[Editors’ Note: This article was written by a graduate of Mountain Lakes High School’s class of 2020 in the summer of 2020. In light of the rise in anti-Asian hate crimes, we feel it is now more appropriate than ever to share this student’s story.]
To Mountain Lakes High School, Mountain Lakes, New Jersey, the United States of America,
As I am packing my things in preparation to leave this town, I thought a little bit about whether I was ever here at all.
I’m an avid reader, and dozens of novels line my shelves. Of all the casts in all these books, there are precisely two Asian characters among them. Even in my own collection, I scarcely find myself reflected in the media that is supposed to represent our society.
Such is the way in this country, in this town, in your schools and your classrooms.
There are three vital instances in your American history courses when Asian Americans are spoken of: the Gold Rush, the railroad, and Japanese internment. Note, please, the distinction between Asian Americans and Asians in general. Indeed, we learn in subtly colonial undertones of China and the Opium War, of Japan and atomic bombs, of India and the partition, of Korea and Vietnam and Cambodia and our armies wreaking havoc there. But in American history, it’s so curious that Asian Americans only existed on three occasions.
We talk about the Korean and Vietnam Wars but speak nothing of the refugees and immigrants that had come to our shores afterwards. We pretend the first time an Asian body stepped foot in this country was in California during the Gold Rush, but Asian indentured servants had long labored inside the home while Black slaves labored outside on the plantations.
We talk about the transcontinental railroad as the pinnacle of capitalistic achievement and ignore the 20,000 Chinese workers exploited at inhumane wages and atrocious working conditions. Do passengers today think about the hundreds of bodies buried in the walls of the mountain passages and under miles upon miles of railroad tracks?
We are told that the topic of Japanese internment is controversial, that there is room to argue for its justification. A classmate said to me, but they could’ve been spies. My hands shaking, I asked how children could be spies, and how come their skin color but not their home had defined their loyalties. In another instance, my friend had asked, if I couldn’t prove I wasn’t Japanese, would I have been locked up? The teacher replied simply, yes.
And that was that.
I can remember only two books in your entire curriculum from fourth to twelfth grade that prominently featured Asian American characters. The first was The Homework Machine in fifth grade and it cemented the expectation that Asian Americans are aloof, unsociable “smart” nerds. The second was a love story between a Chinese American boy and a Japanese American girl during World War II, and we spent our discussions talking about cultural symbols like paper umbrellas instead of the cruelty of uprooting a generation and stuffing them into concentration camps.
In the hundreds of novels we read in school, from literary circles to the Battle of the Books—
We are barely an afterthought.
At the end of my freshmen year I sat down with my counselor, and then the dean, and then various math teachers, and then again with my counselor, because I wanted to take a higher level math course than was typical for sophomores. I sifted through myriad summer programs and online courses, pulling their curricula and placing it under the scrutiny of all these people who questioned my reasons and found my desire to succeed tedious, until they approved the course. I would not receive credit for the summer work. I would have to pass a placement test, or see my efforts wasted. While most of my peers lazed under the summer sun and splashed around the lake, I sharpened my pencils and checked my calculator’s battery in a deserted library.
I succeeded, so a student accused the school of favoritism for myself and my Asian peers, said that I ought to sit the f— down. Apparently this opportunity I had found for myself was actually given to me because I was yellow-skinned and deemed “smart” by the very teachers that had discouraged my ambition. This was not my first experience with gaslighting claims of reverse racism and it would not be the last, so I shrugged and moved on. I would never receive so much as an apology.
Later in sophomore year, I kept my head down when a handful of Asian students were stripped of their AP credits for no reason other than that it was unfair to other students. Us, with all our qualifications we fairly achieved, with the express permission of the faculty and administrators, with our distinct disadvantage compared to your generational legacies—these things were unimportant details compared to your fairness, your equality.
I wanted to storm your Board of Education meetings and unleash my incredibly childish sentiment of that’s not fair and throw a tantrum. But I kept my head down because my mother didn’t want me to make myself a target. After all, I wasn’t affected, wasn’t “greedy” enough to take those courses that met the iron fist of white anxiety and nepotism. I was lucky in that regard.
In my four years, I cried every night in the weeks leading up to an election and fumed through the process, because I knew that despite the work I put into improving these clubs and organizations and the results I’d achieved for them, my competitor only had to have pale skin in order to stand on the same level as me.
A teacher I’d looked up to immensely once told me that intersectionality isn’t real. What I heard in the undertones of that offhand comment was: being a woman of color couldn’t be different from being a White woman. An Asian woman is absolutely treated the same way as an Asian man. Oppression? Your plight and all your experiences? Nah.
Oh, I’d replied, trying to understand and trying to learn because this was my teacher and I was a student. I was supposed to learn everything from my teachers. My teachers were supposed to be correct.
That was the hilarious truth I was taught in these whitewashed hallways of yours; that my skin color would forever be a source of suspicion for betrayal of your country—my country too—and this paranoia justifies concentration camps, justifies American citizens losing their everything, and justifies generations being set back for your comfort in a home that is ours as much as it is yours. That my hard-fought opportunities ought to be presented to you on a silver platter because your fairness trumps mine and you are more equal than I. That none of this is wrong, and that my discomfort is my weakness and oversensitivity. Gaslights.
This is the ugly truth I realized only after I was free from these whitewashed hallways of yours: I don’t exist here. I look up at the billboards along the highways and see happy White families. I open YouTube on my phone and the shampoo ads feature wavy golden hair. I crack open my favorite romance novels and the love interest has clear blue eyes. I take notes on documentaries we watch in class and the experts are John Smiths. I enter WholeFoods or ShopRite and find none of the ingredients we use in our home cuisines, but we have to make do because our ethnic grocery stores were considered nonessential during the shutdown. I sit down on my therapist’s couch and fail to articulate this deep-seated feeling of foreignness, of why I introduce myself as Chinese when my native language is American English—but I certainly can’t claim to be American—because I couldn’t find a POC therapist that would understand me.
These are your daily, subliminal reminders that this world, my home, does not care to remember my existence. These are the subtle things that condition me to internalize your racism so that I would startle when a media figure has the last name Lee instead of Johnson, be ashamed to be a fan of Kpop or C-dramas for that feeling of connection and belonging, swallow my discomfort of seeing cheongsams too short and fox eyes too sharp on white bodies and white faces—things that would be foreign and unwelcome to you on my body, my face, despite them being mine first.
I am erased from my narrative and alienated from my home so that you can feel comfortable in the spaces that are supposed to belong to me.
And then, you raced to remember me and honor me when I achieved things for you. You plastered my face in your newsletters without my permission, demanded I send you “my story” to present at a Board of Education meeting and showcase your outstanding system after I’d gotten into a prestigious college or achieved a high test score. You are saying, we helped you. You are where you are because of us. We have been good to you, so return the favor.
You’re wrong. I studied for and achieved my test scores. I drafted and practiced my speeches that elected me to positions that let me escape your school. I researched and compiled my own materials for my own performances at tournaments and competitions. I created my application and wrote my essays about experiences I found meaningful outside this school, outside these classrooms and hallways and spaces where I never existed.
I am privileged to have wealthy parents who invested time and resources into my education, and privileged to hail from a wealthy, predominantly-white zip code. For the most part, what you did was help me learn of the unconscious ruthlessness with which you can displace me of my own culture, make me feel foreign in my own country, and convert me into something alien in my own body.
I am writing to all who are complicit in this system. This “you” I write to is not an individual nor a board of individuals that you can scapegoat, but every individual who allowed themselves to become part of this community that upholds this system where I and so many of my peers are consistently erased from America, from this town, from this school, because you want these things to belong to you and only you.
You are afraid to admit it, afraid to enumerate the words privilege and oppression because you don’t want to be the villains in this story.
We didn’t want to be the victims either.
Take a look at your Hall of Fame. I sat beneath those picture frames every day as I ate non-Asian lunches served to me by Asian hands.
We are not there.
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