In the mind-numbing aftermath of the marathon Wen Ho Lee spy scare I was torn by two conflicting emotions.
Am I too a potential Wen Ho Lee in the eyes of mainstream America, although he is a Chinese American from anti-Communist Taiwan and I, a Korean American from anti-Communist South Korea? I cant help but wondering. The ordeal of Wen Ho Lee is but the latest flare-up in cyclical waves of Yellow Peril fear in the public and media consciousness ever since yellow men reached the rocky shores of a hostile new world called California in the Gold Rush era of 1850s.
Another gnawing question: Where have you been for all these years, Dr. Wen Ho Lee?
The nuclear scientist represents the emerging new class of made-in-USA techno-mandarins, successful in their own professions and enterprises, who have remained aloof from the maddening crowd of new immigrants and refugees struggling in the other Asian America amid the seething inner cities of America. In glaring contrast to their Jewish and African American counterparts.
Ions ago, it seems, in his America Is in the Heart, itinerant farm worker/author Carlos Bulosan mused about the fate of being an Asian immigrant in a hostile society.
I know deep down in my heart that I am an exile in America, he wrote. I feel like a criminal running away from a crime I didn’t commit. And this crime is that I am a Filipino in America.
The everlasting icon of those bitter harvest times, Bulosan was speaking for his fellow manongs Filipino stoop laborers who were forced to remain lifelong bachelors in the apartheid land under pogrom-like siege fanned by the iron triad of the nativist press, labor unions and liberal white politicians during the Depression years.
The Filipino siege was merely a sequel to the rabid anti-Chinese agitation, violence and exclusion followed by the all-out and successful exclusion of Japanese Americans and their eventual incarceration in desolate camps.
Throughout, it must be noted, the California press led by the Hearst (William Randolph Hearst) and McClatchy (Valentine S. McClatchy) chains was instrumental to these successful open seasons on Asian immigrants.
In this day and age of the global Internet and the shrinking Pacific Rim, those harsh times seem so far and remote. But deep inside me I heard Bulosans haunting voice when I saw the frail-looking Taiwan native being led by FBI agents to jail manacled to his waist last March a day after the lofty liberal New York Times launched its nine-month journalistic lynching of Wen Ho Lee as the prime suspect of being a spy for Communist China.
In retrospect, The Times literally got away with character murder and national scare, with its resident columnist issuing a dire warning that this nation was at risk of a nuclear holocaust because of Lee’s treachery.
After a decent interval, President Clinton said he was quite troubled by his own justice and energy departments’ treatment of the Chinese American only after the outraged trial judge chided his administration for having embarrassed our entire nation. That was that.
Asian Americans ever passive, patient and polite don’t matter. They are prisoners of their own internalized stereotypes who in turn behave in such manners as to reinforce their own stereotypes. And the victims and victimizers know the rules of the recurring Yellow Peril games.
Never mind the Gestapo-like treatment of an innocent man before a trial. Following a rhetorical ritual of self-admonishment, the nation and the media are back to normalcy as if nothing had happened, after a new spell of good old fashioned Asian bashing in the new millennium.
To my wonderment, I felt like I too was running away from a crime I didn’t commit simply because I had become brainwashed enough to see myself in Wen Ho Lees plight as an alien figure in the suspicious white world, even after nearly a half century of working as a journalist in the white media.
Bulosan was an unschooled lowly farm hand from the colonial islands of the Philippines; Wen Ho Lee an archetypical Asian American elite who has enjoyed the reward of professional success in America.
Despite their starkly contrasting backgrounds, both are in the same boat: they belong to a mythical racial category called Orientals and later Asian Americans whose alien presence has become an article of faith in the American imagination.
How did it come to this?
For those who remember the rocky journey of Asians in California and other West Coast states, its no mystery that this pathological fear of Yellow Peril has become deeply embedded in the American culture, along with a series of economic hard times, and trade wars with Asian nations and in the past half century American involvements in World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War.
These are uneasy times indeed for Asian America, despite the unprecedented good times in history. One singular persistent irony in Asian Americans experiences is that no matter how long they have lived and labored in America and no matter how much they have contributed in blood and sweat to its fulfillment, they still remain a troublesome presence in their own country.
Am I a Wen Ho Lee? Such is an unwritten chapter of Asian American predicament in the new millennium.