Lee Wong doesn’t have to prove his patriotism

Nobody should ever have to do what Lee Wong just did. During a recent meeting of the trustee board of West Chester Township near Cincinnati, Wong, its president, stood up and opened his shirt to reveal scars that crisscrossed his chest; wounds suffered during his 20 years of service in the Army.

War wounds are a living, unmistakable testament to the love soldiers have for their country; in this case, the country that took Wong in when he was a teenager.

“People question my patriotism, that I don’t look American enough, they can’t get over this face,” he told the gallery. “I want to show you something because I’m not afraid. I don’t have to live in fear, intimidation or insults.”

Wong, 69, also told the gallery that after he moved to the United States at 18, he was beaten up and harassed in Chicago for being Asian, deciding then that he would never again allow himself to be mistreated.

In recent weeks, Asian Americans and Asian immigrants have been targeted and blamed for the pandemic by people who have appointed themselves the arbiters of deciding who belongs here and who doesn’t.

From slave labor and anti-immigration laws to the forced internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, the demand that people who don’t fit the default definition of an American should “go back where they came from” is as old as the nation itself.

There’s little doubt the coronavirus originated in China, but what does Lee Wong of West Chester, Ohio, have to do with it?

In 1918, because coverage of the flu pandemic was suppressed by government officials who were concerned about war morale, and because newspapers in neutral Spain were the only ones reporting freely on the outbreak of the influenza epidemic, it became known as the “Spanish flu,” when in actuality, it should have been called the “Kansas flu” because that’s where it originated.

When the smoke cleared, an estimated 50 million people succumbed to the outbreak, including 600,000 Americans, yet the world didn’t blame Americans. Rather, some American authorities blamed German spies for seeding the disease on U. S. shores.

Americans like Wong are being attacked because they’ve always been attacked, a matter made worse by the previous president, who knowingly exacerbated the crisis through such provocative names as the

“Kung flu,” granting tacit permission for Asians and Asian Americans to be scapegoated.

Such weaponized language is why Ohio Lt. Gov. John Husted thought he could send a tone-deaf tweet about the “Wuhan Virus,” then was surprised that his Asian neighbors took him to task over a ridiculously avoidable unforced error.

According to an analysis published by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University ( San Bernardino), ethnic- based attacks declined by 7 percent last year, but anti- Asian attacks jumped 150 percent last year.

The growing violence has included assaults on innocent people in which bystanders do nothing to help, but manage to record it.

Today marks Holocaust Remembrance Day. Eighty years ago, you couldn’t have convinced the average German that harassing and blaming Jews for the country’s problems would result in an atrocity that saw 11 million people murdered, including 6 million Jews and 1 million children.

That’s because holocausts never start out as such. They begin when one group of people decides that another isn’t worthy of human rights and how much better things would be if they were just dealt with.

America would not be the nation it is were it not for people such as Lee Wong, who were willing to leave all they knew to contribute to a country that too often holds them at arm’s length.