Columns | The Monster in the Mirror

You Gave the Enemy a Face—and That Face Was Mine

In America, we like to be heroes—to find our enemies and defeat them. So, in a pandemic where the enemy is not visceral, we create one that is.

This is The Monster in the Mirror, a column which uses mythical and legendary monsters from East Asian traditions as a lens to interrogate our fears.

We Asian Americans need to embrace and prove our American-ness in ways we never have before . . . we should show without a shadow of a doubt that we are Americans. —Andrew Yang, former Democratic presidential candidate

[In contemporary narratives] the monster, while initially perceived as terrible and an outsider, proves himself through his actions and his ability to care for others. —Andrea Kitta, author of The Kiss of Death: Contagion, Contamination, and Folklore

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In times of disease—like our current crisis—there are many characters. There are the sick and the healthy. The recuperated. The at-risk. The ones we deign worthy of saving. The ones we will save only if we have enough resources. The ones we let die. There are the workers on the front lines, in hospitals and in grocery stores, and the workers stuck at home. There are the people who sometimes make good choices and sometimes make bad choices and sometimes are just doing what they can to survive.

But in disease legends, there are only two characters: us and the monsters.

The question, then, is not Who is sick? but: Who is us?

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In the first version of this essay—the one I wrote in early February—my story was located entirely in the past. It was about my grandfather and his incarceration in Granada War Relocation Center (Camp Amache) during World War II, about the history of racism against Asians in America, about memory and monsters.

As a child, I was always more fascinated by the monsters than by the heroes or the gods. I wanted to know about the leviathan lurking in the deep, about the oni, the ogre-demons who pepper the legends of Japan. I loved stories like the one my grandfather wrote and illustrated for me, which talked about the obake—a type of yokai—that lived by the slough near his home.

But it’s May now. I am Japanese and Taiwanese American. I am ethnically Chinese. I cannot write anything without writing about Covid-19.

In this version of the essay, in this version of America, the past and the present converge on each other like time travelers caught in a loop, shocked—each time—to come face-to-face with themselves.

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You have seen the news stories about hate crimes against Asian Americans related to Covid-19. Asian American organizations of all kinds have responded to these stories with condemnation and fear and sorrow and strength. My response to these stories is that I can no longer look at them, or I can only look sideways, through my fingers. Our litany of pain and rage. (The intriguing part of disease legends, writes folklorist Andrea Kitta, is that in addition to fear of illness, they express primarily a fear of outsiders.)

Former presidential candidate Andrew Yang’s response to these stories is to encourage Asian America to prove ourselves. Implicit in his statement is that the jury to whom we must present our proof is the America Trump is speaking to when he tweets: It is very important that we totally protect our Asian American community . . . They are amazing people, and the spreading of the Virus is NOT their fault in any way, shape, or form. They are working closely with us to get rid of it.

This quote—a PR-sounding statement at odds with the rest of his rhetoric towards Asians—is about us but not to us. The audience is revealed by Trump’s pronoun usage in the final line: They are working closely with us to get rid of it. They clearly refers to Asian Americans. The question again, then, is who is us?

Our blood, they say, is contaminated. Our blood is the blood of monsters. 

White Americans, the real Americans, the Americans that don’t have to prove nothing to nobody. The Americans that Andrew Yang asks us to prove ourselves to. But I have seen how this administration, and this government historically, has treated proof. What I know from Japanese American incarceration: proving American-ness is a trap.

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After Japan’s government bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941, fear-fueled racist rhetoric blossomed in the American media. On February 2, 1942, the Los Angeles Times published an op-ed by W. H. Anderson called “The Question of Japanese Americans” that concluded, A viper is nonetheless a viper wherever the egg is hatched. A leopard’s spots are the same and its disposition is the same wherever it is whelped.

To Anderson, we were vipers, the family of venomous snakes, whose long, hinged teeth penetrate deeply beneath the top layer of skin. This metaphor was chosen carefully. A viper is poisonous. A viper is lethal. And perhaps more importantly, vipers were recognizable to much of Anderson’s chosen audience—a white America, a Christian America—because of the way Jesus used it in the Bible.

In the book of Matthew, Jesus exclaims: You brood of vipers, how can you who are evil say anything good? And later, You snakes! You brood of vipers! How will you escape being condemned into hell! A crucial distinction between Jesus’s reprimands and Anderson’s, however, is this: Jesus was speaking to—and fighting against—the powerful governing authorities. But in this op-ed, Anderson weaponized the viper metaphor not against those with much power, but against those with very little.

So, like snakes in a garden, we were cast out.

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It was in the afternoon when we reached [the camp], my grandfather, then sixteen, wrote for a school assignment in December 1944, the year before he would be released from Amache. Reflecting on his arrival a few years earlier, he continued: From there we first got a glimpse of the center. I was wondering how will they ever put all of us in a small place that small . . . What surprised me most was why did the soldiers have to stand guard with guns . . . and to tell you the truth the way some people stared at us, it chilled me a bit.

Before President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066—which led to incarceration—a congressional report said that Japanese Americans posed no threat. This was ignored. Not one person of Japanese descent was ever found guilty of espionage or another war crime. Still, the onus was on the Japanese Americans to prove themselves.

One way of proving themselves was to volunteer for the army after the government decided to let Japanese Americans join a special segregated unit. My grandfather vividly remembers the heated discussions that took place at camp after this was announced.

Each block had a town hall meeting to discuss whether to volunteer, he tells me. He and his family gathered in the camp’s mess hall to listen to both sides of the debate. The Issei [first generation], our parents, they said, ‘Why should our sons fight for a country that put us in a concentration camp?’ he explains. But the Nisei [second generation], we thought,‘This is the only country we know.’

In the end, his older brother, my great-uncle, joined the Japanese American 442nd Regimental Combat Team. It became the most decorated unit in military history.

In the myth Anderson perpetuated in his op-ed—in the myth that Roosevelt adhered to then, that white America often adheres to now—it does not matter where we were born, or how we are raised, or what we do. What matters is the simplest common denominator: our race. During World War II, the nation of Japan was the political enemy, but Japanese Americans are not the nation of Japan. In this pandemic, the coronavirus began in Wuhan, China, but Chinese Americans (and Asian Americans in general) are not Wuhan. A person is not a virus. But the narratives of fear and panic elides these differences. Nationality, citizenship, history, and geopolitical boundaries don’t matter.

When Anderson said we were the viper’s brood, what he meant was that we are the viper’s blood. Our blood, they say, is contaminated. Our blood is the blood of monsters.

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Forty years after the war, a study commissioned by President Carter found that incarceration was based on race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.

Against such stories, what is proof?

Yet the idea that proof will save us is also the foundation of the model minority myth, which spread after Asian immigration became legal again in 1965. My Japanese great-grandparents moved to America a decade before the implementation of the 1917 law that banned all Asian immigration. My Taiwanese father and his family came in 1971, six years after it ended.

The model minority myth was circulated to promote capitalism and to undermine the credibility of black civil rights, writes poet and critic Cathy Park Hong. There’s no discrimination, they assured us, as long as you’re compliant and hard-working.

In general, as a middle-class East Asian American in the twenty-first century, I am used to being seen as different, but benign. I receive microaggressions instead of aggressions, not subject to the blatant racism that Black and brown people (including darker-skinned Asians) face regularly. East Asians are, largely, no longer the image of the poor or the working classes, demographics that have historically been associated with contamination and contagion. Classism, like racism, has always infused disease narratives—both the legends and the articles you read in the news.

But the recent widespread anti-Asian racism that has emerged so quickly and so violently shows us again how discrimination always lurks just below the surface, waiting for any trigger.

It’s May, and I am tired.

During this pandemic, my race is salient again because we always want our enemy to have a face. In this pandemic, in America, the face is mine. In this pandemic, this demarcation—of monsters (Asians, the disease vectors) and men (the rest of “us”)—serves a specific psychological purpose. If Asian Americans are the carriers, then avoiding them can ensure safety. If everything Chinese is tainted, then avoiding Chinatown can keep you well. This is, of course, contrary to all facts, all truths.

But the people attacking Asian Americans don’t care if you’re Hmong or Cambodian or Korean, or that Covid-19 mortality rate by population is lower in all Asian countries, including China, than in the United States. Or that research shows that the virus spread in New York, America’s biggest hot spot, because of travelers from Europe. Or that Taiwan’s governmental response, like many other Asian countries, has been one of the most effective in the world.

Reality is not the purpose of disease narratives, writes Kitta. Instead, one population tells these narratives about another population, thus giving the stories a focus that is elsewhere and defining the infected population as something that is definitively Other.

In America, we don’t care about facts. We care about faces, because then we think we know who the enemy is. (We: My position in this essay, like my position in this country, shifts allegiance with the “we” from paragraph to paragraph.)

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In the earliest stories, the Japanese mythical oni were invisible spirits whose purpose was to cause physical harm to humans. One of the most widely-known oni figures, Shuten Doji, is thought to be based on a smallpox deity. According to folklorist Takahashi Masaaki, to keep this kind of epidemic god from entering their capital, Kyoto citizens would conduct special magico-religious rituals in order to give the spirits a physical form. They wanted to turn the invisible visible.

In this vacuum, when the enemy is not visceral, we create one that is. 

Today, most Japanese schoolchildren can describe what an oni looks like: the outsize appearance, the brightly-colored skin, the two horns, the tiger-skin loincloth, the heavy iron club in his hand. Oni are terrifying—but less terrifying, apparently, than spirits without faces.

For if we know what our enemy looks like, we can find them and we can defeat them. In America, we like to be heroes. Stay-at-home is not the hero’s narrative. Washing one’s hands for twenty seconds does not feel like vanquishing anything. Everyone is restless; everyone is fearful and angry. In this vacuum, when the enemy is not visceral, we create one that is.

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We [Asian Americans] are reputed to be so accomplished, and so law-abiding, that we will disappear into this country’s amnesiac fog. We will not be the power but become absorbed by power, not share the power of whites but be stooges to a white ideology that exploited our ancestors. —Cathy Park Hong

The myth that many of my people listened to was that whiteness is the door to power. That we should hitch our wagon to whiteness instead of in solidarity with other people of color.

For example: On December 22, 1941, in response to the violence perpetrated against Chinese Americans (who were mistakenly thought to be Japanese), Life magazine published this article comparing a Japanese face from a Chinese face, in order to “teach” white Americans how to tell Japanese Americans (“our enemies”) from Chinese Americans (“our friends.”) A face, we think, we can understand immediately.

Though some Chinese Americans spoke out against incarceration, many did not want to be associated with Japanese Americans. (As someone with both Japanese and Chinese ethnic backgrounds I am, once again, both enemy and friend.)

Even then, when the Japanese American community was facing the height of its discrimination, they themselves (we ourselves) engaged in our own anti-Black racism. At a time when there were military restrictions on college enrollment for Japanese Americans, when many universities closed their doors to us, a council that included Japanese Americans forbade their students from attending historically black colleges and universities. (Later this policy was reversed, but no students ended up attending.)

Individual Japanese Americans were quite willing to go to HBCUs, explains Eric Langowski, a Yonsei researcher from the Nisei College Redress Project. However, the council was not in favor, and gave various reasons which largely boiled down to ‘racial solidarity between African Americans and Japanese Americans is dangerous and could undermine the entire program of sending Japanese Americans to college.’

We, the Chinese Americans, did not want to be associated with the Japanese Americans. We, the Japanese Americans, did not want to be associated with African Americans. We wanted to be allies of white America. We were trying to prove ourselves.

Seventy years later, wealthy Asian Americans sued Harvard, claiming that its affirmative action practices discriminated against them, an argument white parents and white students had been making for years.

In these choices, our communities decided who belonged in the we, and who did not.

But if it was a choice then, it is a choice now. We can choose to connect our stories to solidarity and shared experience instead of connecting them to power. Contagion does not always equal contamination. Contamination implies impurity, whereas contagion refers to spread. Narratives are themselves contagious; the old stories can die out if there are not hosts to replicate them, retell them.

Today, there are many Asian American activist groups that are harnessing the privilege accumulated by previous generations to work in solidarity with other people of color. Tsuru for Solidarity organized this summer’s march on Washington to protest the border camps, where ICE is holding Mexican and Central and South American migrants without trial. The protest was supposed to be the largest gathering of Japanese Americans since World War II.

I was going to go with my mother and my sisters, my friends, and several camp survivors from my church. Because of coronavirus, it had to be postponed. But the work itself is not canceled—just moved online.

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As a child, I would sing the song of Momotaro (Peach Boy), the Japanese hero who saved his village from the wicked pillaging oni who lived on a nearby island. I didn’t care much for Momotaro himself, but I was compelled by the illustrations of the red and blue oni in my copy of Japanese Children’s Favorite Stories.

Later, I learned that during World War II, the folktale was used in Japanese nationalist propaganda for children. The story presents a clear delineation between the heroes and the monsters, an easy way to teach children the difference between us and them.

Back then, if you asked me to point out the monsters, I could. As an adult, I cannot distinguish so easily. Monsters appear to look like us but are not us, writes Kitta. The self and the Other can shift and meld, depending on the performance context. (Who is my audience, I ask myself. Who am I performing for?)

If monster and disease narratives represent our fear of being transformed—from the well to the sick, from the human to the Other—then the counter-narrative, perhaps, has to embrace transformation. A different kind of story.

In the United States, I am often the self. Now I am the Other. A snake sheds its skin, grows a new one. Sheds it again. We can shift, and we must shift. Because what whiteness giveth, it can take away. When we build our house on whiteness, we build our house on sand. And the tide will always come in.