Strangers in their own land

The research eventually led Chu to the Museum of Chinese in America in Manhattan, which grew out of two men's effort to salvage the history of their forefathers, partly by roaming the streets in Manhattan Chinatown and looking into whatever had been thrown out onto the streets after the passing of an elderly resident.

There, Chu discovered not "skeletal facts" but a history fleshed out in numerous relics-often odds and ends that were no more than flotsam on the deserted shore of memory but that spoke volumes about the remarkable yet unsung journeys of their owners.

In addition to humiliation, what Chu discovered was power and pride amid poignancy, heroism and humanity. She learned that in 1884 a Chinese American couple took the San Francisco school board to court for banning their daughter from attending an all-white school, and that a group of young Asian American artists-activists in Manhattan Chinatown published an art book in the 70s celebrating Asian American creativity and proudly titled it Yellow Pearl.

"People who battled social injustice-up to that point they had been absent from my textbooks and my consciousness", says Chu, who had previously seen Chinese heroes only on the silver screen, as high-kicking Kong-Fu masters.

Things have changed little over the past 30 years. "I've grown up with absolutely no Asian American role models, and as of now I still do not know any," says Lai, the high schooler, who longs for an Asian American equivalent of Martin Luther King Jr. or Malcolm X to "look up to". "Instead of trying to stop the appropriation of and hate against Asian culture, let's seek to educate children and present great Asian role models, whether it be through signs or posters or just reading a quote from a great Asian American leader."

In fact there are many people worth looking up to, said Joseph Chou (Zhou), a recently retired assistant principal at Francis Lewis High School in New York. Chou's maternal grandfather, Zhou Peiyuan, studied at the University of Chicago and the California Institute of Technology before becoming a student of Albert Einstein at Princeton. While serving as deputy director of the Chinese Academy of Sciences he played a crucial role in facilitating US-China educational exchanges in the late 1970s.

"Chen-Ning Yang, Tsung-Dao Lee and Chao Chung Ting-none of them are taught at our schools," said Chou, referring to the three Chinese American Nobel Prize laureates in physics (Yang and Lee in 1957 and Ting in 1976). Then there is Chien-Shiung Wu, Chinese American nuclear physicist whose experiment proved the theory of Yang and Lee that resulted in them receiving the Nobel Prize. In February this year, 24 years after Wu died, the US Postal Service honored "the queen of nuclear research" with a commemorative stamp.

"But it will probably take more time before our schoolchildren learn about her during their Women's History Months," said the father-of-three, who was also behind the open letter.

"The entrenched views of Asian Americans can only be fully dismantled when our educators recognize their contributions in not one but all areas of American society."

As powerful as that argument is, "it would be hard for it alone to get us anywhere", Yu said. "Our communities as a whole must reach out to other communities if we are to argue convincingly for the importance of Asian American history education, not just for our children but for their children as well.

"It's time for us to really show others, especially other minority groups, who we are-generous people who genuinely care about them, not only because we share the same goal in fighting white supremacy."

Yu said that during her early years in the US, faced with the potential of racist bullying, she had repeatedly been told to "hang out with Chinese and not to mingle with others".

In January Yu, with her two children and a couple of their friends, set up a group called Read Nation. Recruiting volunteer high-schoolers to help elementary students with their reading and math, Yu makes sure the effort benefits children within and beyond their own community.

One of them was the 9-year-old son of Ingrid Maldonado, a Hispanic elementary-school teacher and mother of three. "Due to the pandemic, I have to teach both remote and in-class children and have found it very hard to give myself to my own kids at the end of a long day," she said.

Maldonado has referred to Yu several other children who desperately need help, including the 8-year-old niece of Enunide Smith, a black girl who, according to her aunt and guardian, "loves it so much that she wants to get online for the tutoring every day".

"I cannot start to imagine all the hatred that has been brought to bear on my Asian American students and friends," Maldonado said. "They have been here for so long, and our children should learn about that."

By passing on what Yu calls "an enshrinement of education embedded in Chinese tradition", she also hopes to debunk the myth of "model minorities", a term many Asian Americans consider inaccurate and disparaging and one that, they believe, only serves to drive a wedge between Asians and other minority groups.

"Before the model minority myth, Asians and Asian Americans were exploited for their labor, othered, seen as 'the yellow peril'," Bianca Mabute-Louie, an ethnic studies adjunct at Laney College in Oakland, California, was quoted as saying in a Time magazine article last year.

"[The myth] came about when black power movements were starting to gain momentum (in the 1960s), so [politicians] were trying to undercut those movements and say, 'Asians have experienced racism in this country, but because of hard work, they've been able to pull themselves up out of racism by their bootstraps and have the American Dream, so why can't you?' In those ways, the model minority myth has really been a tool of white supremacy to squash black power movements and racial justice movements."

Having taught for eight years in an elementary school with a predominantly black-and-brown student population, Tsui says Asian American students, teachers and their communities cannot be truly empowered if their history is to be taught "in a linear way" that fails to highlight the solidarity forged in history between their people and other peoples of color.

That solidarity can be traced back to the 1880s, when Frederick Douglass (1817-1895), an African American social reformer and abolitionist, denounced the notorious Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which banned all Chinese laborers from entering the country for the next 60 years. The term Asian American was coined in the 1960s by students at the University of California, Berkeley, who were inspired by the black power movement.

"History doesn't happen on its own," says Tsui, who went into teaching convinced that music could heal her students traumatized by police brutality against blacks, before being inspired by them to "stand up and speak out".

"Our history is happening at the same time black history is happening. When we talk about Asian American history education, we must have it next to African American history and Latino American history, and we must study the connections between one another.

"In teaching our history in this country we must make sure there's joy for our students; the triumphs are just as important as the trials and tribulations."

Yet triumph has never come easily. The parents received no direct response from the mayor or the schools chancellor. "They only responded to media interviews, through a spokesperson," Li says. "And it sounds nothing like a commitment."

"One step at a time" was the answer from Yu. "We'll be working at the community and school level, engaging students, talking to librarians and teachers, as we continue to rally behind John Liu's bill. Ours is a bottom-up approach, while his is top-down. Hopefully we'll meet somewhere in the middle," she said.

Another person who has expressed support is New York State senator Toby Stavisky, who previously took part in a teleconference with the parents. "As a member of the Jewish community, she must understand where unfounded hatred could lead people," said Yu, whose husband's great great grandparents labored on the Transcontinental Railroad.

For Chou, "Asian Americans have never banded together as tightly as they do now" during the 41 years of his stay in the US. "And they have never been as vociferous as they are now," he says. Chou is running for a place on his local community education council, which will allow him, if elected, to vote to introduce a resolution for district schools to teach Asian American history. The resolution is being prepared by the same team of parents.

At the beginning of their mother's involvement, neither Li's nor Song's daughter has shown much interest.

"My feeling is that they don't want to be mentally disturbed-to be reminded of the Asian hate and all that," Song says. "There's a tendency to look away, if only to protect themselves from any negative experience." That was until a few days ago, when Song's daughter, after browsing the Asian American news website NextShark, said to her mother,"I saw your letter."

"That was all she said, but it means something," Song says.

"American history cannot exist without the history of the minorities that have made significant contributions to the United States, and so if Asian American history isn't taught in schools, the objective history of our country cannot be taught," read one comment Yu has collected from the students.

Perhaps the most powerful message is always conveyed in simple words. Early last year, when president Donald Trump began calling COVID-19 "the China virus" and Asian communities across the country were convulsed by the first wave of hate crimes during the pandemic, a black girl from the 5th grade went up to Tsui and said:"When I see an Asian person walking down the street, I just smile at them."