The Past Is
The Proof

We spend a lot of time talking about history now. She answers my questions about living under Ferdinand Marcos’ kleptocracy, and I share stories I unearth about what America was like for Filipinos before she moved here, all of it propelled by the feeling that we've missed something.

When the outset of COVID-19 stoked a surge of harassment, assaults, and hate crimes against Asians across the global diaspora, the brazen discrimination recalled anti-Asian policies of a bygone America I didn't personally recognize. Japanese internment camps during World War II. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Incidents that felt far away, until they didn't. Of course, what was new to me has long been a familiar axiom for Black and brown Americans.

The pandemic made plain the compounding inequities of our society—vulnerable low-wage job categories suddenly deemed "essential" without protections or hazard pay, pre-existing conditions exacerbated by unequal environmental factors, a cost-prohibitive healthcare system. Then over the month of May, glued to our screens in lockdown, the videos accumulated: Ahmaud Arbery chased down and fatally shot. Chris Cooper impetuously threatened with false accusations. George Floyd asphyxiated by a Minneapolis police officer.

This moment is not new. State-sanctioned violence against Black people long predates America's founding, as does the Western world's putrid othering of Asians and the authoritarian tradition of criminalizing dissent. Perhaps it's true what they say about history repeating itself, but to render it something cosmological is too trite, too callow to be believed. I am more persuaded by the sharpened adage: those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

Yet nothing about the way we record collective memory makes that easy. Not when entire populations and their descendants are violently severed from their homes and histories. Not when those who hold the pen are compelled, by ego or ignorance, to depict the current era as the finish line for civilization and enlightenment. Instead, with truths half-told, we cycle through familiar plots—corruption, rebellion, reform, plateau—until our volcanic breaking point, forcing a reckoning with the traumas that lay below.

When I'm feeling anxious and alone, I retreat into art, stationing myself under a cataract of beauty in an attempt to quiet everything else for a moment. These days, I linger on the work of Doris Ho-Kane and Stephanie H. Shih: Ho-Kane curates and maintains 17.21 Women, an archive of photos and stories about pioneering Asian women—activists, athletes, and movie stars—which she's currently assembling into a book, and Shih is a ceramicist who lovingly recreates the pantry items that dapple memories of growing up in an Asian immigrant home. One reflects a history I've never seen before, the other gives physical shape to my own.

To belong to a diaspora is to feel foreign in the home you know and homesick for places you've only seen in pictures; a condition of sustained rootlessness. To be anything but white in America is to feel erased, sold a lie that making yourself into a palimpsest for whiteness will grant you the visibility you seek. But a body with no roots and no true reflection is a ghost; a doomed simulacrum of what has been. Nostalgia is easily disparaged as sentimentality—at its most insidious, it can romanticize away the worst instincts of our past, conveniently inoculating them from scrutiny—but there's a difference between absconding to an idealized past because you're afraid of how the present is evolving, and relishing the way little-known histories rearrange your perception of the present.

When Ho-Kane was growing up in Texas, her immersion in the local punk scene introduced her to the work of civil rights activist Yuri Kochiyama, artist Yoko Ono, and riot grrrl band Emily’s Sassy Lime, a lightbulb moment mirroring the relationship between Asian Americans and the punk scene in Los Angeles that Madeline Leung Coleman wrote about for Topic. "I felt boundless for the first time in my life," Ho-Kane writes, reflecting on the memory, "I shed the oppressive layers of expectations of what an Asian American woman should be and began thinking about who I could be."

I've had similar feelings browsing the 17.21 Women archive, reading about vanguards like Esther Eng, Vicki Draves, and Goldie Chu, looking at myself with fresh eyes. Despite an apparent, if surface-level, embrace of multiculturalism, to live in America is to feel subject to a mythic uniform national identity. Assimilationist forces stamp out difference by disguising bland similitude as "harmony," but recollections can offer restoration from the psychic pressure to fit in.

More than a tool for remembering, nostalgia is the ligature connecting an isolated present to a shared past. "Growing up, my family went to a small mom-and-pop grocery in a strip mall a couple towns away," Shih writes to me in an email, "In Chinese, it was called 新禎芳 (roughly, 'New Auspicious Aromas') but its English name, in big block letters out front, was simply 'ORIENTAL FOOD.'" The same careful attention to the ordinary dualities of Asian American existence persists in Shih's work. Where some see nothing but mystery meat in a rectangular can of Spam, others recall breakfasts with grandparents and the war-torn legacy of American imperialism.

Since May, Shih's Instagram has evolved away from ceramic soy sauce bottles and into what she describes as a "protest diary." She documents her experience on the frontlines of New York City's demonstrations against police brutality and systemic racism, and shares resources for those looking for other ways to help. "While I've been active in social justice movements for the last decade, this is the first time that I actually have a platform with a large audience," she explains when I ask about this shift in focus, "My goal is to call our community to account and challenge it to do more. I want to show fellow Asian Americans what allyship can look like, what it means to use our non-Black privilege by putting our bodies on the line."

The Asian "model minority" is a seductive myth that implies a perverse racial hierarchy unfurling beneath the white majority. Not only does it create a false justification for the subjugation of Black Americans, Asian Americans who buy in are coaxed into reticence from anything that might upset that status, like vocal political action. Tou Thao, the Hmong American police officer captured on video standing by as his white colleague held his knee on Floyd's neck, has emerged as a symbol of complicit silence, inspiring calls for an overdue examination of anti-Blackness in the Asian American community. As Jay Caspian Kang points out, the impulse can also flatten Asian identity, ignoring that colorism and classism still exist within and between nationalities, that the Asian American experience differs wildly between those who immigrate as students or professionals of extraordinary ability versus those who flee their home countries as refugees, and that all of it warrants inquiry. Silence isn't an inherently Asian trait; the ongoing protests in Hong Kong make that abundantly clear.“It is always difficult to convince people to contend with their positions of power,” Shih adds, “but we can wield it as accomplices and co-conspirators to Black activists.”

Idiosyncrasy isn't something typically afforded to Asian Americans. When designers Jin Kay, Dylan Cao, and Huy Luong decided to start their brand, Commission, they bonded over the unexpected overlaps in their Korean and Vietnamese mothers' working wardrobes. Nostalgia was their catalyst, and it's with a keen eye toward its specific expression that they create. "Looking at Asia as a continent," Cao explains, "there are distinct characteristics between different regions in one country, let alone across different countries, but for a long time, Asian identity has been lumped together as this really oriental, exotic, theatrical expression, with a lot of things that almost exclusively belong to Chinese culture." Commission, instead, draws inspiration from Asia's seldom glamorized 80s and 90s eras-a time characterized by rapid post-war industrialization and the subtle tweaking of Western career clothes. They render office blouses in tropic-friendly lace and sheer georgettes. Pencil skirts are cut with ample give or a drawstring to hike up a side, nodding to commutes on motorcycles and job markets that outpaced infrastructure. By focusing their gaze on this overlooked history, Kay, Cao, and Luong contribute to a more nuanced vocabulary for what it means to be Asian, unsettling a stereotypical status quo with shades of subversion.

In her 2017 short story collection, Sour Heart, Jenny Zhang writes from the perspectives of six first-generation Chinese-American girls, each grappling with complementary but distinct experiences of immigrating to the United States. Her narrators coruscate from the page—childish, principled, contemplative, bored—and describe the vulgar details of poverty with unflinching rigor. "I feel like that's in my blood memory," she explains to me on the phone, "this fear of having nothing and this fear of having to live in a way that feels inhuman. The only way to heal that is to first be aware of it because you can't heal something that you're ignorant of, or have been avoiding."

While doing personal research on her family history, painter Maia Cruz Palileo stumbled on an archive of photos taken by Dean Conant Worcester, the United States' Secretary of the Interior of the Philippines at the outset of America's colonial occupation of the country. A studied zoologist, Worcester's images and accompanying text portrayed Filipinos in dehumanizing ways, as oddities and scientific specimens. "It occurred to me how little I knew," Palileo explains, "and how much was never taught to us—certainly not in school and certainly not through my family." Through the discovery of Worcester's archive, she started investigating elements of her Filipino identity that she had never questioned, decolonizing her own memories. Confronting the past, and its generational plaque, is a way of processing and resisting erasure at the hands of someone else's dominant history. She cut and collaged elements of the photos—faces and scenes that felt familiar—and affectionately recontextualized them as impressionist paintings, vibrating with color and humanity. "I think I was searching for something more tender than what was there," she says, "In certain parts, I could connect to that despite the circumstances of what I was looking at."

Growing up, I had no interest in history. It was an amorphous flurry of powdered wigs and pistol fights, and I didn't understand its relevance to my life. Standard American history curricula devote only a small fraction of time to prominent figures who aren't white or aren't men. Even more elusive are lesson plans that cover relationships between minority groups. Maybe you'll learn of the Black and Korean communities in California and the tensions that boiled over into the 1992 L.A. riots, but little else.

It wasn't until well into my adult life that I began to value untangling the past. I read about Black soldiers, like David Fagen, who defected during the Philippine-American War, choosing instead to fight alongside the Filipinos after realizing their plights were more similar than they were different. I discovered stories about Hugh MacBeth, a Black attorney who fought for the release of Japanese Americans from internment. The groundwork the civil rights movement laid for the Immigration Act of 1965, which removed race-based restrictions that prevented Asian immigration to the United States for over 40 years. Suddenly, I find history electric. It looks like me; it looks like my friends. It looks like the diverse coalition of K-pop fans organizing to crash the Dallas Police Department's app with videos of Jungkook and Jimin in the name of protecting Black Lives Matter protesters. When the authors of history books recount what happened in 2020, I hope there's at least a paragraph on that.

The sensation of straddling two cultures can be dissociating—described by Cathy Park Hong as “minor feelings” and W. E. B. Du Bois as “double-consciousness”—but it can also be a kind of superpower: an uncommon vantage point from which celebrating and criticizing elements of each is possible. "Part of it is a generational thing," Hua Hsu articulated in an interview with Ross Scarano, "where the generation of immigrants is just trying to get by and see tomorrow. Then, once you attain a certain level of comfort, your kids can be the ones who are precious, or pensive, about things." As diasporic artists pursue meaningful self-expression in their respective fields, they reframe history and mint an antidote to cultural invisibility and marginalization. If art and media have aided and abetted in whitewashing collective memory, they can also be its course correction.

After talking with Kay, Cao, and Luong, they told me about a new Commission project, a tribute account dedicated to moms, and asked if I had any photos I'd want to submit. I immediately dug into my personal archive for old snapshots of my mom in her twenties, but wasn't sure of any dates or locations—a request from the designers to use as captions.

When I edited down my selections, I sent my mom a screenshot of the grid, asking if she could identify them but not telling her what it was for. She replied wordlessly at first, with a handwritten data table, but after I thanked her, an unexpected flood followed: anecdotes about her extracurricular activities, a newspaper clipping from her childhood that described her as brilliant but exceedingly shy, descriptions of her half-hour commute to school in Manila (one of seven kids and two adults crammed into a Volkswagen Beetle).

I don't know what I ever intend to do with them, but I collect her stories with others in a note on my phone—the years her mom spent working in Saudi Arabia so she and her siblings could afford to go to school, her jealousy of classmates with deluxe crayon boxes—aware that I am greedy for a past simply because it exists. I don't want the past to idealize what happened. I want it because it's proof of what happened.

Just ahead of Mother's Day, the photos I shared went up, and seeing the images of my mom, her elegance, her sense of style, running alongside the other beautiful faces on the account was euphoric in a way I didn't expect. I was thrilled to show her what she was a part of, to show her how, in this very simple way, she was being acknowledged, recognized, affirmed. And how, in turn, I was, too. Perhaps it's a mortal desire to add myself to the record, to confirm that my narrative fits. Or perhaps it's some acknowledgement of the ways in which my reality is still not met by what I see. Maybe it's both.

Gaby Wilson is a writer and journalist based in New York. Her work has appeared on HBO's VICE News Tonight and MTV.