Our 250 Year Search for Belonging: Why We Feel the Hate Then and Now

Over 250 years ago, in 1763, the first Asian migrants arrived into the present-day US – a group of Filipino men (“Manilamen”) who soon established a fishing area outside New Orleans, Louisiana known as Saint Malo.? By 1815, they were followed by Chinese merchants intent on facilitating trade with China. Hawaii was next, playing host to numerous Asians, who ultimately provided a source of inexpensive labor for sugar cane plantations.

The migration continued throughout the 19th century, the first waves of Asians continuing to serve as a source of cheap labor for factories, gold mines and the construction of the transcontinental railroad. An alternative to slaves, they were still disparaged, abused and labeled as “coolies”– a derogatory term first coined by European traders three centuries earlier.

According to research from Tennessee’s State Museum, in the wake of the Emancipation Proclamation, Asian laborers were considered part of the “solution” to create competition and “help make Black people productive once again.” This not-so-thinly veiled racism served only to reinforce white supremacy, cementing and buttressing another layer of growing structural bias.

Earlier this AANHPI (Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander) month, I was honored to be a guest at TAAF’s (The Asian American Foundation) Heritage Month and Celebration Summit in New York City. The event, like prior ones, inspired me to embrace more fully my own layered, multi-hyphenate ethnicity (overseas Chinese-Indonesian-Canadian-American), to get better as a student of all Asian-American heritages, and to consider more how I can influence positive change. My interest in these subjects started early and was definingly personal.

It began with the immigrant experience of my own parents as overseas Chinese in Indonesia during a period (1965-66) that UCLA professor and historian Geoffrey Robinson labeled the killing season. My parents sought only a place, a refuge, that would be better for them and their children. It was a response to the newly installed Indonesian President Suharto and his New Order that discriminated against ethnic Chinese natives. The New Order not only banned Chinese language and cultural symbols, it established coercive assimilation to solve the “Chinese Problem.” Its tenets ultimately underlay the brutal genocide of more than half a million Chinese-Indonesians.

To my mind, the most beautiful definition of an entrepreneur comes from Harvard Business School Professor, Howard Stevenson: The relentless pursuit of opportunity without regard to resources at hand or controlled. In that regard, my parents were truly great entrepreneurs. With unimaginable courage and resilience, they fought their own fears and uncertainties in leaving their birth home behind and traveling blindly to a foreign land, not knowing if it was the last time they would see their own parents, siblings and other family members.

My parents’ path was complex and certainly not simple. Beginning in Indonesia, they migrated to Taiwan, and then to Montreal. Eventually, when I was barely a year old, they decided to settle in the rocky and remote island of Newfoundland, Canada. Newfoundland is one of the oldest parts of North America, and also where Norse Vikings created their first European settlement circa 1000 AD. Centuries later, Newfoundland was in desperate need of doctors, and my father fit the bill. He would become one of the island’s first specialty surgeons (an ENT surgeon who would also use medical skills to work all over the island), while my mother became a social worker before working alongside my dad to support his practice. Today, some 50 years after they arrived, they still live there.

Needless to say, my parents never planned to move to an island at the most eastern edge of North America. My mom speaks of crying the first weeks of arriving to what was an alien and cold hinterland relative to her humid, tropical and densely populated Jakarta. We were certainly one of the earliest members of the Chinese Association of Newfoundland and Labrador founded by one of our closest family friends. In hindsight, I believe that our family won the resettlement lottery. So much of my own character and perspectives on what comprises Good People comes as a direct result of my parents’ immigrant journey and the nature and character of Newfoundland itself and the people who live there.

Kindness. Resiliency. As the first person in my extremely large extended family to become a U.S. citizen. I’ve had the privilege of the highest levels of an American education, met kindred spirits and colleagues in the start-up world, and received incredible mentorship that has allowed me to found and lead, over the past 25 years, some life-changing entrepreneurial pursuits. It’s trite but true that there’s no other place than America for entrepreneurial dreams to take flight. One of my proudest “American” moments, in fact, came in 2018, when I was awarded the Ellis Island Medal of Honor. I was truly humbled as it is an award that has been given to several notable leaders, including Nobel Laureates, Presidents, and it felt like a milestone of acceptance and arrival. But recent years have felt very different.

Like many within my community, the growing sea of intolerance, and the rising tide of anti-Asian hate has made me upset and disconsolate.? I strongly believe that most human beings are good, but they can also be swayed, sometimes powerfully, by the context of their times. A hyper-polarized political environment; a global pandemic; or simply and unconsciously swept into the wake of structural and systemic biases.

This is not entirely new. For any minority group, or person of color, there is always a baseline of prejudice around “otherness.” When I arrived in North Carolina in 1990, I quickly realized the cost of that “otherness.” Discrimination. Bullying. Racial slurring. Mostly I learned to ignore it, aware, too, that it was a much milder form of the discrimination experienced by countless other people of color. More recently, however, I’ve experienced acts of prejudice in ways that are more dismayingly direct and palpable. The result being, I have never felt a lack of belonging in this country more acutely as I do today.

Nonetheless, I remain an optimist, an advocate, and a believer. Mine is a far better situation than that faced by my parent’s generation. I’m also fueled by the mission and purpose of the company I lead today, MiniLuxe. At MiniLuxe, I serve as co-founder and CEO of an organization that is over 95 percent diverse Asian and other ethnic groups. I have the privilege of leading a team of hundreds of nail care and personal care professionals committed to empowering and enriching lives, a purpose that unites us to radically transform and shatter stereotypes within our industry. Today, nail care professionals represent the largest population of hourly Asian workers in America. The history of the democratization of nails in the United States is an extraordinary story in and of itself, one that began in 1975 in ?Northern California, with 20 refugee Vietnamese women.. Today, there are roughly 400,000 nail technicians in the US, three quarters of whom are of Asian descent. ??

Whether through better representation of leadership in business, institutions, government or individuals themselves, we need more voices to champion the overlooked and invisible classes and the solidarity of a collective will to soldier forward in the marathon of a long struggle for change. Martin Luther King’s words matter more than ever:

Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter. - Martin Luther King Jr.???

Change does not roll in on wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle. ?Martin Luther King Jr.

As we come to the end of AAHNPI month, there’s one incontrovertible truth that cannot be silenced: ?Asian American history is American history. Too much of our heritage remains unspoken, misunderstood, or gently washed over. Illuminating our past will help us better understand that to combat the sentiments of today, we need not only facts and statistics, but learn some of the personal narratives as well—those human stories whose depth and contours allow us to relate meaningfully to one another.

Right now, awareness and visibility around Asian American stories remains threadbare. In a TAAF sponsored research survey asking respondents to name a famous Asian American, or an event or policy related to Asian Americans, most Americans couldn’t. The most popular answer given was Jackie Chan, who is not even American (when they did answer, 9% said Jackie Chan who is obviously Asian but is from Hong Kong). Innumerate invisible heroes comprise the deep well of storytelling for many Asian Americans, but far too many are embers fading into the darkness.

Others, however, shine vibrantly. TAAF, for example, was founded by some very dear friends, and yes, heroes of mine, especially its Chairman Li Lu (one of the student co-leaders of the Tiananmen Square protests and now a legendary investor and CEO of Himalaya Capital; his hero story is worth revisiting, if you don’t know it already). Some of the civil right activists for our community include heroes such as Guy Aoki, Cecilia Chung, George Takei, Yuji Ichioka and Corky Lee. Corky is one of the most amazing individuals who spent fifty years, until his death due to Covid, photographically documenting the Asian American experience. His archive of images is a visual narrative of economic, social, and racial injustices visited upon our communities. I’ve been learning more about Corky over this past month, and it leaves me wanting to learn more about the activists listed and many more. ?I know they are out there. In the meantime, according to the 2023 STAATUS Report and other research as noted below, here are some of the realities facing Asian Americans today.

• Growing racism for the fastest growing minority group: With 20 million plus residents, Asians are the fastest growing racial or ethnic group in the US. Within the last twelve months, 1 in 3 Asian Americans have been called a racial slur, and nearly 30 percent of Asian Americans have been verbally harassed or abused.?
• Concern and fear for our Asian elders: Research by Stop AAPI Hate showed that between 2020 and 2021, out of over 800 reported incidents of hate against Asian elders aged 60 years and above, more than 25 percent of those incidents involved physical attacks. Vicha Ratanapakdee, known to many as Grandpa “Vicha,” an ethnically-Thai elder, was a well-known San Franciscan who has now become one of the faces for stopping hate and injustices against Asian elders. An 84-year-old practicing Buddhist, Vicha, was taking his customary walk when he was violently and fatally shoved onto the pavement in broad daylight. More than 1000 days later, a trial date has still not been set.
• Lack a sense of belonging or acceptance: Asian Americans are the least likely racial group (i.e. when compared to Black, Hispanic or White) to feel strongly that they belong or are accepted in the US. The vast majority echo this view.? In TAAF’s most recent work on belonging, only 38 percent of Asian Americans agreed with the statement that they fully belong in the US and only about18 percent ?agreed that their racial identity in the U.S. was fully accepted.

What brought us here? As always, history is a good place to start. Almost exactly 100 years ago, on May 26, 1924, the Johnson-Reed Act came into effect - a federal law restricting immigration quotas that included an outright ban on citizenship for Asians. The Johnson-Reed act served to fortify past restrictions on Asians, amplifying targeted discrimination that began with the 1882 Chinese Exclusion act, an act unprecedented in the way it singularly excluded an ethnic group. Until Congress repealed the Chinese Exclusion Acts in 1943, it was illegal for any Chinese person to be naturalized in the United States. Broader protections would not come until the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

The alarming rise and record levels of resentment and hatred against Asian is, as I noted earlier, inextricably linked to this same history of exclusion. From the late 1800s until today, the core reasons behind Asian American prejudice and sense of exclusion even after 250 years of settlement stems from three key reasons:

• Structural biases – systemic practices, institutional policies, and state and federal laws leading to vary degrees of embedded racism across our history (and arguably colonial history)- from the building of our transcontinental railroads to the trans-nationalization of nail salons – and perpetuating a cycle of prejudice.
• Media biases - generalized media stereotyping, social misinformation, and typecasting ranging from the “Model Minority” and “Yellow Peril” to the objectification and fetishization of Asian women.
• Scapegoat biases: Innate hostility, xenophobia and scapegoating of hardships and domestic inequities triggered by current events of geopolitical shifts in power and the global pandemic of the Coronavirus.??

Structural Biases from our History

In addition to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, and, the Johnson-Reed Act, there have been many other laws and policies to incite discrimination against Asians Americans. These range from the Alien Land Laws (1913-1927), which banned Asians from owning land, to the Executive Order 9066 mandating the internment of 120,000 Japanese citizens between 1942-1946. And, would any survey of racism be complete without noting how the Chinese were treated during the building of our transcontinental railroad? Some 10,000-15,000 Chinese laborers were faced with some of the most dangerous labor conditions possible, from the need to handle explosives to gingerly navigating rockslides. ?While connecting the Western section of our railway, more than 1000 Chinese laborers died. Their heroic efforts, along with those of thousands of other Chinese workers, were essentially ignored. Not a single Asian was included in the May of 1869 commemorative Golden Spike “Champagne photo” that symbolized the merger of the eastern and western sections of our railroad.

A dozen years ago, as I was taking my citizenship test, I wondered how many Americans would be able to answer the questions in front of me, which included basic facts about America’s founding and history. The answer, it turns out, is likely only 1 in 3. It is therefore not surprising that numerous historical events affecting Asian Americans remain marginalized or misunderstood, untaught and overlooked. There’s work to be done to create an overall more inclusionary, more holistic (and accurate) perspective that encompasses all the groups that contributed to the building of our great country. Below is a small snapshot of ten critical events that shaped Asian-American history and thus, American history.

Media Biases

In addition to the structural biases of Asian-American history, the media has played a strong role in influencing prejudice, whether they know it or not.? The topic of the media (and especially social media) merits a much longer investigation, but the three areas of negative media bias that stand out are: stereotyped tropes, myth of the model minority, and monolithic bias. Let’s look at them in order.

Stereotyped Tropes: Caricaturized “yellowfacing,” fetishization and “Made in China.”? I can’t remember how old I was when I first saw Breakfast at Tiffany’s, the iconic 1961 film starring Aubrey Hepburn. But among the things that stays with me is the caricature portrayal of I. Y. Yunioshi, a fictionalized Japanese photographer played by Mickey Rooney. An extreme example of yellowfacing, or white actors portraying Asian characters. While intended to be comedic, I vividly remember the scene of Mr. Yunioshi buzzing in Aubrey Hepburn. I cringed in discomfort.

It wasn’t the first or last time I came face to face with the caricaturizing, objectification and fetishization of Asians.? Not just in additional examples of yellowfacing in film or on Broadway, but the offensive hyper-sexualization of Asian women often stereotyped in binary archetypes of either submissive “doll-like creatures” or cold and threatening “dragon ladies” that persists today. Reflect on a slew of popular Asian women roles such as Madame Butterfly, Suzy Wong or Papillon Soo’s role as Da Nang Hooker in Full Metal Jacket. Again, history and policies play a big role in how Asian women are perceived in media and Hollywood. As one example there are the anti-immigration policies including the Page Act of 1875, preventing Asian women from entering the U.S. under the premise of “immoral character” and that the suspicion that they might be prostitutes. Combined with the influx of wartime Asian brides and the trafficking of workers forced into prostitution, these policies created further structural biases affecting national views of Asian women.

Another overt and generalized portrayal of Asian Americans could be found in a simple three-word tag.? “Made in China.? Made in Asia.” Synonyms for cheap, hurried, thoughtless, assembly line. Products, but the thinking extends to people, too. Last year, I took my family on a trip to Paris. On our third day there, I was out shopping with my children in a beautiful boutique. As he rung us up, the store manager reassured us that we would be happy. “You bought some amazing things,” he said, adding, “not like that cheap stuff made in China.”

Media myth of Model Minority - A second media myth about Asians worth mentioning is the stereotypical idea that Asians are a “model minority,” a term coined by William Petersen in a 1966 New York Times article showcasing the success of Japanese-Americans. Over time, “model minority” was adopted to encompass all Asian American groups, with Time Magazine going so far as to feature “Those American Asian Whiz Kids” on a summer 1987 cover. ?“

What’s wrong with that, you might ask? Two issues come to mind immediately. First, the term posits a one-dimensional view of Asian success. A second problem is that the model minority premise is a false narrative – while certain international Asian countries outscore on standardized tests, among Asian American's and among ethnically Asian regions there’s wide variation in math scores. Where there is outperformance in math there is often outperformance in literature, but that receives little mention. We are simply physicians, engineers and programmers who are adept at math and science, who do well by working hard. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve been dropped off by an Uber driver who signs off by saying, “Good night doctor.”?

Nor is he the only one. At Home Depot, customer in line beside me asked if I knew what I was looking for, adding, “You look more like a doctor than someone who knows how to build something!”? Not least, within the business world that I inhabit every day, there this bias can extend to a modern-day version of sophisticated laborers –hard-working utility players and managers, but not necessarily right for top leadership. Some have labeled this the “bamboo ceiling.”?According to AAPI managers surveyed, about two-thirds felt that that the bamboo ceiling and the unconscious bias and microaggressions that come with it at the workplace become a limitation to their advancement. (e.g. in that same survey an Asian woman investment manager being called “Stephanie 2.0” – a better version of that other Asian woman we had.)

Examples in media like the ones given and contemporary examples in popular shows such as The Family Guy perpetuate this model minority myth and a reductionist view that Asian Americans are math and science nerds and more akin to “workhorses” who do the job versus “racehorses” who can lead the job. Within our Asian communities themselves, the model minority myth can be self-perpetuating, the question being: How can we overcome our own disbelief that we as Asian Americans can be innovative breakout leaders? Representation from more AAPI leaders in roles at the top of institutions and organizations is an obvious part of the answer.

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Monolithic media myth: Another way the media contributes to bias is in their tendency to describe Asians as a single monolith. “Chinese food” is intended to describe the cuisine of a country of 3.7 million square miles and a population of 1.4 billion.? It’s as silly to say, “I like Chinese food” as it is to say, “I like Western European food.”? As described, Asian-Americans, after all, comprise approximately 20 million individuals, representing a very wide diversity of heritages from East Asian (e.g., Chinese, Taiwanese, Japanese and Korean), to Southeast Asian (e.g. Filipino, Vietnamese, Thai, Laotian, Burmese, Cambodian and Indonesian) to East Asian (e.g., Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, and Nepalese) to Pacific Islander (e.g. native Hawaiian, Samoan, and Chamorro), and other sub-Asian ethnicities. While we generally enjoy solidarity, there are significant differences among our ethnicities, and no single Asian American sub-ethnic group could be said to be a majority.

Scapegoat Biases

It is easy to project blame onto others – this is the very definition of scapegoating. In 1982, the Asian community, first in Detroit and then across the nation, came together to mourn the loss of a 27-year-old man named Vincent Chin, who, while celebrating his bachelor party with friends, got into an altercation with two white auto-plant workers. They swore at Chin, using the vilest possible racial slurs and after leaving the club tracked Chin down in a nearby Highland Park, Michigan parking lot. The two men, Ronald Ebens and his stepson, Michael Nitz? blamed him and Asians broadly for taking jobs away from white American autoworkers, pinned Chin down and pummeled him with a bat until his skull cracked open. Soon after he died in the hospital. The punishment for his assailants? A $3000 fine, repayment of court costs, and three years of probation.? “These weren’t the kind of men you send to jail,” the judge wrote afterwards.

Scapegoating as part of racism is very real—and while the media cannot always be directly implicated, it’s fair to say it plays an oversized role in our ongoing perceptions and biases. Consider the recent one-two punch of the Covid pandemic combined with the rise of China as a formidable superpower.? As political leaders dubbed the virus the “China virus,” “Wuhan flu” or the “Kung flu” across every major news and social channel, it seemed to give permission for preexisting xenophobia and pressure cookers of resentment against Asians in general, and China specifically, to spill and boil over. Covid, it seemed, was the fault of all Asians—which in turn contributes to the racial (and racist) construct of the “yellow peril.”??

This “yellow peril” metaphor is as much a damaging stereotype as its close cousin, the model minority Asian. Through these lenses, Asians are seen at two extremes: either model math and science nerds or dishonest, low-class, and an existential menace to the US. Again, it’s worth casting our mind back to history. This version of scapegoating construct derived from widespread fears in the 18th and 19th centuries that the large incoming Asian population risked disrupting or displacing aspects of “civil societies” ranging from their cultures, to their economic power, to the integrity of their bloodlines. Seen in this context, a scapegoating bias reinforces a longstanding structural bias towards seeing Asians as forever foreign or perpetual “outsiders” who are “unassimilable.”

During and after Covid, waves of physical attacks occurred across the U.S., including in the most diverse and “accepting” cities of America. Notably, New York City saw multiple physical attacks against Asians, telling us to “go home.”?

In our own nail care business, when we were finally able to reopen our MiniLuxe stores post-Covid, one customer verbally attacked us for using masks. Others asked me repeatedly if our staff had relatives with the virus or if they had recently been travelling in Asia. It was a more circuitous, perhaps unconscious, but still targeted otherness bias towards the wrongheaded assumption that Asian Americans were more susceptible to testing positive for Covid and even spreading the virus into vulnerable American populations.

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Closing

On March 16, 2021, a gunman entered the first of three Asian-owned spas in the greater metropolitan area of Atlanta, Georgia and began shooting. The tragedy would leave 8 people dead, including 6 Asian women: Yong Ye Yue, 63, Daoyou Feng, 44; Paul Michels, 54; Xiaojie “Emily” Tan, 49; Delaina Yaun, 33; Suncha Kim, 69; Soon Chung Park, 74; and Hyun Jung Grant, 51. The victims represented a wide range of narratives including Yong Ye Yue who encouraged her Black-Korean biracial sons to embrace their identities growing up,? an army veteran (Michels) who helped as a “good-hearted handyman” with maintenance tasks at one of the salons, single parents like Grant with two sons, who was described by friends as a “big kid” who drove 30 miles to work long days; and Park who over a decade plus as a single parent widow brought over 5 children from Korea to the US.

Why did the 22-year-old shooter target Asian-owned spas? He believed they represented “temptations he wanted to eliminate.” Later, a spokesperson for Gerogia’s Cherokee Sherriff’s Office said that the gunman was “having a really bad day.”

These Atlanta spa shootings reverberated across our community and the country. For those of us who work in the personal and self-care space (like us), the effects were that much deeper and longer lasting. When an event like this occurs, it’s hard not to feel diminished, that human life has just been degraded and cheapened. You ask again, why does such hate, stereotyping (e.g. fetishization), and racism still exist?

Manicures and pedicures continue to be one of the most widely used beauty services but remain underregulated from standardized levels of hygiene to the treatment of employees. Working in a predominantly Asian business has served as a microcosm of the Asian experience in America. With a front-row seat and anthropological lens to the blatant and more subtle dimensions of prejudice, I’m more motivated than ever for positive change. Through entrepreneurship, we see the chance to empower and enrich the lives of an overlooked part of our society. Experience has shown me that this type of change requires a long view.

While we have come some ways from yellowfacing, we still have stigmatized stereotypes of what it means to be Asian, including an Asian manicurist, which if not in the media, still holds caricaturized (and often demeaning) views in many people’s minds. One of my own non-Asian colleagues once said while I was present, “We really need them to know better English, and I just wish they wouldn’t sound like chickens when they speak.”

Yes, there’s some truth in a stereotype: ?We are proud manicurists, proud doctors, proud restauranteurs, proud laundromat owners, proud researchers, proud programmers, proud scientists. At the same time, Asian Americans run the gamut. We are as diverse amongst ourselves as we are with other races.? We are more than a label - more than a mani, more than a doctor, more than good food, or STEM kids.

Beyond the boxes of what we as Asian Americans do, each one of us offers a narrative of our own entrepreneurial journey in life and an embodiment of that dream. ?We are trying to breakthrough– relentlessly pursuing an opportunity without regard to the resources, constraints and biases that surround us– chasing not just the conventional definition of extrinsic success, but the deeper intrinsic meaning of what it truly means to belong.

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This piece is dedicated to the memories of some incredibly loved people who are no longer with us: the co-founder and creative soul of my first business, Kaming Ng, the 21-year-old daughter of one of my dearest friends, Julia, who left us too soon but taught us to always soldier on, and an incredible entrepreneur, father and grandfather, Paul “Palle” Lederhausen. These individuals taught me and all who knew them how to live with humanity, resilience and intentional purpose.

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