What my illegal immigrant grandfather taught me about white nationalism
Dislocation and powerlessness were the defining characteristics of my grandfather’s early life.
My father’s father was born a peasant in a rural China being torn apart by civil war. There wasn’t much to offer him hope as hunger, instability and poverty were his only constants. Then, watching the Japanese invade and occupy ever larger swaths of his birth country in the late 1930s, he had increasingly fewer options to provide for his wife and young son. So like all the able-bodied men in his village, he felt he had to leave. He bought immigration papers under someone else’s name, and left for the US. (Yes, my grandfather was an OG illegal immigrant, long before there was talk of a wall.)
I’ve never permanently felt placeless. But every time I’ve moved, I discover how jarring it is because home is more than a place. Home is the security of the community that holds you, the reassurance of familiar textures (food, sights, smells, sounds), and the comfort of shared routines. It’s the stability of the mundane that helps us to anchor our inner life so we feel at home in the world.
Photo by Lucas Sankey on Unsplash
For my grandfather arriving in NYC from an agrarian China, there wasn’t much to anchor him. He spoke little English, couldn’t use his real name, lived with the persistent fear that he didn’t belong in the country, and was treated like an alien at a time when Chinese people were seen as weak and backwards. Locked out of most avenues of employment, he went into the hand-laundry business. He literally washed other people’s dirty laundry. And in life’s great irony — after escaping war — he was drafted by the US Army and sent to fight in China during WWII.
Talk about whiplash at the hands of fate.
Being a product of his generation, my grandfather never talked about his inner life — but based on his endless retelling of war stories I sense that all he ever wanted was to feel seen and have some sense of power. Belonging and agency are basic human desires. But my grandfather didn’t experience much of either.
Rather than feel the intensity of despair, he unconsciously played hot potato with his pain by laying it on others through his anger. Fits of anger seemingly let him transform from life’s victim into aggressor.
Like a magician’s sleight of hand, his anger hid his shame of powerlessness and created the illusion of control.
I doubt my grandfather wanted to grow up to be an angry man. But I can see how occasional justified outbursts turned into an addiction. Anger releases a neurochemical cocktail of norepinephrine that numbs pain, and the intoxicating rush of adrenaline. Like the Incredible Hulk, I imagine explosive anger let him temporarily feel bigger than others so that he didn’t need to feel like the man at the bottom of the heap.
Anger was the low road to self-empowerment for my grandfather in a world filled with uncertainty.
Unfortunately, it was usually his wife and children who were the recipients of his reflexive outbursts. And the effects were destructive. Well into his “mellow” old age, whenever my grandfather called my house, I’d see my father — a grown man — visibly tremble like a little boy. My grandfather transferred his sense of powerlessness to my father. And in turn, that spurred my compulsive pursuit to want to never feel vulnerable in the face of life’s vagaries — e.g., by racking up letters after my name (like MBA from Harvard, and BA from Yale magna cum laude) and adding prestigious titles to my resume (like McKinsey consultant, product manager at unicorn Silicon Valley startups).
Photo by Heather M. Edwards on Unsplash
When I look at the rise of white nationalism today, I see the same patterns I saw in my grandfather — just from a different starting point:
1 - In the words of Fox News host Laura Ingraham:
“The America we know and love doesn’t exist anymore.”
In this I hear echoes of the dislocation that my grandfather felt without the anchor of “home”.
“…Massive demographic changes [due to immigration] have been foisted on the American people, and they are changes that none of us ever voted for, and most of us don’t like.”
By blaming immigrants, she’s playing hot potato with the pain of feeling powerless in the face of rapid change. It makes faceless anxiety feel more manageable by transforming it into anger.
2 - “Make America Great Again”
Behind this tagline is the same nostalgia that haunts diaspora cultures that have lost a sense of place. It strengthens an identity that otherwise feels like it’s being lost. It remembers the good old times, but screens out the painful ones (especially when the present doesn’t live up to what was hoped for).
3 - The rise of angry white nationalist groups and rallies (e.g, Charlottesville 2017)
In a country where many face declining economic prospects, it’s terrifying to feel hopeless; and so the pain is getting spewed outward in anger. In a society where loneliness is rampant, these groups fill a deep need for belonging. And by claiming relative superiority it offers a sense of control.
I don’t condone white nationalism, but I do have empathy for its roots in dislocation and powerlessness.
Photo by Daniel Jensen on Unsplash
Fox’s Tucker Carlson noted in March 2018:
“This is more change than humans can digest. …No nation, no society has ever changed this much, this fast.”
I agree.
And it’s why I’m inspired by the far-sighted Scandinavian leaders of the late 1800s that helped the Nordics transition from agrarian to industrial society within a few decades by investing in their citizens’ capacity to navigate rapid change.
As Swede Tomas Björkman explains:
Recognizing that “in times of uncertainty and rapid change we all tend to [want] an outside authority… (Scandinavia’s visionary leaders) knew that the only way to build democracy… was to empower a large part of the population to become active and conscious co-creators of the new social order that wanted to emerge. For that purpose, they created [300+ state-funded] retreat centers for inner growth all over Scandinavia.”
“…Here young adults mainly from the farming or working class (up to 10% of each generation) could spend up to 6 months in retreat… to find themselves in order to resist the sirens’ calls of fundamentalist religion or authoritarian leadership, and to be able to hold the complexity of rapid social change.”
I know, it’s radical. And these ideas still feel visionary. But it gives me hope that we can navigate the leaps our times ask of us now.
PS, In case you were wondering — thanks to his US military service and the War Brides Act, my grandfather was able to bring my grandmother and uncle to join him in NY. And during the McCarthy era’s Chinese Confession Program, many of the “paper sons” who immigrated from China between 1910-1940 were offered the chance to reclaim their real names if they denounced Communism and confessed to their illegal entry to the US. So my family has proper citizenship under our true family name.
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