The first time I heard the name of Robert E. Lee, in a fifth-grade
classroom in suburban Connecticut, I was secretly thrilled, if also
discomfited, to discover that a man who had played such a pivotal role
in the American Civil War had been Chinese. General Lee gazed at me from
the pages of my history book with a majestic white beard and features
that looked indisputably Caucasian, but my felt kinship to the
Confederate leader was born of something more compelling than reality.
His last name, the first American one I’d encountered since arriving
from China that sounded plausibly Asian, gave me imaginary purchase to
think that the history of the country I’d lived in for three years—the
first two and a half of which were spent friendless and
uncomprehending—could conceivably be intertwined with my own.

To learn about Abraham Lincoln, Fort Sumter, Appomattox, and Antietam,
as an immigrant child with barely the ability to pronounce their names,
was to be steeped in a peculiar kind of historical fantasy. During the
twice-weekly, fifty-minute history classes, in which we made Venn
diagrams comparing the interests of the North and the South, the story
of America’s birth and subsequent cleavage seemed mythical and, at
times, fundamentally absurd. Chinese history had always been recounted
to me as a matter of dynastic cycles that moved glacially through the
millennia. How could a country, purportedly the world’s greatest, have
been founded and then brought to the brink of destruction in less than a
hundred years?

Eleven-year-olds are not prone to discussing classroom learning outside
the classroom, so I had little idea what my classmates—those whom I
thought of as true Americans—made of slavery, a concept so abstract and
so preposterous that I couldn’t believe the even tones with which our
teacher explained its practice. If I was tempted to broach the subject
with my parents, I soon discovered that they knew even less about it
than I did, preoccupied as they were with the task of survival in an
American present that was as disorienting for them to inhabit as its
past was for me to imagine.

In China, where I had been born, and where history and politics are
taught from first grade, I had learned about divisive battles and the
price of oppression. The difference was that our Communist forefathers,
like our present Communist leaders, were unimpeachably virtuous, and
their enemies incorrigibly villainous. Redemption for the losing side
was impossible. By contrast, the American Civil War was both a bloody
reckoning and an act of reclamation. The Unionist North had won, and
slavery was abolished, at least in name, but the half of the nation that
had fought for that institution was rejoined. This was confusing to a
child who had, until then, known of the moral universe only as a set of
uncompromising contrasts. How does a nation face its sins and confess
them to the history books? And was it possible for it to emerge from its
depths stronger for having documented its errors, rather than erasing
them?

A fear of not understanding was exacerbated by a fear of not belonging.
Prior to my arrival here, I had assumed that America was as racially
homogenous as the only other country I had known. Hadn’t every
advertisement for American products I’d ever seen exclusively featured
happy, smiling Caucasians? Whiteness conferred Americanness. I might
have recognized the illogic of my thinking; after all, my own
conspicuously non-white family was going to live here. But the myopia of
the immigrant child is at once ruthlessly rational and entirely
senseless. Some amalgam of fear, anxiety, and a desperate need to
conform renders her both a keen observer and an adroit imitator; in her
imagination, she is at once putative insider and perpetual outsider.

And here was a harder truth, which seemed both shameful and
self-evident: for a person of color, assimilation in America is akin to
the physical manifestation of Zeno’s dichotomy paradox. That which is
in locomotion must arrive at the halfway stage before it arrives at the
goal. My improving English and my increasing familiarity with American
culture felt like a series of halfway stages that signalled progress but
would never gain the achievement of arrival: to be accepted as American
by others.

The fears of all immigrants or members of a minority—that their
Americanness is, indeed, provisional—were grimly validated by the events
of last weekend in Charlottesville. Perhaps the only thing more
terrifying than a fiery congregation of white nationalists and neo-Nazis
on an élite university campus is a President’s defense of their presence
and what they see as a tacit approval of their agenda. Donald Trump’s
craven equivocation at a moment of crisis assaults the very values upon
which this nation has staked its existence. It is also the clearest
reflection of his own cowardice and opportunism. In his morally
abhorrent equivalences and swaggering falsity, Trump is united with the
swastika-bearing bullies in a promulgation of hatred, an evasion of
responsibility, and a profound, childlike delusion.

Here is the deepest irony: behind my childlike willingness to see
General Lee as Chinese, no matter his role in history, lay a displaced
hope for relevance, for a chance to claim a relationship with a country
that I worried might always hold me at arm’s length. I could not have
guessed that, in two decades’ time, my adopted country would be presidedover by a child-man looking at that same general with a similar hunger
for legitimacy and a vexed relationship to reality. But, unlike my
delusions, his inspire legitimate fears—that the wounds he is inflicting
on this country are lasting and deep.