born to Taiwanese immigrants. He spoke at length about the history of United States policy towards Asian immigrants, and how that policy has continued to shape the lives and experiences of the AANHPI community today.<\/p>\n Despite the fact that the U.S. has benefitted for centuries from Asian immigrants\u2014Wu discussed Chinese immigrants who built most of the transcontinental railroad in the 1800s\u2014records show that Chinese and other Asian immigrants had already been coming to the U.S. by then, though in smaller numbers. That didn\u2019t stop the country\u2019s politicians from swiftly moving to pass a series of exclusionary laws meant to stop them from staying.<\/p>\n \u201c\u2018The Chinese must go\u2019 was the rallying cry and politicians of both political parties sought to outdo themselves,\u201d Wu said, explaining the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, as well as a series of other anti-Asian laws. \u201cOur ancestors could not naturalize. \u2026 Asian immigrants were put into this category as aliens ineligible to citizenship. \u2026 It wasn\u2019t until the 1890s that birthright citizenship was established \u2026 [but] that was very rare, very rare, because \u2026 Asian women weren\u2019t allowed in<\/a>. And so in San Francisco\u2019s Chinatown, the ratio was 100 to one men to women. Can you imagine that in that hyper-segregated neighborhood?\u201d<\/p>\n This anti-Asian sentiment has expressed itself again and again in different ways, Wu continued. He remembered when two white men murdered Vincent Chin in Detroit in 1982. Wu was about a decade younger than Chin, and Chin\u2019s murder left an impression on him. Though Chin was Chinese, the two men who murdered him used Japanese racial slurs. Fast-forward to contemporary times, and many people once again targeted Asians, this time blaming them for the COVID-19 virus.<\/p>\n The theme running through it all has been this \u201cperpetual foreigner syndrome,\u201d Wu explained.<\/p>\n \u201cDuring COVID, we saw \u2026 people shouting, \u2018Go back to where you came from,\u2019 shouting racial slurs. And \u2026 it still happens, and it\u2019s all a signal: \u2018You\u2019re not one of us. You\u2019re one of them. You made us sick,\u2019\u201d Wu said. \u201cYou saw the videos of Asian elders being spit on, shoved to the ground, kicked in the head, shoved down the stairs leading to the subway stab, ultimately in Atlanta, shot. \u2026 You never know when you\u2019re walking down the street, and someone starts shouting at you, whether it will escalate or if it\u2019s just someone shouting some slurs.\u201d<\/p>\n Even when people were brought into the hospital for treatment, he continued, they would refuse help from Asian American healthcare staff.<\/p>\n