What does it mean to belong?

During the pandemic, misinformation about the coronavirus contributed to an alarming spike in racial violence against Asian Americans. The pandemic became an excuse for anti-Asian xenophobia, drawing attention to a painful reality.  In this country, Asian Americans — even when born and raised here — often are viewed and treated as perpetual foreigners.

As the New York Times reported, “A surge of violence and harassment targeting Asian Americans has shown that America’s long history of treating people of Asian descent as foreigners whose belonging is contingent — on labor, on cultural assimilation, on perceived success — is far from a relic.” According to the recently released STAATUS (Social Tracking of Asian Americans in the US) Index Report 2022, Asian Americans are the least likely to feel accepted compared with Black Americans, Latino Americans and white Americans, even when born in the U.S.

And yet, even the term Asian American at times can feel like a misnomer. The idea of a shared identity meant to encapsulate the experiences of millions of people with very different ties to countries and cultures can feel aspirational at best and essentializing at worst. What shared interests bind refugees struggling to make a home in a new country with people, and their families, who have lived in the U.S. for generations?

Given this vexing question, Serica joined forces with the team at Exploring Hate, a public media initiative from WNET in New York, PBS’s flagship station, to explore the roots and rise of hate in America and across the globe. The result was “be/longing: Asian Americans Now”, a five-part digital series profiling Asian American trailblazers from across the country.

Despite the incredible array of experiences reflected in our interviews, some common threads began to emerge, about belonging and exclusion; resilience and hope; and solidarity in the face of hate. Here’s what some of our interviewees had to say about what belonging means to them:

Viet Thanh Nguyen came to the U.S. as a Vietnamese refugee when he was four years old.  Today Nguyen is a college professor and the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer. He discusses his lifelong feelings of displacement, the resilience of the refugee, and why telling stories is not only his craft but his mission.

“One of the experiences of marginalization is to feel that one is separate and isolated from other populations; and to be invested only in one’s own representation, in one’s own interest, in one’s own uplift. And my feeling is that, while it could be possible that we uplift ourselves, that in order to truly liberate ourselves, we actually have to make sure we liberate everyone. And that’s actually much more difficult project for people to imagine.”

Dr. Richard Park, cofounder of CityMD, is a son of Korean immigrants, who grew up in the New York borough of Queens. Today he is behind a new venture to provide medical care to one of the city’s most vulnerable populations. His mission to serve poor and elderly Asian immigrants has become more urgent as hate crimes against the AAPI community have surged. 

“No, you’re not invisible to us. No, you do deserve care. Yes, you deserve NOT to be marginalized. You deserve to be part of society. My mom was that person. My parents are grateful to be even second-class citizens in this great country, as opposed to those of us that were born here like we’re Americans. What are you talking about? I ate the same macaroni and cheese and frankfurters in the school lunch as you did. Why should I be treated any different?”

In flight from war-torn Laos, Hmong refugees began settling in Minnesota in the 1970s. Today the Twin Cities is home to the largest population of Hmong in America. As their new country grapples with a racial reckoning, Hmong American leaders are reaching across racial and ethnic lines to fight anti-Asian hate and systemic racism. 

“When I went to college, there was always this assumption that because I was a person of color, that I was from out of the country. It was very, very offensive. It was also hurtful too to see that racism be played out, whether it was subtle or whether it wasn’t, that pain is still felt…. We’re not different from anyone else. We may look different and have different stories and experiences and identities, but at the end of the day, we all want the same things.”

Asian American actor George Takei is famous for his starring role on the TV series Star Trek.  But as a child, he was wrenched from his home with his family and wrongfully imprisoned in a Japanese American internment camp during World War II. Takei discusses what being American means to him and what gives him hope for the future.

“We need the diversity of Asians to be all over, active participants in our system; and for young people to be able to see people that look like themselves on television, on the Broadway stage, as scientists throughout American society. That is going to bring about that society that we look forward to.”

On March 16, 2021, a 21-year-old white man murdered eight people in attacks on three separate spas across metropolitan Atlanta. Six of the eight victims were women of Asian descent. In the aftermath of the shootings, filmmakers Gina Kim and Titi Yu set out to tell the story. They call their upcoming PBS documentary Rising Against Asian Hate: One Day in March. Among a small number of filmmakers who are both Asian American and female, Gina and Titi discuss the perspective they bring to their work, and what they have discovered about the AAPI community in the face of anti-Asian violence. 

“Every single person we spoke to in the film said at some point in their life, they’ve been told by somebody on the street, go back to your country. You know, you don’t belong here. Go back to China. China-boy, whatever. Every single person. And I just felt that every person we spoke to in the film, their pain was bubbling at the surface.”

Watch the entire five-part be/longing series, for free, on PBS.

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This article was produced in partnership with The Serica Initiative, which is our sister 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that is independently run from The China Project.