The story of how Steven came to care

This is an entry that probably won’t make much sense until you finish the whole thing, because it will tie various seemingly unconnected aspects of my life and worldview together – but through this, I hope to be able to understand my thought process better, and simultaneously share a slice of my life with you. It’s going to be long, so you’d best grab a cup of hot cocoa beforehand. It may or may not be controversial to you, so all I ask is that you do not judge me until the very end, and if you do so, please tell me as politely as you can.

It starts from my childhood growing up as one of two sons of Taiwanese immigrants in the Midwest, which appears to be approximately 95% white, at least where I grew up. This may seem a bit odd if you know me well, but back then I was not a very race-conscious kid – I knew that most of the other kids I hung out with didn’t look like me, and their families tended to eat different foods and go to different churches, but that in no way deterred us from playing with each other and enjoying genuine friendships. I do remember distinctly things that forced me to acknowledge that I was different, a minority no matter how you sliced it – though I am quite grateful that I grew up in a caring and protective environment that allowed me to sort this all out in my own time and pace. While my brother and I often played with the other kids in our neighborhood (one black, three white, and out of all four, two were girls) and those at school (predominately white – it was a distinguished private one), outside of that when we went to gatherings and events, it was primarily with our home church, MCCC – Michiana Chinese Christian Church, in South Bend, Indiana. That was where my deepest friendships were forged. I didn’t really put much thought into it, as I simply assumed that this was the way things were. Either way, there wasn’t discrimination, because this was America, where all were equal.

However, as I’ve matured and become increasingly capable of organizing, formulating, and analyzing my past experiences into concrete thoughts, scattered incidents have come together, establishing a more solid narrative that may or may not be representative of a typical Taiwanese-American Midwest experience.

I remember another kid asking me, “Are you a Commie Jap?” in school, though I can’t remember exactly what year this was. In response, I simply replied “No.” without really feeling anything, because I didn’t really know what he meant besides the fact that it didn’t seem like any description of me that I’d heard before, and therefore didn’t really matter. Perhaps he was mistaking me for someone else, I really didn’t know. Now of course when I look back on that incident, it’s somewhat disturbing to me primarily because it is unlikely that the kid knew what “Commie” really meant, or that “Jap” was derogatory wartime slang. In other words, the most plausible way that this young boy came to the understanding that calling me a “Commie Jap” made sense would be if his parents taught it to him. Of course, it goes without saying that he couldn’t tell that I wasn’t Japanese – this in of itself doesn’t mean anything, as I can’t tell different East Asians apart easily either.

However, the point here is that I was Asian, and that was enough to make the connection, prejudiced assumptions an indispensible part of this worldview. It also say something about how ignorant his parents were, because while the Japanese Communist Party was the Liberal Democratic Party’s opposition for quite some time until it began to consistently lose seats in the house in the 70s-80s, the Japanese political system as a whole after World War II has been anything but Communist. In other words, this statement towards me required both ignorance and bigotry, proudly taught by the parents.

I remember my Mom telling me that if anyone ever came up to me and said, “Hey Steven!” while pulling back his eyes to do the insulting “chinky-eye” face, I should respond by taking my fingers and stretching my eyes out as large as possible, in satire. I will admit that I get legitimately angry when I see these sorts of gestures nowadays, and the “ching chong” phrase, not because I can’t take a “joke” (it isn’t one, it’s bigotry that’s trying to legitimize itself my masking itself as pseudo-sophistication), but because people really should know better. It’s like the word “gook”. I don’t care if John McCain was tortured by the Viet Cong or NVA, that in no way will ever justify him saying, “I hate the gooks. I always will.” in public, if only because of the loaded racial history behind the word, particularly in its dehumanizing aspect that’s related to the unjust Vietnam war. To draw an analogy, it is unacceptable in the same way that you can’t black people “niggers”, Germans “krauts”, or Iraqis “towelheads”. It’s simply offensive, and if you have to ask whether or not a given context justifies it, then you shouldn’t be using it.

Still, overall despite all this I truly believed that Asians were indeed the “ideal minority”, whether in action or treatment. I had assumed that since my family was privileged – my Dad had a good job, a Ph.D, and I while I didn’t always get what I wanted, my parents always provided me with what I *needed*. I was brought up to value education, to strive for good grades, and to be an obedient child. I believed that this was the reason why Asians were so successful, and other minorities failed – it was their fault – if only they worked harder, they could achieve the same things. Not to make excuses for my childhood beliefs, but I feel that it’s quite natural and understandable – most of my friends were in similarly privileged positions. Nearly all of our parents had emigrated from Taiwan in the 1970s or 1980s, generally having already finished their undergraduate or graduate degrees, and at the time (as it is now), it was extremely hard to get a green card allowing you to work in the States unless you were extremely well qualified and already heads and shoulders over the average person. I didn’t know all this.

It wasn’t until this one time I visited Chinatown in Chicago with my family that I finally realized there are poor Asians too! I honestly had never really realized this before – that in fact, most people belonging to the “model minority” in the United States are not part of the 4.0 GPA-learned-stringed-instruments-growing up-participated-in-Church-youth-group-will-go-to-one-of-the-University-of-Californias-majoring-in-either-Business-Engineering-or-Premed-demographic. Rather, when you think of “Asians in the States”, you also have to remember the 52-year old man who left China 30 years ago in search of a better life, but ended up scrubbing dishes and carrying overweight packages in a smelly cramped neighborhood in Chinatown, and can barely make enough to pay for his rent, bus pass, and monthly calls back home to his family in Szechuan.

But I didn’t really think of this until relatively recently. My sense of superiority was so internalized that when the 9/21 earthquake hit Taiwan in 1999, causing roughly 3000 deaths, I scarcely felt a thing.

They were Taiwanese, not like me. I’m American. They’re pagan; Buddhists. God protected me, not them. Yeah, this is where my family came from, and they all look like me – but really, I’m actually white on the inside. Listen to me speak English, I don’t have a stupid Chinese accent.

Looking back, I am absolutely ashamed at how callous and bigoted I was when I was eleven. It hurts to look back, but it’s a healthy thing to do if you really want to grow.

A brief history in East Asian immigration (I don’t really have space and energy to go into the whole broader Asia – suffice to say, it wasn’t much prettier). While I don’t personally identify as “Chinese” as far as cultural identification and nationality goes, this relates to me in that I am affected by the aftermath, lingering effects, and continuation of racism. Chinese first came to America in large numbers during the 1848 California Gold Rush and in the 1860s when they were recruited to help build the Transcontinental Railroad. We learned about these things in school, but never that low-wage Chinese laborers were used to build the railroads that went from “sea to shining sea”. (for those of you who have seen the movie “Shanghai Noon”, the film gives you a slight glimpse at the labor situation, and how there were so many Chinese in America at the time)

As the need for labor declined, animosity towards these immigrants increased – politicians began to blame Chinese “coolies” (coming from the word 苦力) for depressed wage levels.

It was under these circumstances that the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed – the first significant restriction on free immigration history. To the best of my knowledge, there has been nothing comparable in scale and magnitude directed at Western-European countries. It excluded “skilled and unskilled laborers and Chinese employed in mining” from entering the country for (originally) ten years – but in addition to that, it also affected Chinese already in the United States. Chinese immigrants were made permanent aliens, as they were excluded from obtaining US citizenship – this meant also that Chinese men in the US had little chance of ever reuniting with their wives back home, or starting new families in the States. The Act was amended later on which specified that it applied to ethnic Chinese regardless of country of origin. It is important to note that because immigration of other races was unlimited during this period, which indicates that it was driven primarily by racial concerns, not economic.

Essentially, these restrictions froze the Chinese community, making it extremely difficult for it to grow into US society like the European immigrant groups were by and large able to – the “melting pot” that we learned in school growing up sadly applied primarily to “white” immigrants. Thus, these people were forced to build a society for themselves in which they could survive. Perhaps this is why we see Chinatowns on the scale that we do scattered in major US population centers.

The Chinese Exclusion Act was finally repealed in 1943 by the Magnuson Act, which permitted Chinese nationals already residing in America to become naturalized citizens. Note however, that this allowed a national quota of 105 Chinese immigrants per year. To put that into perspective, Asian InterVarsity Christian Fellowship has roughly 70-80 people in it. That’s not a lot of people. Also, while the exclusion act was repealed in 1943, the (Californian) law that forbade Chinese-Americans from marrying whites wasn’t repealed until 1948.

Most people already know of the Japanese internment camps of WWII, so I will not go into unnecessary detail. I am slowly starting to reach the main point of this entry – starting with the Anti-miscegenation Laws. I spent a lot of time detailing the history of institutionalized discrimination (this does not even go into the non-institutionalized sort), because it is the easiest to keep track of, and I can actually back up what I’m saying. At any rate, my point is that this is by no means the limit of racism. In a nutshell, anti-miscegenation means laws that ban marriage between people of different ethnic groups. This isn’t ancient history, like the abolition of slavery (which still has long-reaching effects even today) – the last anti-miscegenation law in the States wasn’t repealed until 1967, in the “Loving v. Virginia” case that is commonly cited for its relevance to black-white relations.

1967. Less than 42 years ago. In the United States, non-whites were viewed as subhumans by the United States government (to be fair, this was on a state by state basis – the laws were repealed earlier in some states than others, but I believe that a society is only as righteous as its weakest member). Politicians and interest groups and racists all found their own reasons to justify this sort of ban which feeds on the deepest and ugliest nativist xenophobic fear of the unknown.

Unfortunately, God was often used back then in regards to marriage, with people finding passages that would justify their beliefs, much like today. (Perhaps you see where I’m going with this already) I want to go into more detail about the Loving v. Virginia case (388.US.1) because of the imagery and arguments invoked there, and how crucial this case has had on my beliefs about a certain controversial issue. As noted above, this was the court case that finally lifted all bans on interracial marriage. An interracial couple from Virginia – Richard and Mildred Loving – began a legal battle in 1963 against the anti-miscegenation law which prevented them from living together as a couple in their home state of Virginia. They had originally married in 1958, Washington DC to evade the law in their home state – they were arrested in their bedroom after returning to Virginia for living together as an interracial couple. The judge decided to suspend their sentence on the condition that the couple leave Virginia and not return for 25 years – they decided to appeal the case.

The Virginia judge who had heard the original case refused to reconsider his decision, citing that:

Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.

Ultimately, the Lovings appealed to the US Supreme Court – and in 1967, the Court ruled unanimously that:

Marriage is one of the ‘basic civil rights of man,’ fundamental to our very existence and survival… To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State’s citizens of liberty without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discriminations. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not to marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State.

After this ruling, the remaining laws were ruled null, though they weren’t necessarily stricken from State law until the respective states decided to do so. It took South Carolina until 1998 (62% of voters), Alabama (59% of voters) until 2000 to officially amend their states’ constitutions via referendum to remove language prohibiting interracial marriage.

62%. 1998. South Carolina.

59%. 2000. Alabama.

I cite this not to bash these States, but rather to point out that this sort of discrimination based not on the character of a person or their humanity, but rather elements of themselves that they could not and should not change existed until recently, if only in law. Those aren’t large margins, in referendums that should have been unanimous by any rational definition. Society has slowly accepted interracial marriage, but it’s been a slow process. In many households and regions, it may be legal, but unacceptable regardless. It is because of tireless advocates for equality that I have the right to marry a person of any ethnicity in the United States now.

After reflecting on all of this, I have come to realize exactly why it is that I am significantly more sympathetic to gay rights and issues than the average Asian or Christian is. In sort, I can feel their pain. It is quite self-centered and narrow-minded of me to have this increase in sympathy after I realized that until relatively recently, people like me were not given the ‘inalienable right’ to marry another person of my own choice. To clarify though, this is not the only reason why I am able to emphasize so easily with our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters, but it is an argument and rationale that I can explain more rationally with opponents who wish to understand why I believe the things I do.

People justified their own bigotry towards interracial relationships by citing various passages in the Bible – and I know which ones they were. People do the same in arguing against same-sex marriage. I know it is not a perfect parallel, but I do know this – the pain, suffering, and discrimination felt by these people is the same, regardless of whether or not the Bible is right *this* time. I believe that just as people who are against interracial marriage have a right to hold these views but not the right to stop others from getting married, one can understandably be against marriage equality – but you should not have the right to stop two people from marrying each other. You are certainly allowed to express your own opinion, and even try to persuade them to “pray away the gay” if you do so wish, but to continue this sort of discrimination institutionally in law specifically is unacceptable to me. (To be clear: Pastors are and should be free to perform marriage ceremonies only for those that they choose to. That's separation of church and state.)

And yet ultimately, establish it in law we did. The same day that people were celebrating the election of Barack Obama as the end of racism (trust me, it isn’t), Proposition 8 was passed in California, amending the constitution to make same-sex marriages illegal and null – similar ones in various other States as well. Supporters of the bill argue that this court measure should also annul the 18,000 existing same-sex marriages that had already taken place before the proposal had passed. This is as repulsive to me as the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, and I cannot be silent on the issue. To me, discrimination is what it is, regardless. I’ve been trying to empathize with the gay community, trying to understand what it’s like knowing that your country (and most in the world) views you as an abomination doomed for hell, that you are perverse and should not be allowed to adopt children, that you cannot even marry the one you love, or visit him/her on their deathbed in the hospital because you aren’t “family”. To hear “That’s so gay” and “Don’t be such a faggot” tossed around casually as insults.

For half a year, I have attached a pin from the UM Spectrum Center to my bookbag – it’s nothing flashy, just a simple rainbow-colored pin with a big Maize “M” in the middle. And I have felt self-conscious whenever I open my bag, and others see it. I just wanted to try and experience it for myself.

What will others think?

Will they think worse of me?

Will they think I’m gay?

Does it bother me if they do believe so mistakenly?

What do my church friends think?

What will some of my closest friends – in the fellowship – think?

And it’s just a freaking pin. I think I can feel a bit of the pain. Just a little, but enough to get me to care even more than I did before.

The purpose of this writing is not to persuade you to change your mind – though if that does indeed happen, then the more power to you. Rather, it is to clarify the reasoning regarding a stance that alienates me from some of my Christian friends, some more so than others. If you disagree, I would greatly appreciate comments or E-mail, unless your argument is simply “The Bible tells me so”, in which case I request that you save your breath. This is not because I have flat out rejected scripture – to the contrary, it is something that I have been struggling with, and have read quite a few books about, trying to make sense of it

Above all, it is an attempt to help you understand me.

Good Lord, it's like coming out of the closet. I can only imagine how tough it would be to actually have to do it.