Recently, my only Asian American friend from high school shared that her prevailing memory of me was that I hated being Chinese and wished I was white. She remembers me saying this over and over again. I had always felt the categorical otherness of being Chinese in a town that was over 90% white and had so minute an Asian population that the category was often omitted altogether in census data (other times, it came in at a decimal below 1%). But I lacked a framework to make sense of it. I didn’t yet understand white supremacy, or the model minority myth or even systemic racism. I didn’t know that I was a person of color.
I instinctively hated what was hated in me, but even that felt like pointing at a ghost. How do you gather evidence when all the evidence is just ways you are quietly not there? The movies you are not in, the books, the TV shows. The way your history is omitted, but you can’t cite what you don’t know, you can only know what isn’t yours, and the history you learn never is. You singularly fill the gap that accounts for your existence, because if you haven’t learned about you, then surely they haven’t either. They ask you about your eyes or your food or your parents’ names, but it’s all in good faith (except when it’s not). The systems that are designed to restrain us — the ones that succeed without our ever seeing them — breed a particularly maddening brand of self-hatred.
Following the election, the bubble of white-adjacent privilege I had quietly kept myself in popped overnight. All of the good behavior in the world couldn’t save me from the pain that was now presented to me as my birthright. People I loved had received a blanket permission slip to say out loud any abhorrent things they had believed all along. Oftentimes racist ideology was shared with me with no awareness of its implication on me at all.
I’d spent so many years trying to convince white people and myself that I was one of them, and I’d almost done it. I’d prided myself on being the kind of Asian you could make Asian jokes to, ask your racist questions to. I beat people to the punchline for a quick laugh. I cracked jokes about pretending to be everybody’s adopted Chinese daughter; one year, I wound up in three different families’ church directory photos as a gag. I’d spent my life allying with whiteness, and I couldn’t believe now how it had betrayed me.
When I share now that I voted for Trump in 2016, it drops like a bomb every time. People who didn’t know me then are shocked because it feels aggressively counter to every value I hold now. People who did know me then just never clocked me as particularly Republican, and so even “voting for the platform” doesn’t quite explain what I did because was I ever so against abortion?
When I told my therapist a few weeks ago, she gasped and immediately asked me, “Why?” The truth of the moment of decision is not particularly interesting or compelling. “I was told I had to,” feels cheap and off-kilter. My understanding of that political era is so different now than it was then that it is hard for me to access my actual beliefs from that time. What did I truly believe about Hillary Clinton? How little did I think about my decision as my own before I cast it on a ballot? Most of my close white evangelical friends sat the election out because they said they just couldn’t vote for him, and they couldn’t vote for her. How, then, had I reconciled the cognitive dissonance that was voting for Donald Trump?
The short answer is, I didn’t. The longer one is that two primary impulses compelled me to my vote: the desire to stay loved and the desire to stay close to whiteness — both repackaged as a desire to please God. I didn’t believe Trump would get me any closer to these things, but I thought compliance might. I don’t know what I really believed about the stakes of that election or the platforms of the candidates (though my body gave me signs I had betrayed myself immediately after I voted), but I do know that I truly believed that the church was the reigning authority on love. This belief, paired with my pleasing tendencies and my insecurities, made me incredibly susceptible to the church’s ideological mandates. I felt like I had snuck into the group and had so much to lose. I wanted to stay trusted and to be seen as good, and I believed them when they told me how to do it.
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