All my life, my dad would always tell the story of how he came to the U.S. with only $60 in his pocket and didn’t know anyone. He told me about how he had to work three jobs to put himself through school but eventually was able to achieve his American dream. My parents were born in Shanghai and their families fled to Hong Kong in 1949 when the communists took over China. They would later come to the U.S. as graduate students in the 1960s, eventually settling in the Los Angeles area. That’s where I was born and still live to this day.

I heard about my father’s immigrant story thousands of times but growing up, I rarely learned the history of other Asians in America. I falsely assumed that most Asians had immigrant parents like mine who were born overseas. I grew up thinking we were “new” Americans and didn’t feel the same sense of belonging as those who had been here for generations. What I learned about the Asian experience in America was limited to Chinese coming during the Gold Rush and building railroads in the 1800s. That was a long time ago. After that, Asians were not mentioned in my history classes until World War II when the U.S. placed Japanese Americans in internment camps. 

I never really felt a personal connection to U.S. history I learned in school. Maybe it’s because I couldn’t relate to white guys in powdered wigs when learning about the Founding Fathers. Though I felt empathy, I didn’t feel a connection either to the history of slavery and the subsequent imposing of Jim Crow laws post-Civil War. That history happened to other people, not to my family or people that looked like my family (as seen in the documentary, Far East Deep South.)

Then on a fateful trip in 2014, my whole view of what it meant to be American changed. We went to visit my husband’s grandfather and great-grandfather’s graves in Mississippi and I thought they would be the only Chinese people buried there. Instead, I discovered there were generations of Chinese who worked on plantations during Reconstruction and later ran grocery stores all around Mississippi, Arkansas, and Tennessee among other Southern states. I learned that many of the Jim Crow laws that I thought only impacted African Americans were applied to the Chinese too. In many cities in Mississippi, Chinese children could not attend white public schools. They had to attend a separate Chinese school. Even in death, the Chinese were forced to be buried in their own cemeteries separate from white and Black ones. These were just a few examples.

I remember learning about segregated schools but I was never taught that it impacted the Chinese and other people of color beyond those who were Black. Going to Mississippi and discovering these stories opened my eyes to how much history had been excluded. I would later learn segregation even happened in my home state of California. Going back to 1859, the first segregated school for Chinese opened in San Francisco because Chinese and other Asians were barred from attending public schools. I would also learn that there were Asians who fought in the Revolutionary War, the Civil War and contributed in so many ways to the building of the U.S. beyond the railroads. This wasn’t just other people’s history. This was my history too. 

Why does this history matter? If I didn’t see Asians as a significant part of American history, then others who were not of Asian descent certainly wouldn’t either. That is why the stereotype of Asians being the perpetual foreigner persists today. When most people in the U.S. look at someone who has an Asian face, their implicit bias is to assume that person is a new immigrant. Most people don’t look at somebody who is Caucasian in the U.S. and automatically assume that they must be from Ireland, Germany, or Russia. I have lost count of how many times someone assumed I was born in China when I’m a native Californian. When people think of someone “All-American”, they don’t envision me. I have to constantly tell people I’m “American”.

The myth of Asians in America being “perpetual foreigners” and the “model minority” has unfortunately led to increasing hostility and, in many cases, violence against the Asian community. It’s not always front page news just like our stories are rarely in textbooks. We become an easy target for scapegoating and people think we are not entitled to what America has to offer because we don’t belong. After uncovering my husband’s family’s history in Mississippi, we discovered there are now six generations of his family that have been in America. His family belongs. His family is a part of the fabric of America. 

Hopefully, the more people learn about the full picture of American history that includes Asians in America, the more people will see that we belong.