By Hannah Lee
Animal species adapted to protect itself from the unknown: it’s always Us or the Other. So, animals explore with their world warily with long-range vision, acute hearing, and a fine sense of taste (e.g., toxic substances taste bitter). Human beings have devised more sophisticated ways to assess the foreign, the unfamiliar. The rare pioneers are the ones who journey to a new land, try a new food, or welcome strangers. I get that.
In a recent issue of the New York Times [10/11/2016] on the front page, an editor wrote about a disagreeable incident when a woman yelled at his family, from the safety of her car, to “go back to China.” Yes, Michael Luo is Chinese-born; he graduated from Harvard and probably speaks and writes English better than the provocateur. He leads a team of reporters focused on investigations and long-form narratives. In 2016, his reporters were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in three categories: investigative reporting, local reporting and feature writing. Luo posted an open letter on the Times’s website and it sparked a tremendous outpouring of responses, mostly from Asian-Americans with their own stories of racial prejudice, both overt and subtle. As a Chinese-American immigrant from Hong Kong, I, too, have my stories.
People fear that this country is changing, but the ship has already left the port: among today’s young people, nearly one-half are members of racial minorities [New Republic, 11/2014]. The world is a large place and we cannot keep our borders closed— not from people, not from technology or ideas, not from viruses or pathogens. All but the Native Americans are immigrants to this new land.
I approach the world with curiosity and wonder. Whenever I travel by taxi, I look at the name tags, and I ask if the driver was born abroad. If so, I ask what they like about America, their favorite foods, and if there’s a restaurant that serves their cuisine. It’s fun and I broaden my knowledge of other cultures, other peoples. At my work, I routinely ask people with unusual names, what is their ethnicity? Sometimes, I’m rebuffed, but often times, it leads to a small conversation about themselves.
Each year, Jews are reminded to remember that they were once strangers in a strange land, in the Hagadah reading on Passover [Exodus 23:9]. (Actually, to be a Jew is to be a stranger, writes Rabbi Jonathan Sacks.) It seems that Americans, all of foreign ancestry, need to keep in focus the poem of Emma Lazarus (inscribed on the base of the Statute of Liberty) to develop the empathy for the foreigner:
Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…
Until we are all free, we are none of us free.