This Is Us
I Can’t Protect My Parents From Racism, and It Hurts
On anti-Asian hate, allyship, and protecting our moms and dads
Like many thoughtful humans, I’ve been overcome with rage as I witness story after story of Asian American elders being pushed, kicked, and slammed into the ground just because they had the audacity to walk to church. But as an Asian American immigrant, I also felt something more.
Bizarrely, even though I would never engage in such hateful violence, I found myself feeling responsible.
I know I share this feeling with other immigrant children who have carried the burden of holding our parents up when they have been dismissed in their new country as being stupid, greedy, and unworthy. As being “less than.”
“You think I’m a dummy because I don’t speaking English?” my father would rage at me when I came home from school. As a five-year-old who was struggling to learn the language herself, the thought had never crossed my mind until then.
“I graduated from Ewha Women’s University, the oldest women’s university in Asia,” my mom growled at me when a child pulled their eyes tight at the sides and spat at her feet, running away yelling over her shoulder, “Chinese, Japanese… ”
Of course these things happened to me, too, but they never hurt as much as when they happened to my parents.
The true harm of systemic discrimination almost always lies in the details.
As the daughter of Korean immigrants, it was my job to make up for all the respect they weren’t getting elsewhere. To not only carry but to erase the hurt heaped on them by others. An immigrant child is never really a child. She is too busy wiping away the stain of racism in every corner of her home. But just as I moved to cover one soiled spot, another, even bigger dirt bomb would land. It was, and is, an impossible, never-ending job, this work of protecting our parents. Our home was never safe.
My parents’ obsessive efforts to push me toward the best educational opportunities — along with unlimited access to whatever books I wanted — paid off in the form of two Ivy League degrees. On the…
