Origin Story

ON A BRIGHT AFTERNOON IN MARCH 2021, Aimee Towi Mae Tang was curled up on her couch in Irvine, California, reading a book she’d chosen for her then-13-year-old daughter Marisol’s home-school curriculum. Aimee had taken over Marisol’s education, frustrated by the narrow view of the world taught in public school and what she called its “European American bias.” Then a news alert lit up her phone: A gunman had shot and killed eight people at Atlanta-area spas. Six of them were Asian women.

For Aimee, a fourth-generation Chinese New Mexican and a citizen of Jemez Pueblo, the tragedy echoed the discrimination and violence her family has experienced. In the 1930s, state laws barred Edward Gaw, her great-grandfather, from buying land in Albuquerque, New Mexico. During the 1980s, when she was in high school, boys harassed her, shouting a gendered slur common in American films about the Vietnam War. When Aimee saw videos of Asian elders being attacked and beaten in late 2020 during a rise in anti-Asian hate crimes, she thought of her own father, who was then 76.

Three weeks after the Atlanta shootings, I found myself on the phone with Aimee, talking about the nation’s shocked reaction. Aimee’s usually tender voice hardened. “You’ve ignored your cancer for years, and now, at stage 4, you go to the doctors and ask, ‘Oh, how is this happening?’” she said. “Well, come on! If that’s how you’ve treated the Chinese, how is this not happening?”

Aimee’s father and grandparents spoke fluent Cantonese, but her family raised her to fit in with white American society. “We never talk about China. We speak English in our household. We eat Chinese food with a fork and knife,” she said.

The daughter of a Chinese father and a Jemez mother, she often felt disconnected from her Chinese side. Since childhood, she had visited Jemez Pueblo, 50 miles northwest of Albuquerque, helping in the vineyard, harvesting white corn and learning stories about the high mountain mesas that surround the pueblo. But when she asked about her Chinese relatives’ past, she said, her grandfather refused to answer. If pressed, he simply said, “We are American” in a deep, commanding voice in which “American” clearly meant “European American.” To this day, Aimee said, she “slaughters Mandarin Chinese” when she tries to speak it. When I met her, she still knew little about how her family got to Albuquerque.

At 49, in the wake of the Atlanta shootings, she realized that, for her, the idea that “We’re American, not Chinese” no longer resonated. She