They were from Filipino, Japanese, and Chinese working-class backgrounds, from migrant farmers to restaurant waiters, fighting not just domestic racism but U.S. imperialism abroad. Many were disenchanted with the mainstream white anti-war movement because they cared not just about “bringing the troops home” but about the tens of thousands of Southeast Asians abroad who were being killed daily. That period of time, writes the historian Karen Ishizuka, was “an unholy alliance of racism and imperialism, like nothing before or since—the war united Asians in America who, regardless of our various ethnicities, looked more enemy than American.” According to the scholar Daryl J. Maeda, Asian American veterans reported being humiliated and dehumanized by their fellow GIs as “gooks” while their supposed enemies, the Vietnamese, often identified them as their own. In the 1977 play Honey Bucket by Melvyn Escueta, an old Vietnamese woman touches the black hair of an American soldier named Andy. She asks, “Same-same Viet-me?”

    “Filipino. Uh, Philippines,” Andy says.

“Same-same, Viet-me,” the peasant repeats confidently.

* * *

—

In college, I was more interested in art than activism, so I discovered our radical history rather late. My only exposure to it in school was scanning the row of faded books on Asian American social movements in the library, its death entombed in those dull dry textbooks that were never checked out. But I also recall how the anti-racist movements in the sixties and seventies were dismissed as failures. Marxists wrote off the fight for Chicano, Asian American, and Native American rights as extravagantly specialized, atomizing the Left from thinking about the core issue of class, whereas the mainstream center dismissed it as overtly militant, an opinion shared not only by whites but by minorities as well.

In a 1996 New York Times interview, Yuri Kochiyama declared, “People have a right to violence, to rebel, to fight back. And given what the United States and Western powers have done to the third world…these countries should fight back.” Right afterwards, the interviewer, Norimitsu Onishi, deflated her quote by saying that Kochiyama “clings to views now consigned to the political fringe.”

    I embraced all these half-baked opinions without doing my homework. Whatever their politics were, I thought, they were now outdated. It concerns me how fast I dismissed the hard work of my activist predecessors after hearing enough “experts” spout off on the frivolity of identity politics when the international and interracial politics of Kochiyama was anything but frivolous. It makes me worried about the future, about this nation’s inborn capacity to forget, about the powers that be who always win and take over the narrative. Already, “woke” is a hashtag that’s now mocked, when being awake is not a singular revelation but a long-term commitment fueled by constant reevaluation. Ending this book, I think about what prognosis I can offer among the crowded field of experts who warn of our end times. What I can say is look back to that lost blade of history when activists like Kochiyama offered an alternate model of mutual aid and alliance. They offered an alternate model of us.

* * *

—

A thought experiment: what if every time white people yell at nonwhites to go back to [insert nation or continent], they are immediately granted their wish? Confusion will abound. Ecuadorians will find themselves in Mexico, or I could find myself in China. But what if they get it right and I find myself zapped to Seoul?

I haven’t returned since 2008, when I went to visit my grandmother who, at the age of one hundred, was slowly dying in an appalling nursing home that I still can’t think about without being upset at my family. That home was like some daycare from hell, with pink walls and a creepy recording of church songs sung by children playing all hours of the day. Elderly people, packed ten to a room, whimpered for their kids to come visit them. My sister was there for a year, caring for our grandmother, because the rest of my relatives were too old to manage her severe dementia. “I want to die before my family abandons me in old age,” my grandmother used to say.

    I can’t live in Seoul. It is not a good place for women. Through cosmetic surgery, many women shrink down their naturally wide Mongolian faces to whitened inverted teardrops. The education system is merciless. In 1997, the International Monetary Fund bailed out South Korea’s crippling financial crisis with a $58 billion loan upon the agreement that the nation open up its markets to foreign investors and relax labor market reforms, making it easier to hire and fire workers and loosen carbon emission standards so that American cars can be imported. Now real wages have stagnated. Unemployment is dire. College graduates call their country “Hell Chosun” after an oppressive dynasty with a feudal class system. A murky haze of micro-dust has settled over Seoul, dust which can’t be seen but is felt at the back of your throat, and which will cause long-term health problems, like cancer. During certain months, if Koreans have to go outside at all, they wear surgical masks, but even that isn’t enough to protect them.

* * *

—

Then be grateful that you live here.

* * *

—

    Theresa Hak Kyung Cha writes, “Arrest the machine that purports to employ democracy but rather causes the successive refraction of her.” The most damaging legacy of the West has been its power to decide who our enemies are, turning us not only against our own people, like North and South Korea, but turning me against myself.