Reading with Patrick

“‘Nobody will tell you these stories,’ my parents told me. ‘We tell you because we want you to be careful.’”

Kuo recalls how her parents instructed her about the racism that Asians faced in the U.S. These narratives, passed down from one generation to another, filled in the blanks that Kuo discovered in the books that she read and television shows she watched. Asians may not have existed in the media landscape or in the narrative of racial oppression, but they could be just as vulnerable to racial violence. 

“Be careful: That was the central message. Like many immigrants, my parents were fearful people, and they seemed determined to remind me that tragedy might be right around the corner. It only took one ignorant guy with a baseball bat. In actual numbers, the likelihood an Asian would be murdered in the 1980s and 1990s was minimal. And yet, in a way, they were telling me something important. They were trying to tell me that we did not figure, at all, in the national imagination […] I never learned about Asian Americans, alive or dead, in any class, from any teacher […] When we did well, people would vaguely point to us as evidence of the American dream, but when were killed for being Asian, the media wasn’t interested.”

Kuo continues to contemplate the lesson that her parents were trying to teach her by narrating the stories of Vincent Chin’s murder and that of the Japanese exchange student killed by a man who later used the “castle doctrine,” or protection of his home, as a defense. Kuo considers the precariousness of life as an Asian American. On the one hand, White America would occasionally use the community as a “model minority”—pointing to them as an example of what other communities could achieve if they developed more discipline. On the other hand, they were just as vulnerable to the forms of discrimination that blighted other non-White groups.