I was then surprised by the audience at Western Michigan University, which was more racially mixed than I had anticipated. The crowd seemed as upset as I was. That week, Republican senators were using the Japanese internment camps as precedent to justify the Muslim registry. I talked about the internment camps and how history must not be repeated. Then I read an essay from this book. A few students of color sat up front and approached me afterwards to tell me how much they appreciated the reading. Among them, a Korean American student said how alone and alienated she felt on campus. She asked if she could hug me. When I hugged her, she began sobbing. It is for her, I thought, that I’m writing this book.
Then a white woman in her seventies came up to me. She was a gaunt, unsmiling, flinty-looking woman, her two hands gripping a cane.
“I want to thank you for mentioning the internment camps. I was a POW in the Philippines during the war,” she said. “I came from a family of missionaries. We were all imprisoned even though I was a child. The Japanese soldiers threatened to torture us because of what the U.S. were doing to their Japanese American citizens. What Trump is proposing is wrong. He’s putting us all in danger.”
After I thanked her for her story, she gave me a hard look.
“I wish you’d read your poems,” she said sternly. “We need poems to heal.”
“I’m not ready to heal,” I said as gently as I could because I was afraid how she’d respond.
She nodded.
“I respect that,” she said, and walked away.
* * *
—
More than three million Koreans died in the Korean War, roughly 10 percent of the population. Among them, untold numbers of innocent civilians were killed because they were in the way or were mistaken for Communist collaborators. During that war, my father was at home with his family when they heard a pounding at their door. Before they could react, American soldiers broke into their shack. The GIs kicked down earthenware jars of soy paste and trampled their bedding to shreds. In a matter of minutes, their home was in shambles. The soldiers boomed out orders in their alien language. But no one could understand anything. “What do they want?” the family asked one another frantically. “Why are they here?” The soldiers gestured at my grandfather to go outside. These gigantic men dwarfed my grandfather. Still, my grandfather was noncompliant. He kept asking, in Korean, “What do you want from us? We did nothing wrong!” Finally, one of the soldiers rifle-butted my grandfather in the head and dragged him out of his own house.
The whole family followed them outside, into the courtyard, and my grandfather kept pleading in Korean. The soldier fired a warning shot into the ground to shut him up. He, along with the rest of the family, was ordered to lie on the ground with his hands behind his head. The soldier cocked his gun and aimed it at my grandfather’s head. And then my father’s older brother recognized the soldiers’ translator, who arrived at that moment. They had gone to school together. My uncle called out to the translator, who recognized him as well. The translator told the American soldiers their intel was mistaken. These villagers were not Communists but innocent civilians. They had the wrong people.
* * *
—
I thought of my father’s story when I watched the viral video of David Dao being dragged out of a crowded United Airlines plane by a security guard. On April 9, 2017, airline attendants asked for volunteers to give up their seats because the plane was overcrowded. When no one offered, personnel randomly chose Dao to give up his seat. He refused, leading staff to call security, who forcibly removed him. Dao was a sixty-nine-year-old Vietnamese man of narrow build, with a full head of black hair that looked recently cut. He was dressed sensibly for the plane in a black Patagonia sweater and a khaki canvas cap, which was knocked off during the altercation.
Asian friends of mine and Asian American journalists who wrote about Dao said the same thing: “Dao reminds me of my father.” It wasn’t just that he was the same age as our fathers. It was also his trim and discreet appearance that made him familiar. His nondescript appearance was as much for camouflage as it was for comfort, cultivated to project a benign and anonymous professionalism. His appearance said: I am not one to take up space nor make a scene. Not one to make that sound especially.
That sound was more disturbing than Dao being dragged unconscious, glasses askew, his sensible sweater riding up to expose his pooched stomach. Before he was dragged, three aviation officers wrenched Dao out of his window seat like they were yanking a mongoose out of its hole by the scruff. And then you heard Dao make this snarling, weaselish shriek. To hear that shriek in the public setting of an economy-class cabin stopped the heart. It was mortifying. He might as well have soiled himself. How many years did it take to prove that he was a well-spoken man?
* * *
—
Anyone who ever had to suffer through flying economy identified with Dao. Media identified Dao as a “passenger,” a “physician,” a “man,” and his Asian identity, it was initially argued, was beside the point. Maybe, in this rare case, an Asian man is finally the everyman who represents all of middle-class America, but I don’t buy it. Dao was not everyman, because not every man would have been brutalized in that way. In the same way I saw Dao and thought, He is not any man, he is my father, Chicago aviation officers thought, He is not any man, he is a thing. They sized him up as passive, unmasculine, untrustworthy, suspicious, and foreign. Years of accumulated stereotypes unconsciously flickered through their minds before they acted.
And not every man would have reacted the way Dao did. After he regained consciousness, Dao escaped security and rushed back into the plane. He ran back down the aisle while repeating in a soft, disoriented voice, “I have to go home, I have to go home.” Blood streamed out of his mouth and down his chin. Later it was discovered that the officers had slammed Dao’s face into the armrest when wrenching him out of his seat, breaking his nose and his teeth, and causing a severe concussion that might have made him hallucinate. Dao looked dazed and adrift as he searched for an available seat or anything he could anchor himself to. He settled for the galley curtains that separated the plane by class. He clung to the curtains as if they were an execution post and said, “Just kill me, just kill me now.”
* * *
—
This is not every man. Dao is in another place, another time. The savagery of his ejection may have triggered some deep-rooted trauma. In 1975, Saigon had fallen. His home was no longer his home. Dao was forced to flee as a refugee, and he and his wife raised their family of five kids in Kentucky, a new home that—if reports are to be believed about his checkered history—had its own share of absurd hardships. Dao was caught trafficking prescription drugs for sex and lost his medical license, after which he earned his income as a poker player. While I agree with his defenders that his rap sheet is irrelevant to the United Airlines incident, it’s relevant to me, since it helps us to see Dao in a more complex, realistic light. Dao is not a criminal nor is he some industrious automaton who could escape the devastation of his homeland and, through a miraculous arc of resilience, become an upstanding doctor whose kids are also doctors. For many immigrants, if you move here with trauma, you’re going to do what it takes to get by. You cheat. You beat your wife. You gamble. You’re a survivor and, like most survivors, you are a god-awful parent. Watching Dao, I thought of my father watching his own father being dragged out of his own home. I thought of Asians throughout history being dragged against their will, driven or chased out of their native homes, out of their adopted homes, out of their native country, out of their adopted country: ejected, evicted, exiled.