I saw a black man for the first time when I was four years old. I remember the encounter only by sensations, although more of it comes to me each time my grandfather tells the story each Chinese New Year. It begins with the dampness of fading summers in Guangdong province, the way it cuts to the florescent chill of an apartment building lobby; I felt the callouses inside my grandfather’s hand as I held on, and the smell of my grandmother’s trousers as we waited inside the elevator, half asleep, for our floor. There were others inside the elevator with us. I remember looking ahead and seeing belt buckles and the pockets of jeans, and then following the length of one up and seeing dark skin and a buzzcut comprised of tiny swirls of hair.

I yelped in surprise, tugged at my grandfather’s hand, and pointed to the man, exclaiming, “look at his skin, grandpa, it’s so black!” And then: my grandfather’s hand cradling my cheek, drawing me close, effectively hushing me and obscuring my vision as he turned my head away, the rustle of feet as we exited the elevator.

More than a decade later, he stays with my mother and I in Shanghai, and our extended family joins us each Chinese New Year–where we bundle up in thick woolen jumpers, play mahjong and spend hours at dinner tables scattered with mandarin peels and peanut shells recounting stories of the past.

This is a sacred time; my cousins and I stay quiet and let elder family members relive our childhoods because we grow up too fast for them to find secure footing in our lives now. So, I eat my mandarins and listen. My encounter with the black man in the elevator is one of his favorites to retell.

It took place in 2007, three years before China’s first national census recorded at least 600,000 expat residents throughout the country–roughly 0.045 percent of the total population, although numbers have increased since then. As for locals, there are 56 ethnic groups in China, with Han Chinese making up over 90 percent of the total population–all groups, however, look broadly Southeast Asian and indistinguishable to most. As a result, most Chinese go through life without dealing with many faces that had jarringly different features from their own.

Do I blame my grandparents for acting defensive and not correcting my reaction then? Nothing in their demographic environment prepared them for interacting with people of a distinctly different race–perhaps imposing blame on their past actions based on present-day expectations misses the point entirely and does a disservice to us all. The problem lay in the way common sense told them to not reprimand my rudeness afterwards, which would have been inexcusable had I reacted that way to some unusual appearance of a Chinese person. Who decides when and where rules can fall slack? What kinds of appearances influence that decision? Would Chinese children today get away with what I did all those years ago? One could argue that, since I had all but forgotten the encounter myself, one outburst isn’t enough to make a racist out of anyone. Certainly, most kids my age meet outwardly-racist remarks with a knee-jerk condemnation. But rejecting offhanded remarks from those closest and dearest to us– which so often come as a form of caring–requires a whole new skillset. There is distance between prejudice and racism, but too often both point us in the same direction: recall the parent, aunt, or uncle who can’t wait to see you with a boyfriend or girlfriend, as long as he/she isn’t black; the small talk over meals about strangers worth noting during that day’s errands, where any negative behaviour is immediately attributed to the colour of their skin and therefore made inherent to their entire heritage.

If stories are so integral to how Chinese families reminisce and bring up their children, how do we separate prejudice from an affection for the past, without hurting those we love? The pandemic, the recent cases of police brutality against African Americans in the US, and the Black Lives Matter developments have made these conversations heavier and more necessary than ever before. But if anything, the pandemic has given me ample time to think. That one cute outburst in the elevator by a toddler? It is only one of many stories to piece back together and retell.

Despite the increase of expat numbers in China, a person of non-Southeast Asian descent is still a rare sight even in the biggest metropolitan cities like Beijing or Shanghai. The 150,000 or so officially registered foreigners living in Shanghai this year still only make up 0.55 percent of the 27 million total population. As is the case in any country, when someone looks jarringly foreign, his or her reputation becomes predetermined by the media’s portrayal of their community, which the local consumes in the absence of real-life interactions with people of that race.

Unfortunately, domestic media has done more harm than good to the reputation of black people in China.

Where promotional media subscribes to colourism, black people are often used as the butt end of jokes and represented as the undesirable state of being before product placement. In 2016, an advertisement for laundry detergent owned by the brand Qiaobi featured a young Chinese woman putting a detergent pod in a black man’s mouth and then shoving him into a washing machine. Later, a light-skinned Chinese man emerges, to the delight of the woman.

A bestselling toothpaste brand, Darkie toothpaste, was recently rebranded as Darlie toothpaste under international scrutiny. In China, it is still referred to as “Black Man toothpaste” and in some packaging features a white man leering in blackface. The Hong Kong-owned company, Hawley & Hazel, based the design off of American minstrel performer Al Jolson. The blackface doesn’t stop there. Come every Lunar New Year, China’s state broadcaster CCTV releases a 4.5-hour long variety show known as the Spring Festival Gala, filled with dances, comedy sketches, singing, and more that stretches from the evening into the new year. In the 2018 edition of the show, a skit intended to celebrate China’s growing relationship with African countries featured Chinese actress Lou Naiming in blackface. Aside from the face and body paint, she sported comically large, fake buttocks under questionable traditional Kenyan garb, wore a basket of fruits on her head, and was accompanied by what seemed like a black actor playing a monkey.

After praising China for building the high-speed rail link in Kenya in an exaggerated tone, she turns to the crowd and proclaims her love for China in perfect Chinese. Needless to say, the skit was met with online backlash, with netizens domestic and international alike cringing at the on-the-nose propaganda and offensive stereotyping.

Disagreeing voices brought up an interesting point in their defence of the skit; namely, how it was meant to be a ‘comedy’ that had no intention of being racist, especially as it wouldn’t be politically strategic for China to do so. In addition, they believe that the insensitive execution of the patriotic message stemmed from a place of racial ignorance, given the fact that China’s demographic wasn’t as racially diverse as other countries.

Regardless, quarantine in China has shown how outcome outweighs intent. While advertisements and comedy skits may seem harmless, they stand for the very same prejudices that have inspired actions that are anything but.

In April, a McDonalds restaurant in Guangzhou posted a sign on its doors saying, “from now on black people are not allowed to enter the restaurant”. The city is home to one of the largest African communities in Asia, with the Yuexiu and Baiyun districts colloquially named “Chocolate City” by locals due to the large number of African migrant traders that live there. As the pandemic worsened across China, Africans, among other foreigners, were reportedly evicted from their homes by their landlords and forced to live on the streets.

The spike in xenophobic attitudes correlates with state media reporting roughly a hundred Africans yielding positive COVID-19 results, as well as local rumours of several hundred-thousand black people in Guangzhou causing a second wave. In response, the local government required thousands of African people to undergo testing regardless of if they have broken travelling restrictions. Months later, local public health officials deny the rumour and there is no evidence to suggest disproportionately higher infected numbers in Guangzhou’s African community.

While ignorance, colourism, and race-based humour lies at the root of black discrimination in China, they alone cannot explain the anti-black sentiment involving Asian communities in the United States.

Enter the model minority myth. The phrase “all Asians are smart” has been thrown around for so long that much of today’s youth have reclaimed it and use it among themselves ironically. Since World War II came to a close, the term “model minority” has been used by popular media to portray Asian-Americans as one homogenous ethnic group that has achieved socio-economic success across its population. General public knowledge seems to only recognise Chinese, Japanese, and Korean people as the sole inhabitants of the entire Asian continent. They are the math whizzes, the doctors, and the lawyers; the respectable families that can afford to live in respectable neighbourhoods; the mascots of the American Dream that prove how hard work equates success.

These stereotypes seem positive at first glance; indeed, the international Asian diaspora has internalised many of the aforementioned expectations. But to embrace these expectations that seemingly benefit this community is to support a system that simultaneously puts down another. Ask yourself: for whom are Asians the ‘model’ minority?

When used in the context of high earnings, high education levels, low crime rates, and more, the Asian ‘model’ minority almost always insinuates black (and other marginalised) people as the ‘problem’ minority. By assessing how members of both groups succeeded or failed using the same metric, the term negates past and present systemic barriers that do not reward the same amount of hard work with the same chances of success.

It groups voluntary immigrant histories with involuntary histories of slavery, determines the value of minorities only by their utility, and creates an internalised ‘us vs. them’ mentality among Asians.

There is a distance between the two communities that has caused many to forget the not-toodistant brutality against Asians before they were adopted into the myth, as well as forget the history of solidarity shared by the two groups. Where the histories of Asian- and African-American demands for civil rights converge is the story of Vincent Chin.

Between 1973 and 1974, oil prices in the West spiked as the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) released an oil embargo against countries including the United States.

This crippled the domestic automobile industry for years in what is known as the ‘economic Pearl Harbour.’ As thousands of domestic workers were laid off, fuel-efficient Japanese cars entered the market and made massive profits from the crisis, leading to rising anti-Japanese resentment among unemployed Americans.

In 1982, Chinese-American Vincent Chin, aged 27, was enjoying his bachelor’s party at a bar in Detroit when he caught the attention of Ronald Ebens, a supervisor of Chrysler (one of the “Big Three” manufacturers in the US automobile industry), and his stepson Michael Nitz, who had just been recently laid off. Both men were white, and, mistaking Chin for being Japanese, repeatedly assaulted him until Chin was beaten to death. When the murder was brought to court, Judge Charles Kaufman sent neither Ebens nor Nitz to prison despite the two pleading guilty to manslaughter charges. Instead, Kaufman fined both a couple thousand dollars, declaring that “these weren’t the kind of men you send to jail”.

The verdict triggered many into demanding justice from within the Asian-American community. But the support didn’t stop there. African-American civil rights activists, such as Democratic presidential-candidate Jesse Jackson and members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) were involved at every level, from planning community meetings to protesting with Asian-Americans on the streets.

The activists soon faced a major legal problem: before 1982, what concerned American civil rights in the Constitution only protected African Americans. In other words, Asian Americans had no civil rights, in the context of the law, before 1982. Had it not been for the combined support of activists from multiple ethnic communities, Chin’s murderers would have continued to walk free from the multiple legal battles that ensued.

In 1987, Vincent’s mother, Lily Chin, finally won a prolonged civil suit that fined Ebens and Nitz $1.5 million and $50,000, respectively.

The same systems that allowed Chin’s murderers to repeatedly walk free thirty years ago now proclaim Asian Americans the model minorities of today. They are the systems that continue to allow racist policing and unjust incarceration in black communities, that allow many tragedies like that of Vincent Chin to happen on a daily basis.

Many don’t remember Chin’s story because it shatters the American Dream in such a violent manner. “Stories around Vincent Chin are either too painful or too unjust,” says Nancy Yao Maasbach, president of the New York Museum of Chinese in the United States. “People see Asian-Americans as stories of success. The American dream story. It’s not about Vincent”. As a result, we have all but forgotten how the same brutality faced by black communities today were once just as normalised as when they struck Asian-Americans. Of all the unspoken rules in a Chinese household, this one is among the more instinctive: don’t bring politics into established stories. And so, the younger generation stays quiet while harmful rhetoric is passed along the dinner table.

For the longest time, I thought interjecting my elders to point out their prejudices would subtract from the good the custom of storytelling brought to my family. I thought that repeating their past attitudes on how the world worked all those years ago was inextricable to the value of the stories themselves–but this isn’t true. The culture of complacency disguised as filial respect can be separated from a culture that values stories, in the same way ethnic differences can be ignored or emphasized by different calls to action.

If we do not make this distinction, then our culture will continue to raise generation after generation of people that choose harmony over correction, ignorance over history, and isolation over solidarity.