If Trump can’t spark Asian American political awakening, what will?
Despite a US election campaign scarred by xenophobia and racism, Asian Americans are still reluctant to stake out a political identity, a road trip from Washington DC to Detroit suggests
Led from his cell in Chippewa County Jail, on the remote peninsula that divides Lake Superior from Lake Huron, the United States from Canada, Justin Cheong is ordered to sit by a prison guard. Compliant but not cowed, the Macau-born civil-rights activist smiles wanly and places his palm in greeting on the reinforced glass that separates us. It is the act of a man clinging to social convention, seeking any meaningful human connection.
“There’s so much anti-Chinese rhetoric,” notes the University of California, Berkeley graduate, whose arrest four months ago occurred in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s inflammatory criticism of the US-China trade imbalance, when the Republican presidential nominee told an Indiana crowd: “We can’t continue to let China rape our country.”
“When a man who could be the next president of the United States makes such statements, and Mrs Clinton only pays lip service to equality, of course the law is going to get tough with Chinese Americans,” Cheong says.
In an operation executed with military precision, immigration agents swooped on the 26-year-old while he was travelling to a National Education Association convention in Washington, to table a motion supporting equal access to public education. Under arrest, the Macau taxi driver’s son discovered that a bureaucratic snafu meant his marriage five years ago to Liana Mulholland, a Detroit artist, had not been registered with the Department of Homeland Security. As far as the American government was concerned, Cheong was now persona non grata in his adopted country, at the height of one of the most xenophobic election campaigns in US history.
In the same week as Cheong’s arrest, Congressman Mike Honda spoke at a Democratic Party fundraiser in Washington.
“The marginalisation of Asian Americans precedes the Chinese Exclusion Act [1882],” said the charismatic legislator, who, as a child during the second world war, was incarcerated with his parents in a Colorado internment camp for Japanese Americans. “We’re just 4 per cent of the population; 18 million people. We’re the least represented minority in government [2.3 per cent of the House, one senator]. But we are the fastest growing demographic in the country, and our vote will be crucial in battleground states.”