My TakeThe America I knew and Americans I loved

The country I studied in as a young man was generous and intellectually exciting, and while no doubt my experience and exposure were very limited, it was the opposite of the racially charged place I read in the news today

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Row of buildings on a block near Tompkins Square Park in New York City. Photo: Handout

Published: 9:00pm, 19 Apr 2021Updated: 9:00pm, 19 Apr 2021

It is deeply ironic that in an age of hyper-political correctness and racial sensitivity in North America, there have been unrelenting waves of anti-Asian violence, especially in the United States. Asian-looking people have been beaten, kicked, shouted at, spat on and called racist names. Homes and businesses have been vandalised. Some violent attacks have turned deadly.

This wasn’t how I experienced America when I was a college student there in the second half of the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan was in the White House. As a pundit, I am highly critical of the American government, especially its foreign policy. But as a young student in the US many decades ago, most Americans and Canadians I met were friendly and generous, and intellectually exciting and challenging to be friends with. And that was all before the current culture of PC, “cancel culture”, micro-aggression and safe spaces that supposedly protect minorities and women.

There were no “safe spaces” on the campuses of high schools, universities and colleges I attended or visited; the phrase didn’t even exist. But I always felt safe and mostly welcome. To be sure, some of those schools were close to inner-city slums where it was really dangerous to walk at night, but that was because they were high-crime areas.

I have had my share of racially charged encounters over the years in North America. I have been shoved, refused service, offered poor service, called a Chink and a Jap. I once fought over a parking space outside a Costco in Toronto where the guy shouted, “You Chinese steal everything.” What, even parking spaces?

But it strikes me that I have had many angry encounters in Hong Kong, Shenzhen and Guangdong with other Chinese and Hongkongers over the years, too. A family of mainland tourists once called the police on me, at Times Square in Causeway Bay. Maybe they thought I was being “racist” to them! Maybe I am just a confrontational kind of guy.

Sometimes, though, the anger and hostility arising from everyday conflicts among ordinary people might not have been racial to begin with, but when the two sides were of different ethnicities, race often became an extra-irritant.