At the same time, a recent class conversation sticks out to me. In the midst of teaching my class on Asian-American literature, I had mentioned that May is Asian/Pacific Heritage Month. One of my Asian-American students, a senior, told me that he didn’t know that. It’s easy to presume that his lack of knowledge was an anomaly, that most Asian-Americans would know of their history month. However, my own life experience tells a different story: before beginning work in education, I myself did not know about this month, nor did many in my family. In the end, while the month is meant to pay homage to those Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders that helped to build the United States brick-by-brick, these bricks seem to go unnoticed by the majority of Americans, even those that are meant to be celebrated.

Part of this lack of awareness is due to the history of Asian-American and Pacific Islander immigration to the United States. Prior to 1965, the United States engaged in strict quota systems of immigration overall, and people from Asia suffered the strictest quotas. Chinese people were and continue to be the only nationality of people ever formally excluded from travel and immigration to the United States, and this ban lasted for almost eighty years. Asian families who lived through this era of American history endured racism and segregation that brought along, among other things, the advent of Chinatowns and other ethnic enclaves. It is this group of immigrants and their progeny that, inspired by the civil rights movement, birthed the term Asian-American for the first time in the 1960s. A group of people who lived and contributed to American history decided, for the first time, to identify themselves as such.

However, the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965 brought a new wave of immigration spurred on by the abolition of quotas based on race or nationality. All of a sudden, people from all over the world could bring their own histories to this country and their own hopes. Without the voices of previous generations of immigrants to tell them the stories of history, they could not hear the experiences of Chinese immigrants in the first Chinatowns passed down to them. Many of these new immigrants would come from new areas and new countries and so actually would not share much culturally with prior immigrants.

For years, my students have told me that the Asian-American experience in history class has been learning about the Chinese Exclusion Act and Japanese Internment. The same was also true of my experience in school.

Without a connection to a common history and with varying ties to the United States, the connection to an Asian-American/Pacific Islander (AAPI) community, let alone a month to celebrate it, are often varied. However, the advent of COVID-19³ and its association with China has put a spotlight on the fact that those in the AAPI community can see themselves as individuals with their own complex identities, but that those in the wider world around them may only see something foreign. The events of the past year, in fact, have put a spotlight on how vulnerable a group becomes without this commonly understood sense of belonging that is rooted in history.

The United States, along with a few other countries with large Asian populations, have seen a marked rise in anti-Asian sentiment and hate speech. According to the Pew Research Center, about 4-in-10 Americans report that it is more common for people to express racist views about Asian people now than it was before COVID-19. The same report states that Asian-Americans are more likely to suffer the sting of racial slurs, and since this report’s publication in July 2020, the world has witnessed an increase of violent crimes against the Asian-American community, including the attacks on elderly Asian-Americans and the shootings in Atlanta. As of April 2021, this has resulted in a one-third of Asian-Americans fearing physical and verbal threats and the belief that such threats are becoming more commonplace.⁴