I first learn of Asian American history through other Asians. In grade school, we learn about Chinese laborers that came to work on the transcontinental railroads and the subsequent Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, created when the Yellow Peril fear of the Asian laborers by White people became too fierce. I learn of how immigrants came through Ellis Island and Angel Island, but am confused what island my family came through since they flew in on a plane. I learn about how the Japanese Americans were interned in camps, but in grade school we spend more time reading about Anne Frank and the concentration camps than we ever do on Manzanar, or Tule Lake, or any of the other camps scattered across America.

I still don’t see myself in these histories, not really. My kind of Asian — Bangladeshi American, South Asian American — don’t ever make it into the American history books, if only but a footnote. I find these versions of me in my geography books, maybe in a blurb about Gandhi, maybe a blurb on India’s Partition. ‘If this is American history, then how come there isn’t anything about my kind of American in here?’ I ask my grade school teacher. She tells me that my people are immigrants new to this country and have no history, even though I know I am not an immigrant and born here. I am skeptical of this statement.

I learn later, much later, South Asians did indeed come to America early. I had always been told that South Asian were new immigrants, coming after 1965’s Immigration and Nationality Act, imported for our brains as doctors and engineers. It’s not until I’m an adult, and searching through archives that I find a 17th century “wanted” newspaper ad in Richmond County looking for a runaway “East India Indian” man. I know that slaves came from Africa, but I didn’t know that slaves came from South Asia, too. The image states it was looking for Thomas Greenwich, a “well made fellow, about 5 feet 4 inches high, wears his own hair, which is long and black, has a thin visage, a very sly look and a remarkable set of fine white teeth.” I learn later, much later, that many East India Indians came over as indentured servants to the American colonies, “blending” into the free African American population when they won petition of their freedom[1]. I find myself viscerally reacting to American History slave narrative after finding this out — I am sad that this is forgotten as a part of our Asian American history. I wonder about all the anti-blackness and how much that would change if they all only knew. I wonder how this feeds divisiveness into the model minority myth.

I become obsessed. I learn of other kinds of South Asians that existed in in America pre-1965. There are the Punjabi Sikh farmworkers that moved to the Central Valley of California to work on the farms. There are the gurus and yogis and charlatans that came to make money off of telling fortunes to the wealthy Whites. There are the ship-jumping stowaways who secretly imported ethnic goods from the motherland. I learn that South Asian men immigrated alone and couldn’t bring over wives, nor could they marry White women, so they married Mexican women in California and Black women in the South. I wonder how different my life would have been if I had known my history of being working class and slaves as South Asian in America went back hundreds of years — we are not just newly imported educated immigrants.