Racism Here,
Racism There
Alan is a 20-year-old Chinese-Filipino student whose international experiences have shaped his understanding of racism. His story is about the impact of Donald Trump's presidency on immigrant families.
Alan's Story
Every news station was broadcasting, and it was getting late. They were still counting when I went to bed, unsure of what the outcome would be. My mom woke me up the next morning: “Trump won.”
That was not the way I wanted to wake up.
The racist vitriol of Donald Trump. His xenophobia. All those misguided beliefs had been building up to this moment of the 2016 election. According to the new president, immigrants weren’t contributors to American society. They were criminals and degenerates. People who would only bring harm to American society. What a blatant lie. My parents had moved to the U.S. as medical professionals and cared for underserved populations in rural Wisconsin. Did none of that matter? They’re just gonna go and devalue everything immigrants have done for this country?
After the 2016 election, I became consciously aware when I walked into a room if I was the only Asian. Or if my family walked into a restaurant and people stared at us. I lived in a small city in a rural area of Wisconsin for most of my life. There were very few people of color here, but after the election, I really began to see it. With Trump’s presidency, people felt like it was okay to be outright racist, sexist, homophobic, and all that. It was so frustrating, but it’s not like we could really do anything.
In 2020, I started college, and the anti-immigrant rhetoric went from bad to worse. It was COVID and the racism and xenophobia were amplified. It turned against Asian Americans. The ideas that were spreading on the news made my skin crawl. Politicians and news anchors alike bashed on immigrants like we were a poison to U.S. society. I talked to my family about it, and they were just as frustrated as me. The reason that my parents moved from the Philippines was to leave that sort of racism behind, and now it’s like America was trying to go backwards in time.
On top of that, George Floyd’s murder was so terrible. My family hadn’t had any issues with the police in the U.S., but in the Philippines, it was the police that would kidnap and kill Chinese Filipinos because of who they were and their perceived threat to the local economy. We assumed the police in the West would be much better, but I guess not. There were communities that are still affected, even if we are no longer the ones that are targeted.
It’s obvious that this stuff is wrong. People shouldn’t be made to feel like they are lowlifes and villains. So I wrote to elected officials about these issues. I voted. I tried to help put people who are willing to make progress in positions of power. It was what I could do. And that’s what we can do as Asian Americans. We need to be willing to fight the good fight.
About Alan
Alan, a third-year genetics student, loves to travel. Born in the Philippines and raised in the U.S., Alan frequently visits his Chinese-Filipino family in Manila and spent vacations visiting new countries in Europe and Asia. Each time, he learns something new about how countries operate. None of them are perfect, but he got to see different cultures, different perspectives, and learn different histories.
With his family having lived in the Philippines for generations, Alan has a strong sense of the history that has shaped the lives of his family. In Alan’s opinion, the Philippines was and still is a fundamentally sexist and racist country. Extremely Catholic due to its 300 years under Spanish rule and socially conservative, the Philippines lagged regarding social issues. Additionally, the Philippines had their own mess of conflict and racism due to a long history of Sinophobia, or a fear of the Chinese. Stemming from Chinese invasion in the 1500s to the enforcement of the U.S. Chinese Exclusion Act in the Philippines in 1882, anti-Chinese sentiment has been a part of the story of the Philippines for a long time. In 1954, a law was passed that prohibited foreign nationals from engaging in retail business, impacting many Chinese-Filipinos who ran convenience stores in the Philippines. Without local opportunities, the Chinese-Filipinos went into import-exports as a means of livelihood. In the 1990s, economic conflict between the groups led to kidnapping and holding Chinese-Filipinos for ransom. Not all of them would survive. A great fear loomed around Alan’s parents during this time and contributed to their decision to leave Manila.
Despite their attempts to escape, racism was everywhere. When Alan visited his family in the Philippines, the Filipinos never really saw him as fully Filipino, and the Chinese didn’t see him as fully Chinese. At the end of the day, both saw him as American.
Meanwhile in the U.S., Alan would be asked if his family ate dogs, spoke English, or lived on a rice paddy. He didn’t think this racism was malicious, but it was confusing and annoying at times. There were some people that had never left the area that Alan grew up in. They didn’t know what was outside of the city limit. Perhaps reasonably so, it was difficult for them to understand what else and who else was out there. But Alan knew. He knew there was so much more in the world, and he was somewhere between here and there.
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