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Joe Tien is a professor of mathematics at Ohio State University.
“Where you from, buddy?”
It was a question a stranger asked with malice on Jan. 6 as I waited for the route 2 bus on North High Street near 18th Avenue.
Ohio State University classes were cancelled due to winter storm Blair.
The stranger, a middle-aged white man with a navy overcoat and wearing a surgical mask and backpack, stepped out of his way to pose his question.
his was a question that Asians and Asian Americans hear far too often. Sometimes it is asked in genuine curiosity, sometimes it is asked with an agenda.
This time it was asked with a stare, with a hostile edge.
“This is my country!”
“I’m from here. Where you from?”
Here, meaning an Ohioan, born and raised. Born and raised in Cleveland, living in Columbus since 2009, professor at The Ohio State University.
During a Chinese class in college, my professor asked us whether we felt we were Chinese or American. My mandarin is generally insufficient to converse on complicated topics, but here the answer was easy: American, absolutely.
Asian American, and proud of it and my Chinese heritage, but American through and through.
The man kept walking briskly away. Distant 20 paces, his back turned and still walking, he calls out: “No way. Get out of my country.”
“This is my country!” I cursed, but the man continued walking rapidly without turning around.
I am 5’7″, 140 pounds, bespectacled and no wrestler, but contemplate tackling him, nonetheless.
I am on my way to a faculty dinner; we are recruiting for a position in mathematics of data science. It would be a novel reason for being late to a dinner of math professors: a brawl with a racist xenophobe.
Permission to hate
Jan. 6 is a fraught day.
The White House will soon be occupied once again by a man who denigrates immigrants at every turn.
The last time Trump was in the Oval Office, white supremacists marched with torches in Charlottesville, the Muslim ban was enacted and anti-Asian American hate spiked. The language from his presidency trickles down, gives permission to hate.
I have seen it myself.
Flashback to March 2020, during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, referred to by Trump as the “kung-flu virus.”
After a stressful day of zoom meetings with the Ohio Department of Health, I go for a run to clear my head. A car of young college-aged white men drives by, shouted “Corona! Corona!” as they passed. I a shook my fist and accelerated, but the car was gone.
But this question of, “Where are you from?” This framing of Asian Americans as perpetual foreigners predates Trump by far.
Most if not every Asian in America has similar stories.
Racism goes beyond black and white
The mocking of language, pulling up eyes, kung-fu poses and racial slurs — these are commonplace.
Getting told to “go back to China,” expletive added for emphasis, is no microaggression.
But are you aware of this if you are not Asian? What would you do as a bystander when you witness it? What do you tell your students as a teacher, tell your kids as a parent?
Opinion:‘There are those who benefit from divide-and-conquer policies that see Asians as “forever foreigners’
Our discussion of race in America in the schools and the media are one-dimensional.
The Columbus City Schools elementary curriculum includes reading “The Watsons Go to Birmingham,” discussion of the civil rights movement and a Martin Luther King oratory competition.
But is there a broader discussion of race? Recognition that not judging people by the color of our skin includes not just black and white, but yellow, red, brown, all shades of humanity?
What would you do?
I wonder, when I walk with my son in front of the sparkling, recently renovated Clinton Elementary School in Clintonville.
A yellow school bus sits at a red light. A young African American boy, maybe seven or eight years old, raises his face to the open window and shouts gibberish mocking the Chinese language at us.
I shout back that we speak English, but the bus drives away.
What I should have done was run in front of the bus, stopped it, no matter the scene or backed-up traffic and honking horns. I should have talked to the bus driver.
Sir, I want you to know that one of the students on the bus was mocking our race. He’s a child, he doesn’t know better, but it’s important that he learns, that his classmates learn that looking different does not warrant derision, that we are all people worthy of respect.
Please tell the teachers of the students on this bus. Because otherwise in 30 years, these cute children might be ignorant racists telling anyone who looks Asian to go back to China.
I would like to think that bystanders would speak up if someone on High Street told an African American that they should go back to the plantation.
That the person making those comments would be shouted down in shame. But no one said anything when I was told to “get out of my country.”
Fighting racism is not a zero-sum game.
We can stand up for people of all backgrounds when they are harassed and discriminated against. This will be all the more important in the coming years with anti-immigrant invective from Trump in the White House.
Columbus: we’re better than this.
Joe Tien is a professor of mathematics at The Ohio State University. He studies infectious disease dynamics and online ecosystems and has been a Cavs fan since the days of Mark Price and Brad Daugherty.