A friend messaged me on Wednesday night and told me that she was at a loss as to how to explain the result of the US presidential election to her Chinese friends who did not know why it bothers some of us so much. Her predicament resonated with me and has inspired me to give my own answer, which hopefully helps others understand the shock that they see in so many Americans.
As I watched the election results unfold on Tuesday, I was struck with a sense of dejection that I had never experienced. My chat apps went crazy with various shouts of disbelief, memes and messages of lost hope. I too partook in these activities and I went about my day trying to rationalize and accept the new “status quo” of seeing the name Donald Trump after “US president” after he is sworn into office in January.
Still, I was unable to shake the feeling or put a finger on why this bothered me so deeply. I am an Asian-American expatriate. I no longer live in the US, nor do I belong to one of the groups dragged through the mud. Was I truly being affected?
I went home and watched election reactions on YouTube, read articles on how the polls could have been so wrong and looked into the demographics of Trump’s voter base. It was not until I stepped into the shower that I was truly able to grasp what had happened, and it was then that the reason for my dejection crystallized. This was the first time in my life that I felt truly ashamed to be an American. I say that knowing full well the weight of those words.
I am a first-generation
Taiwanese-American, along with my sister. I was born in the US to Taiwanese parents. My father was studying in Connecticut during the initial wave of Asian students going to the US in the 1980s. My family moved back to Taiwan shortly thereafter, where I spent a sizable piece of my early childhood. Nevertheless, the US never faded from view. Like many people around the world, and Asians in particular, my parents saw the US as the place with the best education in the world. As a result, it was a land of great opportunity. So it came to be that I was shipped off to continue my education in the US from the second grade on.
It was in college that I discovered racially based clubs, such as the Intercollegiate Taiwanese American Students Association, among others.
It was there that I learned that many of my peers experienced a US story radically different from my own, one which raised questions about their cultural identity. However, I have never truly felt like an outsider and I would like to believe that most in the same position do not.
My communities were not primarily Asian, but I felt welcomed. I was not met with open hostility or prejudice growing up and I can only count three instances where I had racism directed at me, all of them as an adult. Maybe it was a lack of awareness or an ingrained naivete, but that was the US I lived in — inclusive, open and kind. I was proud of that. It was not without its problems, but I knew it was home and that I was a member of that society. That was lost on Tuesday night.
The hashtag #notmyamerica is peerless in defining this moment for me. What bothers me is not that we have a Republican in the office; it is about what this result means in terms of the US social fabric. While Democratic candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton won the popular vote by almost half a million ballots, there are still large swathes of the population that wanted Trump in power.
The man who won the election is a man who ran on a campaign of divisiveness, closed borders and anger. It is not just about race, but rather a whole slew of “them versus us” themes. Bigotry and misogyny were bulwarks of a candidate endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan. This is the man that the US has voted to hold its highest office.
I understand that not all votes were cast on religious, racial or gender lines, that not all of Trump’s supporters are racist, blue-collar white men without an education. Despite his supporters being predominantly white, to have won the White House he needed the support of a larger coalition, including those who are educated.
Therein lies my shame. I am a product of the US education system that my parents sacrificed so much for. Despite all of its flaws, we were shown the darkness of the nation’s history from a young age so that we, as adults, would not make the same mistakes. The system championed freedom, dreams and the strict observance of a document written for the people.
The hitherto successful US experiment is why the US is the self-professed greatest nation on Earth. So it is with this backdrop that the heirs to that principle willfully chose to place Trump in office. More than anything, this was a backlash against globalization that has created massive inequalities.
As it turns out, a tide does not lift all boats, but a previously inconceivable number of people saw it necessary to embrace or ignore a leader spewing tenets we know to be wrong to change a system they believe to be against them. To choose a demagogue who preaches what is, in many cases, the antithesis of what the US was built on.
It is yet to be seen if Trump can deliver on his campaign promises, just as it will be seen if those within the other branches of government allow him to do so. It will be seen if the US closes itself off and if the messages Trump brandished as weapons during the election embolden those among us who feel that taking the US back means taking it back for just a select group. That “Making America Great Again” means stripping the rights of some for the ideological beliefs of others. Today, the US has spoken, but it is not the US that I know.
All is not lost and as US President Barack Obama said, the sun will still rise in the morning, and indeed it has. I have never dabbled in politics beyond voting. Neither have I ever had the urge to share my political views with the world beyond a close social circle.
However, if there is one lesson to learn from this, it is that for better or worse, the US democracy works. People truly hold the power to govern. For those who wished for a different outcome, I urge them to do what they can to keep making the US the one that I, and those like me, lived through.
Do your part to celebrate our diversity, celebrate our social progress and continue to vote on the issues that you believe in.
The US as a nation showed the world that the light of Lady Liberty has dimmed, but now it is up to all of us to keep it alive.
Calvin Chen is a Taiwanese-American expat working in Beijing.
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