so . . . where are you really from?

This desire to return home is innocent enough, but the onset of the global plague in 2020 complicates notions of origin and belonging. The plague infects not just the individual body but the body politic of each nation it touches. The body politic convulses, twitches—and remembers.

The Western body politic recalls

the fear of an Asian invasion.

In AMERICATM, the demonization of Asians begins with President , who calls the plague the “Chinese Virus.”75

relishes his role as the super-spreader of a noxious, ignorant white nationalism that has lurked in AMERICATM since its origin. A white nationalism that continues to kill: Through guns in the hands of angry, frightened white men. Through the fact that racism, writes the abolitionist scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore, is

the state-sanctioned or extralegal production76

and exploitation of group-differentiated

vulnerability to premature death

found in being victims of warfare and sanctions, police violence and incarceration, exploitation and discrimination, macro- and microaggression, and illness like the plague.

White nationalism is the dominant American identity and has been for centuries, but when white people are in total control, (white) nationalism passes as ( ) nationalism. When this ( ) nationalism is challenged—

by

people of color,

feminists,

and

queer people

because ( ) nationalism,

besides demonizing racial Others,

also

subordinates women

and

regulates sex

and

condemns queerness

—this ( ) nationalism asserts itself,

inflames the body politic,

becomes visibly,

markedly

white.

The fact that ’s followers include women, Latinos, Asians, even some Black people, means that women and non-white people can align themselves with whiteness and heterosexual masculinity, protecting themselves from white nationalism by pointing at someone darker, more feminized, more easily stigmatized, while hoping to be paid a share of the wages of (masculine) whiteness.

Siding with the powerful and targeting the weaker as viral threats is human, all too human. began his presidential campaign by painting Mexicans as drug dealers and rapists, continued with banning Muslims as importers of terrorism and a foreign religion, and now, with the plague, attacking the Chinese.

The West has long feared the Chinese as a source of contagion. In the nineteenth century, Americans burned down Chinatowns, perceiving them as enclaves for disease. The burning of San José’s Chinatown77 occurred in 1887. Standing in its place now is the luxurious Fairmont Hotel, where you have slept. When the hotel is built in the 1980s, a new landmark of the gentrifying downtown a few blocks from the SàiGòn Mới, you write an article for your high school newspaper describing the architecture.

You do not mention Chinatown because

you, the Asian Invasion, do not

know of its ghost.

, a builder of hotels, a man ignorant of history, says that the Chinese virus is also the Kung Flu.

Some of your Saint Patrick classmates

thought it was hilarious to ask,

Is your last name Nam?

sniggers in the same register.

The Chinese virus or the Kung Flu78 takes aim at the Chinese, but to some, all Asians look the same. Anti-Asian violence rises79 throughout AMERICATM, Canada, Australia, Germany, France, and elsewhere.

The French of Asian descent declare

#JeNeSuisPasUnVirus.80

In AMERICATM a woman is splashed with acid on her doorstep; a man and his son are slashed by a knife-wielding assailant; numerous people are called the “Chinese virus” or the “Chink virus” or told to go back to China; people are spat on for being Asian; people are afraid to leave their homes.

We don’t have coronavirus,81

Cathy Park Hong writes.

We are coronavirus.

Being the coronavirus shocks some Asian Americans. Some of you thought you had made progress beyond the viral level. When your high school invites you back, nearly thirty years after the Asian Invasion, to talk to the sixteen hundred young men of the assembled student body, you notice how many more of you there are. You, the model minority: desirable classmate and favored neighbor, the nonthreatening kind of person of color.

Or are you?

A white classmate from your high school tells you that in the 1980s in his suburban neighborhood of Saratoga, southwest of San José, white people started moving out when the Asians started moving in.

After your talk, a couple of Asian American students tell you how they feel foreign, especially if they are, or are perceived to be, Muslim or brown. This is the same vibe from your youth, when you learned to feel ashamed, or at least embarrassed, of what supposedly made you foreign: your food, your language, your fashion, your smell.

Your parents.

But these were minor feelings. What is the weight of minor feelings when anti-Asian sentiment remains a reservoir of major feeling?

Anti-Asian racism dictates that Asians belong in Asia, no matter how many generations you have been living in non-Asian countries. Even though you are supposedly invading all these countries, there are not enough of you to make people hesitate in saying Chinese virus and Kung Flu or from asking the classic

Where are you from?

To ask this of

someone of Asian descent

in a non-Asian country

is not an innocent question,

only an ignorant one at best,

a malicious one at worst.

But where are you really from?

Are white people

ever asked this question

in a white-dominated country?

Perhaps if they have an accent. But even those of Asian descent who speak fluently in English, French, German, and so on can be asked this question. Assuming foreignness is the first step to assigning blame. Scapegoating Asians in non-Asian countries for a society’s ills dates to the nineteenth century, at least in the Americas.

When the usefulness of Chinese workers is finished with the building of the Transcontinental Railroad, politicians, journalists, and business leaders demonize them to appease white workers who feel threatened by Chinese competition.

In Torreón, Mexico, in 1911,82 a local mob

murders more than three hundred people of

mostly Chinese and some Japanese descent.

White mobs in AMERICATM also lynch Chinese migrants and drive them out of many towns. In downtown Los Angeles in 1871,83 not far from where you live now, a mob of several hundred murder eighteen Chinese men and boys. In 1875, Congress passes the Page Act, aimed at keeping Chinese women out. Anti-Chinese feeling climaxes with the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, the country’s first racially discriminatory immigration law. The Chinese become the nation’s first illegal and undocumented immigrants.

What does it mean to be illegal

when the law is unjust?

The cycle repeats throughout American history: big businesses rely on cheap Asian labor, which threatens the white working class, whose fears are stoked by race-baiting politicians and media, leading to catastrophe for Asians:

the Gentlemen’s Agreement of 190784

ends Japanese immigration after

the Japanese, who replace the

Chinese, become too visible

the beatings,85 throughout the early

twentieth century, of Filipino

workers, who replace the Japanese

only to encounter signs saying

NO DOGS AND NO FILIPINOS ALLOWED86

the incarceration of Japanese

Americans from 1942 to 1945, which

allows white neighbors to buy (steal)

Japanese American property at

insultingly low prices87

the Ku Klux Klan attacks88 on

Vietnamese fishermen in

Texas in the 1980s

the social downgrading of educated

Korean immigrants,89 who open

liquor stores and other businesses in

Black and brown communities of

Los Angeles, where, during the LA

rebellion of 1992, the Los Angeles

Police Department cordons off

Koreatown and lets it be burned—90

Riot, says Martin Luther King Jr.,91 is the language of the unheard.

Americans blame the Chinese and anyone who looks like them for the loss of American jobs, even as Americans rely on China and other Asian countries for cheap commodities that help Americans live the AMERICAN DREAMTM.

ANOTHER AMERICAN

DRIVEN OUT OF BUSINESS

BY THE ____________

is a story always available for fearful Americans and those who want to frighten them. The people who tell that story misunderstand a basic fact:

AMERICATM is built on

the business of driving other

businesses out of business.

Ba Má excel at this capitalist life cycle. No one wants to open new businesses in San José’s run-down downtown in the 1970s and 1980s except for people like Ba Má. Easier to blame them or a foreign country or politicians than to identify the corporations and economic elites who shift jobs to other countries, maximize profit at the expense of workers, and care nothing for working people, for some of whom

being racist

is easier than

blaming capitalism.

For too many Asian Americans, the solution is to prove yourselves. Prove your Americanness. Prove your humanity. Wrap yourselves in the American flag, donate to white neighbors and fellow citizens in emergencies, and die in this country’s wars, like the Japanese American soldiers who fought in World War II while their families were imprisoned in concentration camps.

Bravery and medals, blood and death, all to prove what should not need proving to people who giggle, chortle, snort, laugh, and sneer when they say to you, or to the cameras, in front of millions, or even just in front of their children, who repeat what they hear—

Jap

Nip

Chink

Dogeater

Slant-Eye

Kung Flu

Chinese virus

Do you know kung fu?

Unidentified Fucking Oriental

Go back to where you came from

University of Caucasians Lost among Asians

Your English is so good

Me love you long time

Love it or leave it

Ching Chong

Chinaman

Gook