LA library visit, Aug. 2017

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Whose America?

By Ai-Ling Louie

Published in:

Martin, Hyun, ed. Asian American Anthology; I am an American too! Seattle, WA. Amazon Services, June, 2020, p.1506. 

I was parking my car in an Ikea parking lot one day when I heard loud, insistent honking and saw a man leaning out of his car window and screaming at me, “You B****, that’s my space! Go back to China, where you belong!” I was shocked and hadn’t realized someone else was trying to park in that space. Fear overcame me—I didn’t know what to say. 

This kind of insult keeps happening  to me when I’m not expecting it. I feel tongue-tied and don’t reply. Then I feel badly that I didn’t defend myself and my race. There is so much that is wrong with what he said to me. Why can’t I have something ready to say?

Here is the long version:

Anthropologists are finding that the first people who came to what is now the United States came from Asia. The earliest records now place humans here around 15,500 years ago. This is dated from stone tool fragments found in Buttermilk, Texas1 and other evidence. Footprints, human bones, stone tools, and butchered animal remains, have been dated from early peoples in the Americas. At this time, the continents of Asia and North America were connected by a land bridge called Beringea, and humans probably walked across Beringea and took dugout canoes from Beringea to North America. American Indians are descendants of  those  Asians. 

That’s right—we were here first! This land was a continent fully populated by natives descended from Asians. 

Here is the history of the United States of America the man from the parking lot should have learned in elementary school.:

North America was populated by people whose ancestors came from Siberia in Asia. They walked across a strip of land that once connected Asia and North America, or they took their canoes and landed on the shores of what is now Washington state and the state of California. There were many groups of Native Americans, not one people. They each had their own language, government, and ways of farming and hunting. They shared a deep respect for the earth that gave them life, and the animals that gave their lives to them. The tribe or group lived on the land that they needed and then moved on. 

At the end of the 1400’s tall ships, unlike the Natives had ever seen before, came to their shores. On these ships, were very strange people with very light skin and hair. They spoke in languages no one understood. The Natives thought they were gods. They gave the gods gifts of food and skins to warm them. Soon, they saw they were not gods but people. The new arrivals seemed friendly at first, but they brought with them powerful weapons that killed animals and Native people with loud noises.  They made wooden walls and prevented Natives from coming into these walled off areas, even though the new people freely came and went from the Native villages.  They brought queer animals that ate up and trampled the Natives’ corn and squash crops.  Then, the Natives began dying. The new people  had brought diseases with them.  Diseases, like none ever seen before, sickened whole families, whole tribes, and they died in great numbers—year after year, more dying-- America’s first great pandemic.  

That history of the clash of two great civilizations is what our children and our adults should have in their minds when the Anti-China and Anti-Asian rhetoric comes to light in our country. 

So next time, someone yells, “Go back to China!” I’ll know what to yell back,

“No, you go back to Europe! Asians were here first!”

History informs the present, but the present and the future don’t have to follow the past. The America where I want to live is the one I see in my grandson’s public school classroom: children of all colors in the same building--  adults, committed to nurturing each child according to his/her needs. The public school is not without friction. The adults in the room work together to help the children see each other as equals, and this, in turn, helps all succeed. 

1. Gannon, Megan. “When Did Humans Reach North      America? The Question Keeps Getting More Complex”. Discover Magazine.      September 19, 2019. discoverymagazine.com

 Ai-Ling Louie is the author of 5 children’s books: Yeh Shen; a Cinderella Story from China, Philomel/Putnam, and biographies of Vera Wang, Yo-Yo and Yeou-Cheng Ma, Kalpana Chawla, and Patsy Mink, all published by her own press, Dragoneagle Press, dragoneagle.com. Ms. Louie lives in Maryland and is the proud grandmother of three grandchildren.