Can We Only Take Ownership of History That Our Blood Ancestors Experienced?

A FEW MONTHS into the pandemic, as the country started to notice the uptick in hate crimes against Asian Americans, caring friends checked in to ask, “Are you okay?” I found myself metaphorically turning around to see if they were talking to someone behind me. I was so unused to having my ethnic vulnerability seen and named.

Then a year ago, in March 2021, a young white man killed six Asian women in spas around Atlanta. This time it was clearer—I was not okay. My mother is a massage therapist and has worked in spas in Florida, where the killer was headed when police apprehended him. This time, I could say with more certainty, “This hurts me.”

In the blooming of Asian American consciousness since that event, however, I’ve continued to wonder how much of what happens to other AAPI (Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders) folks around the country, and back through time, is mine to own. Writer Jay Caspian Kang argues that Asian Americans who came to this country after the 1965 Hart-Celler Immigration Act have little to no connection with earlier generations of Asian Americans, whose circumstances were vastly different. Between the lines, Kang is saying to us later waves of immigrants, “That’s not your history.”

But if that were the case, what right does my husband (whose great-grandparents came to the United States from Europe in the early 20th century) have to identify with the Revolutionary War or American slaveholding? Can we only take ownership of history that our blood ancestors experienced?

Kang is right in some ways—history lives in our bodies. Recent studies suggest that traumatic events mark not only family systems but our biology. Extreme stress causes epigenetic changes, as genes that protect against or increase risk to various diseases are turned on or off in current and subsequent generations. I take Kang’s words as caution against flippantly identifying with “the oppressed” when my socioeconomic—and physical—reality is quite different. At the same time, later waves of Asian immigrants have our own generational trauma to process.

I still believe solidarity is possible and can be expressed in ways that don’t gloss over real differences. The Christian story, after all, is an invitation to weave our individual and family stories into a larger narrative. Too often, those in power have wielded the story in ways that silence quieter voices that might challenge the telling. We would be more honest—and open more space for conversation—to assume multiplicity: Christian stories, AAPI experiences, American histories. Different—and even contradicting—experiences need not negate one another.

So I walk as an Asian American woman on a land scarred by what Mark Charles and Soong-Chan Rah call a “dysfunctional theological imagination” that privileges white bodies of European descent. This beloved land holds many stories—of suffering and resilience; oppression and opportunity; solidarity and discord. I want to hear them all.