An intergenerational love letter to new East Asian transnational migrants: toward a system of racial love Open Access

How are you feeling in mind, body and spirit? We hope the transition has been a smooth process – setting up your new bank account, obtaining a new phone number and activating Wi-Fi, electricity and water services at your new place. How do you like your new place? How does it feel, smell and sound compared to your home in your motherland? We imagine that walking down the street now looks and feels different, with people of a range of skin tones, hair textures, body shapes and expressions. On the surface, people look differently, but on a deeper level, race shapes everyday life here in ways that may be invisible at first. In North America, race is not simply about what people look like, but also a mechanism of social division deeply embedded in social life, profoundly affecting how people live, how they are treated and how they imagine their futures (Takezawa and Smedley, 2025). Everyone, your neighbors, friends and colleagues and you, in the USA, are navigating lives differently from each other because of the current racial landscape and hierarchy. As you settle in and anticipate what the future of this country will bring for your dreams and hopes, we urge you not to ignore race and learn about racial histories and the present in the USA.

You may have heard of the murder of the Korean and Chinese women working in massage parlors in Atlanta in 2021? The murder of a Black man named George Floyd by a white police officer who knelt on his neck for more than 8 minutes, while an Asian police officer stood and watched? You may think they are just some isolated tragedies or individual people’s experiences. However, the motive and underlying reason behind these seemingly isolated events is racism that is deeply rooted in the U.S. social, political and historical context (Qiu et al., 2023). Now, these contexts and histories matter to you as a newcomer and an im/migrant. It will matter to your children and your children’s children, too. Because, as you arrive on this land, you will be inherently racialized as an Asian person through what Asian Critical Race Theory (AsianCrit) Theorists call Asianization – the process by which diverse Asian experiences and identities become “Asian,” and racially categorized into one monolith (Museus and Iftikar, 2013).

We are im/migrants like you. We are also Chinese Mother Scholars who lived, studied and are working in Predominantly White Institutions (PWIs) and who have traversed the difficult racial landscapes across North America over the past few decades. We acknowledge the (intersecting) privilege and sense of safety we have through: (1) holding visas/permanent residence/citizenship as documented migrants; (2) the financial capability to travel transnationally and pursue post-secondary education in North America (while working part-time); (3) the option to return to our home countries; (4) being East Asian, the dominantly visible racial group in the Asian diasporic community (An, 2022); and (5) currently holding faculty positions in prestigious universities.

However, even with these multiple privileges, we have experienced racial pain and trauma as we grew as transnational migrants living in North America. Our experiences represented two generations of immigrants: Guofang arrived in Canada in 1996 as an international student and later moved to the USA in 2001 to begin her academic career. As an earlier immigrant, Guofang was one of the few international students in the field of Education at her university. Most of her professors and peers were white, with a couple from Indigenous backgrounds. When she was hired in a US PWI in 2001, she was told that she was the first Asian ever hired in the department. Alongside a Black colleague and another Hispanic colleague, the three of them represented the entire visible racial diversity of the department.

Tairan first came to the USA as an international student in 2011 and attended PWIs throughout her post-secondary education (undergraduate to PhD studies). In undergrad, she was the only international student and non-white person in her cohort of pre-service English Language Arts teachers. She vividly remembers one classmate saying, “I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t speak English my whole life until I came to college.” During her master’s and PhD studies, her classmates and professors were predominantly white. In these PWIs, Tairan found refuge being in a community with other Asian international students (Hsieh et al., 2024) through Asian/Chinese student organizations and affinity groups. She also learned about language and theories to name her racialized experiences through the mentorship of Black women professors.

Both of us did “life” things like finishing school, getting married, having children and finding a job – things that our Chinese parents and grandparents think we should do. However, throughout these major life events, we also experienced immense struggles while learning to be Asian in the heavily racialized U.S. society. Because of our lived experiences over the past decades, as well as our unique positionality as East Asian Mother Scholars and transnational migrants, we feel the urgency to write you this love letter to share the lessons we have learned and unlearned, and to be in conversation with you as you engage in (un)learning and caretaking as an Asian transnational im/migrant. This urgency is personal, social and political. Specifically, people live in different realities because of the way they are socialized and the exposure to information they experience throughout their socialization process (Harro, 2000). We hope this letter, written out of radical love and deep care for you, can function as a disturbance in your (re)socialization process as you start to build a life in North America.

In this letter, we use interview quotes from research, specifically from Tairan’s three-year critical ethnographic study, to highlight some representative discourses by East Asian immigrants we have encountered throughout our research endeavors. This ethnographic study took place in a predominantly white and conservative suburban town in the Southeastern USA and the research partners were recruited through a flyer posted in a WeChat group. Two of the data sources were over 50 hours of kitchen-table talks and 10 hours of semi-structured individual interviews with a China-US transnational family and their family friends. During our conversations, we talked about everything and anything, such as recipes, immigration stories, gossip and postpartum exercise routines. This work also took place during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, so naturally, we discussed politics. It was those political conversations concerning race, gender, immigration and class (which we quote throughout this paper), that prompted the idea to write this love letter, as the research (e.g. Qiu, 2025) and this very letter are rooted in relationality, stories and our observed realities. This letter is in conversation and solidarity with other “love letters” written by Black (Coles and Green, 2025), Indigenous (DuPré, 2019) and other educational scholars of Color (Reyes, 2022; Tsang and Kodershah, 2023) to their respective communities, calling for intentional engagement in radical love and care for one another.

As such, in this conceptual paper and love letter, we share our conceptualization of what we call a “system of racial love.” This system of racial love extends several interrelated theoretical traditions, with Black feminist thought providing a crucial foundation. Building on bell hooks (2000) view of love as a radical practice for dismantling domination, racial love is understood not as a fleeting feeling but as a deliberate ethical commitment encompassing care, trust, responsibility, respect and knowledge. For hooks, such love is action-oriented, beginning with an awareness that shifts relationships from power and domination toward connection and justice. As she notes, “We can successfully do this only by cultivating awareness…to see what is needed so that we can give care, be responsible, show respect, and indicate a willingness to learn” (p. 67). Racial love also requires what Sealey-Ruiz (2019) terms racial literacy – the ability and willingness to engage in sustained dialogue about race and racism. This is particularly significant for Asian immigrants who often avoid racial discourse despite being rendered invisible or cast as “perpetual foreigners” within North American racial hierarchies (Li, 2021; Young et al., 2021). Bringing these ideas together, our framework connects racial love to AsianCrit (Museus and Iftikar, 2013), positioning it as a transformative, love-centered practice essential for confronting Asianization and intersectional racial harms, reimagining racial justice and situating Asian immigrant narratives within transnational contexts. Our system of racial love includes four dimensions of love: Love for our ancestors – how what we have and who we are now is a result of the love and sacrifice of those before us; Love for other allies in the form of racial solidarity – how we embrace love, respect and empathy across racial lines, through loving other racial groups and standing in solidarity against racism; Love for our broader Asian community – how we can take pride or care for our racialized diasporic group; Love for our collective liberatory racial future– how we can build on the racial love of our ancestors in the past to project a better future for our children in the current dehumanizing racial climate. We use the term system to denote the interconnectedness of each dimension of the system of racial love, as well as the importance of each component to this system. Specifically, it highlights the potential of systemic change, extending from interpersonal and familial to transnationally communal and institutional contexts. We also emphasize interdependence, recognizing how we are interdependent on one another, on other communities, and on our collective past, present and future (Montgomery, 2021). The first three forms of love are fundamental to our love for our collective racial future, a future for our generations to come.

“这已经是历史了。你不说感谢白人。但是至少现在也有很多他们的后代在享受当前的社会。白人带来很多的技术机械。为什么非要揪着历史不放?” (This is already history. If you don’t want to thank white people, but at least acknowledge that we are enjoying the current society White people brought a lot of skills and technology. Why do you have to hold onto history and not let go?) These are words that one research partner said when they were discussing their understanding of race in the USA. You may have questioned something similar, so let us share why history should matter.

Throughout American history, every wave of immigrants – from the Irish to the Japanese to the Chinese – were told implicitly and explicitly that they do not belong through public rhetoric and exclusionary policies (e.g., Anti-Irish Sentiments for Irish Laborers in the 1800s; Internment of Japanese Americans during World War II; Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882). However, these immigrants not only belonged, but they also became integral to the fabric of American society and what it means to be “American.” Our histories – Indigenous, Asian, Black, Latiné, Arab, multiracial – are American history. For the East Asian community specifically, as a racialized group of people, we have suffered from the historical legacy of racism. No other ethnic group has experienced such a drastic shift in status back and forth as Asians in American history. Before the 1890s, Asians were vilified as the “Yellow Peril,” an Oriental menace to Western civilization that positioned Chinese immigrants as invaders of land and disruptors of traditional values, including democracy, Christianity and technological innovation (Bowling Green State University Libraries, 2025). It took Asians over sixty years (from the 1890 s to 1950s) to shake off the “Yellow Peril” stigma and earn yet a more complimentary title, the so-called “model minority” in the 1960s, which superficially praised Asians for hard work, self-reliance and academic success, but subtly reinforced racial hierarchies and sewn division among communities of Color. It took only a few months since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic for Asians, especially the Chinese, to be once again cast as threats, disease carriers, or spreaders of the “kung flu” (Cho, 2021). These pendulum swings – lifting Asians high up in the racial hierarchy only to throw them deep down through arbitrary and radical racialization – have brought real and long-lasting harm to Asian people and their younger generation. They damage the mental health, sense of identity and academic well-being of Asian people and strain potential alliances with other racialized communities (Li, 2021).

Because of the temporality of our racialized status, we must preserve the stories from our history and recognize that our collective past matters. The past tells us about who we are, and the past fuels our future. Asian(Americans), as a racialized social group, have come a long way to where we are today. Your right to migrate to the USA on a visa or green card, your ability to get a job and get paid, your children being able to attend school with kids who look and don’t look like them, your right to leave the USA and come back, your children having birthright citizenship…the list of the result of decades of civil rights wins goes on. The past matters, because social events and history are cyclical and however much of history a person can see, is how much of the future they can see.

Over 150 years ago, Chinese immigrants arrived in the USA with almost no rights. Labelled “cheap labor,” they worked dangerous jobs on railroads while living in overcrowded housing (American Experience, 2023). Even though their labor and brilliance were foundational to building the wealth of businessmen like Leland Stanford (Stanford Facts, 2025) and the wealth of this country, they were paid $27/month, $7 less than Irishmen, who also received food, housing and insurance (Chang, 2019) .

Discrimination and hatred towards Chinese immigrants for “stealing” jobs soon became law. The Page Act of 1875 effectively banned Chinese women under the false pretense of stopping “immoral purposes,” but in reality, this law acted on racist stereotypes that portrayed nearly all Chinese women as sex workers (Rotondi, 2021). Later, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 became the first law to ban immigration by race (Wu, 2014). The law demonstrated the white supremacist belief and ideology that Chinese immigrants are “permanently alien, threatening, and inferior on the basis of their race, culture, labor, and aberrant gender relations” (Lee, 2002, p. 38). Then, during World War II, Japanese Americans were incarcerated in prison camps, again treated as perpetual foreigners and inherent threats (An, 2022). The violent political discourse permeated into hate crimes towards the Asian community, when in 1982, Chinese American man Vincent Chin was racially profiled and brutally beaten to death by white autoworkers in Detroit (National Park Service, 2023). His murder sparked nationwide protests that were parallel to the grief and anger later felt after George Floyd’s murder in 2020.

Major political change became possible through activism and resilience. The Civil Rights Movement, led by Black communities, fought for equality in housing, voting, education and jobs (Barber, 2017). Their work made the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 possible, which finally ended racist quotas that had kept Asian families apart for decades (The Asian American Education Project, 2025). Asian activists such as Yuri Kochiyama and Grace Lee Boggs also worked side by side with Black leaders, showing that progress came through cross-racial solidarity.

The privileges immigrants have today – family reunification, safety from exclusion laws and opportunities to build livelihoods – were not freely given but won through the sacrifices and activism of previous generations, often in solidarity with other communities of Color. As immigrants, we carry both individual stories and a shared legacy shaped by ancestors who crossed dangerous waters in search of a better life. Honoring their radical, loving and tireless labor means recognizing how their struggles shape our present and engaging in the unlearning of one-sided ideologies about race, gender and immigration that we were socialized to accept and normalize.

“你们为什么要争取黑人权利呢？黑人有可能他就是愿意过这种生活。还有, 广告现在都是黑人。我要问了, 为什么没有亚裔？”(Why are you advocating for Black rights? Maybe Black people want to live this life. Also, all the commercials have Black people. I want to ask, why are there no Asians?) We were asked this question by one of our research participants, a recent immigrant from China.

This quote shows that this immigrant deemed racial advocacy for Black people as unnecessary and aligns their ideologies with the white supremacist logics (Kim, 1999). The white supremacist system and logics include (1) settler colonialism – the genocide of Indigenous people and occupation of land, (2) anti-Black racism – the (en)“slavability” (Smith, 2012, p. 68), dehumanization and over-policing of Black people and (3) orientalism – the deeming of certain people and nations (historically countries identified as the “Orient,” “Asia” or “Middle East” [Said, 1978]) as exotic, inferior and permanent threats (Smith, 2012). This logic goes beyond individual white people, but systemically functions to maintain its power by scapegoating different communities based on current global geopolitics and through pitting communities of Color against each other. They make us believe that rights and privileges are like slices in one single pie, and every community needs to fight over how many slices each of us gets. But in reality, people in power and billionaires (as a result of settler colonialism and capitalism) have hundreds and thousands of pies to themselves. Moreover, for example, the “model minority” myth is a convenient ideology for anti-Blackness. The immigrant’s quote above, position Asians as in direct competition with the perceived overrepresentation of Black people and argues that Black communities want to live in under-resourced environments. It reflects a model minority logic in which Asians should be successful and well-represented because they remain silent, hardworking and non-confrontational, weaponizes Asian “success” against other marginalized groups and minimizes the tangible impact of the white supremacist system. Leaning into proximity to whiteness brings about gains in social status, safety, protection and material gains (Baldwin, 2012). However, benefiting from proximity to witnesses can seem positive, as long as there is no war or pandemic (Mabute-Louie, 2025). Not questioning proximity to whiteness is a form of internalized racism and ignores the reality that our status and how we are viewed in the USA are shaped by the geopolitics of different historical moments.

How different ethnic groups are racialized and perceived is cyclical, and each group is scapegoated at one point in history to preserve the power of the white supremacist system. As such, it is equally important for im/migrants to understand the histories and realities of other communities in conjunction with how our own Asian community is viewed. Our history and our future are deeply connected to that of other communities. And when one of us is not free and seen as fully human, all of us are oppressed and dehumanized. For example, do you remember seeing on the news about the uprisings and protests after the murder of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor because of police brutality and anti-Black racism in 2020? Did you see in the news that Trump put a travel ban on 12 countries, including Afghanistan, Burma, Chad, the Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen, on June 4, 2025 (The White House, 2025)? Do you see the videos from the civil unrest in Los Angeles after ICE illegally abducted and disappeared both documented and undocumented Latiné and Asian migrants without due process in June 2025? Do you ever scroll through videos of bombed schools and maimed children in Palestine and reflect on why the US war machine exists and how it functions?

Our humanities as non-European and non-white descendants are connected because our histories are connected. In 1526, it was the transatlantic slave trade that “saved Africans from their countries” to benefit the USA’s imperial and capitalist development. In 1882, it was the Chinese Exclusion Act argued that “admitting Chinese into the USA lowered the cultural and moral standards of American society” (Office of The Historian, Foreign Service Institute, 2025). In 2025, it was a travel ban on Muslim and African countries “to protect the USA from foreign terrorists and other national security and public safety threats.” As you can see, the discourses of institutions functioning to protect the white supremacist system throughout history are similar. If we do not see the interconnectedness of our collective histories with our allies, we will always be pitted against each other to protect the power of the white supremacist system.

Never again, for anyone. Cross-racial and cultural solidarity is a tangible way to enact love for our allies. For example, in 1992, Korean and Black residents of South Central, Los Angeles gathered for a “multi-racial peace March” against systemic racism, after the civil unrest that broke out because of violence towards the Black community and growing tensions due to cultural differences and a lack of historical knowledge/appreciation of past African American civil rights struggles by newly immigrated Koreans to the USA (Lacey, 1990). In 1965, Filipino farmworkers led the Delano Grape Strike, uniting with Mexican workers to fight for better labor rights – a reminder that Asian and Latiné struggles have long been connected (National Park Service, 2025). We need to develop a deep sense of love for our allies, to learn about each other’s histories and cultures, to build together, because the only way to be safe is by protecting one another. In the next section, we narrate another dimension of loving our allies, which is loving our own Asian community.

“白人强, 白人知识强, 能力强。所以他们成功。你们千万不要说白人不给机会, 我觉得是我们还不ready。” (White people are stronger, white people have more robust knowledge, and better abilities. Thus, they are successful. Don’t you say white people don’t give others opportunities. I think we are actually not ready.) This statement by the same Chinese immigrant shows that some recent East Asian immigrants do not feel confident about themselves as Asians, and they consider themselves inferior to whiteness. Internalizing the dominance of whiteness like this will cause harm to our self-worth, sense of identity and our relationships with others, especially with our own community. When we have internalized racism in the form of low self-esteem and self-doubt, we may naturally feel invisible or unworthy, and in times of adverse situations, we may lack the confidence to stand up for ourselves or others. Self-love begins with the recognition that our capacity to love is informed by our ability to love ourselves; and loving ourselves means that we are willing to affirm our right to live fully and well (hooks, 1993). For Asians, it means to honor our own languages, cultures and skin color and to reject the narratives that we are “less than” for being different. That is, we are worthy, brilliant and valuable in our own right, not just through the gaze of whiteness.

For some of us, we may need to do some unlearning of our past experiences and racial stereotypes that we have internalized as the “norm.” Your upbringing and socialization ultimately determine how you perceive race. As you migrate to a new country, it may take some time for you to unlearn the racial discourses you learned in your home country, but this process is necessary. Let us tell you why through Tairan’s story.

I, Tairan, was born and raised in Kunming, China – a place where most people looked like me. Yet even in this seeming sameness, people were divided by ethnicity, language and class. In high school, friends who came from rural areas to Kunming often “stood out” if they had darker skin or if they didn’t speak Mandarin like how the news reporters spoke it on TV. Beauty was narrowly defined: those with 双眼皮 (hooded eyes) were seen as more attractive than those with the 单眼皮 (single eyelid) Asian almond eye. Fairer skin was desired, as I was constantly told to avoid the sun so I wouldn’t get too tanned. Darker skin was associated with “ugliness, lack of education, and manual labor.” This is what Alice Walker (1983) called colorism – discrimination based on skin tone, often within the same racial group. Colorism is a global issue, affecting Asian, Black, Latiné, Arab and many other communities.

When I moved to the USA for college, I brought these beliefs with me. But something didn’t feel right. When people assumed I didn’t have a job because my husband is white, when someone shouted “ching chong chopsticks” from a car when I was on a walk, or when I was asked where I’m “really from” and why I “don’t have an accent…” I felt uncomfortable, confused and angry, but did not have the language to name this discomfort or the knowledge to process these experiences. You will probably feel this way too, over and over again, as you live here.

I didn’t have the words to name the racist and microaggression encounters I was experiencing, until I started reading about Critical Race Theory, Intersectionality and the works of authors such as Grace Lee Boggs, bell hooks, Toni Morrison and Gloria Anzaldúa. The wisdom and stories of Asian, Black and Chicana women helped me understand and validate my discomfort. I unlearned the implicit privileging of whiteness through understanding and learning about the system and logics of global white supremacy. Because I experienced this unlearning process and continue to unlearn beliefs I was socialized into believing that dehumanize our own community and others, I want those I love in the East Asian community to unlearn too – to name, feel and challenge the harm we unintentionally carry and reproduce.

Kai is a research partner in the aforementioned critical ethnographic project. She’s the aunt of Meiyi, a Chinese high schooler. We first met in a coffee shop in Metro Atlanta – she reminded me of my mom, with wavy black hair, curvy eyes and a wealth of wisdom and stories to share. We quickly formed a deep bond. Yet, I was shocked to learn she held beliefs rooted in anti-Blackness and white supremacy, like many other Chinese immigrants. The quotes we mentioned previously were some things Kai said during our research work together. This was no fault of her own, because her views, she explained, were shaped by social media, mainstream Chinese and US media and Hollywood, where America appears as a meritocratic, racially harmonious society – masking the deep systemic inequities that persist.

Im/migrants such as Kai, you and us carry the socialization of our home countries through our im/migration experiences. The change of contexts and histories demands that we unlearn harmful ideologies that position some groups as more human than others. Racial pride in our Asian community means honoring our pasts while committing to unlearning together – respecting one another’s journeys in racial literacy development and holding each other through the often-painful process of growth.

一个人能看到多大的过去, 就能看到多大的未来。(How much a person can see from the past, is how much they can see in the future.) These words weighed heavily on us in 2025 as we witnessed the horrific dehumanizing policies and rhetoric unfolding in the USA and across the world towards Latiné and Asian undocumented immigrants, international students, working-class people, non-white people, non-Christians and many other marginalized communities. In moments of deep fear and sorrow, we ask: what future do we see and what hope do we still hold?

Our dream of a racial future is one in which everyone can take pride in their culture, their ancestors, their skin and their tongue and love who they are without feeling inferior to others. It is also a place where we live in harmony with our differences. As our ancestor Confucius envisioned, “和而不同 (harmony but not sameness) is the highest virtue.” It is a place where everyone can thrive, love and be fully human.

Powerful social change begins with individual efforts and grows into collective action. To achieve this vision of the future, here are some actions you can take today:

• Stop apologizing during moments when you feel like you are being inferior to dominant cultures and narratives, like the way you dress, the way you talk, how you believe 风水(Fengshui) or how you choose to tell your stories.

• Embrace cultural, ethnic and racial pride by not giving your kids English names because you worry their Chinese names are hard for people to pronounce.

• Speak your mother tongue loudly, proudly and unapologetically in public.

• Take up space and rebel on cultural expectations that teach us to minimize ourselves.

• Pack those chive dumplings with vinegar sauce for lunch at school or work, and celebrate your festivals such as the Lunar New Year, Dragon Boat Festival, Mid-Autumn Festival – all the festivals.

• Celebrate as hard as you can and maintain your cultural practices as fiercely as you can, even when there is no national holiday for it, because if you do not celebrate with intention, no one will celebrate it for you and no one will do it for your children.

On a more systemic level, we challenge you to commit yourself to learning and unlearning. Become more aware of how the white supremacist system and logic work and identify how it manifests in every aspect of our lives. Share your stories and experiences related to racial literacy development to raise awareness within your communities. Teach your children and elders, and combat systemic and interpersonal efforts to erase the history of us, our communities and our allies. Become more aware of internalized racism and push against it. Engage in solidarity with Asian Americans, Asian diasporic groups and other racial groups. After all, communities of Color are people of the global majority. Speak up, when you are able, for those who have fewer privileges and power to speak up and advocate.

Okay, we’ve said a lot in this love letter, illustrating what it means to love racially, fiercely and unapologetically. As Chinese Mother Scholars, we have described racial love as loving our ancestors, loving our own racial community and loving our allies. Although this letter focuses on race, we acknowledge that every person experiences race and racism intersectionally with their experiences and identities of gender, sexuality, immigration status, socioeconomic status and/or dis/ability. We challenge you to continue to (un)learn your understandings of race in conjunction with other identities and embrace intersectional struggle, dreaming and love. Moreover, we do not intend to use our experiences to represent the experiences of the vastly diverse Asian diasporic community, especially South Asians and Southeast Asians, and other communities of Color. No matter what your racial identities are, we hope our framework can inspire you to consider what a system of racial love looks, sounds, tastes and feels like for you and your people. Ultimately, racial love is love for our collective future, a more just, humanizing and joyous future. So now, we ask you:

The authors would like to thank the people, places and things that led them to where they are today in the growing racial literacy and critical consiousness. They extend deep gratitude to the research partners from Tairan’s dissertation research for trusting them with this research and having vulnerable conversations.