Xenophobia threatens Asians in US too

By Rong Xiaoqing Source:Global Times Published: 2015-11-27 0:18:01

Illustration: Liu Rui/GT


Last week, Arafat "Ralph" Succar, a Syrian community leader in New York, told the New York Post that Islamic State may have already planted sleeper cells in the US. He said that with a little bribe, it was very easy to get a fake ID issued by the Syrian government and that this could be used to come to the US as a refugee.

"I believe the terrorists from Syria have been coming into the US, not only in the past few years, but way before that," Succar was quoted as saying. "I think they're already at work."

A day later, Donald Trump, the loudmouthed Republican US presidential candidate drew attention again when he appeared to indicate he'd establish a registry of Muslims in the US. He later insisted he was set up by the media, but he didn't clearly say he opposed the idea either.

I don't really care what exactly Trump said. But he is riding high in the polls because such ideas appeal to many Americans, particularly white working class Americans. To some people, this may be a solution to the problem identified by Succar.

I am terrified too by the idea that I might have a jihadist neighbor or colleague. But I am not sure this is more terrifying than making the approximately 3 million Muslims in the US all feel they are labeled as "suspects."

I am not a Muslim but I have some Muslim friends. I will defend them not only because I believe they are being treated unfairly but also out of self interest.

Non-Muslim minorities like the Chinese are much closer to the flames of anti-Muslim frenzy stirred by the new round of terrorist attacks than we might think, and we can easily be burned badly before we even realize what's going on.

To make a heart-wrenching topic easier to understand, check out the newly unveiled Broadway musical Allegiance. The show, about a Japanese-American family's suffering in an internment camp in the US during WWII, is based on the personal experience of George Takei, the Japanese-American actor who was best known for playing Hikaru Sulu in the TV series Star Trek before he became a major activist for tolerance and civil rights in recent years.

When the show opened earlier this month, Takei, who lived in an internment camp with his parents when he was five, told me the discrimination against Muslims after the 9/11 attacks made his experiences more than a half century ago relevant to today's audience.

That was only a few days before the Paris attacks, whose aftermath made Takei's words seem like a prophecy.

Last Wednesday, in a written statement announcing his city would stop accepting refugees, David Bowers, the mayor of Roanoke, Virginia said: "I'm reminded that President Franklin D. Roosevelt felt compelled to sequester Japanese foreign nationals after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and it appears that the threat of harm to America from ISIS now is just as real and serious as that from our enemies then."

The mayor's comment unnerved many people. Takei wrote on Facebook: "The internment (not a 'sequester') was not of Japanese 'foreign nationals,' but of Japanese Americans, two-thirds of whom were US citizens. I was one of them, and my family and I spent 4 years in prison camps because we happened to look like the people who bombed Pearl Harbor. It is my life's mission to never let such a thing happen again in America." Bowers apologized to the public later.

But this cross current was not the only "coincidence" tied to Allegiance. The similar experiences of Takei and the playwright Jay Kuo, who wrote the music and lyrics of the show, is another. 

Kuo only bumped into Takei at a theater a few years ago, learned his story and decided to bring the story to Broadway. I asked him, as a Chinese-American, how he made himself understand the feelings of Japanese in the internment camps. Kuo brought up a dark memory of his own.

 In the 1980s when he was in high school, his father Jenkai Kuo, then an IBM engineer who had been invited by China's premier Zhou Enlai to visit his home country in the 1970s, was accused of spying for China. The case was settled but it produced emotional turmoil for the Kuos. "I realized early in my life that the government cannot be trusted," Kuo said.

In a country where 13 percent of the population is foreign born, many people have had similar experiences of being alienated and left quaking with fear for something that's not their fault, be it the imprisoned Japanese, Holocaust survivors or even those who lived through the McCarthy era. Perhaps these aren't remarkable coincidences after all.

The author is a New York-based journalist. rong_xiaoqing@hotmail.com

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