Recent attacks against people of East Asian descent in this country have brought to mind a memory of growing up in California in the sixties. When I was in the third grade, a new boy, I’ll call him Danny, joined our class. He had recently arrived from Hong Kong and lived with an uncle above a Chinese restaurant in our town.
The first day of school he showed up wearing a pair of his uncle’s pants that were cinched around his waist with a length of rope. The next day he came to school with a proper belt and a pair of pants that fit him, more or less, but the damage to his reputation had already been done. Because he knew very little English when he first arrived, he continued to be an easy target for ridicule.
In the first few months of Danny’s life as a third-grader, many of my classmates never missed a chance to get a laugh at Danny’s expense. I remember some of them putting their fingers to the corners of their eyes to contort their faces into what they believed was a “Chinese look.” To enhance these grotesque grimaces, the kids would say things like “Me Chinese,” or various other quotations they had picked up from television.
Most of the teachers were welcoming to Danny and tried to help the students to accept him despite his differences. My teacher, however, seemed to be as amused as we were with Danny. She would often smile and snicker at Danny’s attempts to speak English, and she never seemed to temper her disdain for him with any positive reinforcement.
One day, about a month after Danny had joined us, our teacher was leading a class discussion after we had watched an educational film about table manners. She was asking questions and pointing to specific students for answers. I recall her asking Danny a complicated question about which fork to use and with which hand to use it. Danny had already made a lot of progress in English, but this time he had no idea what the teacher was talking about.
The teacher asked the question again, this time in a louder voice, but still Danny didn’t seem to understand. Rather than calling on a different student, our teacher decided to make Danny come up to the front of the class, so that he would have an audience while he was being humiliated. By the time the teacher had posed the question a third time, the entire class watched the drama unfold with rapt attention.
I remember seeing Danny’s eyes dart back and forth in confusion and nervousness while a condescending smirk gradually spread across the teacher’s face. After a very long and uncomfortable pause, Danny blurted out a tirade of Cantonese which made the whole class laugh, everyone, that is, except the teacher who now sported a look of horrified disgust.
Then she did her best to repeat what Danny had said. Because she didn’t know a word or Cantonese, the teacher launched into a mockery of musical syllables which consisted almost entirely of ching, chang, and chong, sounds which we had learned on the playground to be the phonological essentials of any Asian language. When the laughter had died down, she exhaled and said almost under her breath, “now you know how we felt when you and your kind attacked us at Pearl Harbor.”
At the time, I didn’t really understand the absurdity of the teacher’s remark, nor really much else about the bigotry towards Danny that we all engaged in. As I got older, though, I sometimes looked back with guilt and shame at the ignorance and outrageous lack of decency we showed towards him. Like so many immigrant children, Danny managed to rise above the base vulgarity of his teacher and classmates. He worked hard as a student and went on to become a successful orthopedic surgeon.
Sadly, as Americans, some of us are still engaging in the same sort of bigotry that I witnessed in the third grade. No, people of East Asian descent are no more responsible for the spread of COVID-19 than Danny was responsible for what the Japanese did 15 years before he was born. My hope is that someday, as we reach adulthood, most of us can leave behind the cruel attitudes we picked up on the school playground.
Philip Bragdon is a public school teacher and innkeeper in Shelburne Falls.