Epilogue

Summary

The Historian's Table: Epilogue – A Comprehensive Reflection on History and Identity

Released: November 26, 2024

Host: Charles Fournier

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Introduction: Reflecting on the Journey

In the final episode of the first season titled "First Asians in the Americas: Epilogue", host Charles Fournier brings listeners full circle, revisiting the core concepts explored throughout the series. This episode serves as a culmination of discussions on the subjectivity of history, the importance of diverse perspectives, and the intricate relationship between historical narratives and personal identity.

Charles Fournier opens the episode by emphasizing the subjective nature of historical narratives:

"If we think of history as a photograph, the history we typically have access to often comes from a very narrow and specific lens." [00:51]

He encourages listeners to view history from multiple perspectives to achieve a more honest and empathetic understanding of the past.

Historical Subjectivity and the Value of Diverse Lenses

Fournier delves into the idea that historical photographs and records are inherently subjective, shaped by the perspectives of those who document them. Throughout the season, the podcast has highlighted how different lenses reveal varied aspects of historical events, moving beyond simplistic hero-villain dichotomies to portray humans in their full complexity.

Personal Histories and Identity Exploration

A significant portion of the epilogue focuses on the personal journeys of Diego Javier Luis and Julian Sapariti, co-contributors to the podcast. Their experiences underscore the interplay between personal identity and historical research.

Diego Javier Luis shares his poignant experience visiting his ancestral village in China:

"When I was there and I was standing on top of the old walls of the Intramuros, the Spanish section, looking out, all I saw was a golf course. And I was like, God damn it. Yeah, the colonialism worked." [06:37]

This visit starkly illustrates the transformation of historical sites and the erasure of vibrant communities, highlighting the impact of colonialism on cultural landscapes.

Julian Sapariti reflects on his trip to Vietnam, emphasizing the dissonance between historical significance and present-day reality:

"Going to a space that is historically charged for ancestors doesn't mean that it is charged for us in the present, because, again, the context and circumstances of that place have since changed." [08:18]

Both Diego and Julian emphasize the challenges of reconnecting with their heritage, navigating feelings of alienation, and striving for self-acceptance amidst complex cultural identities.

The Story of Chang and Ang Bunker: A Case Study in Honest History

A pivotal segment of the episode introduces the story of Chang and Ang Bunker, conjoined twins born in Siam (modern-day Thailand) who arrived in the Americas in the 1820s. Their narrative serves as a powerful example of the complexities inherent in historical figures.

Julian Sapariti narrates their journey:

"Chang and Ang Bunker, the Siamese twins... were brought to Massachusetts. They are so intrinsically American to the point where, when it's illegal for Asian folks to become citizens of the United States, or unprecedented, at least they are given the United States citizenship by the people around them because they're such a pillar of their community." [17:55]

Initially portrayed as pioneers overcoming adversity, the twins' story takes a dark turn as they become slave owners, aligning themselves with the Confederacy:

"They marry sisters, they have over a dozen kids between them, and they... own slaves. Some of their children go on to fight for slavery as part of the Confederate side of Civil War." [20:24]

Charles Fournier poses reflective questions to listeners:

"How do you feel about this story? What do you think of these brothers?" [19:05]

This narrative underscores the importance of viewing historical figures in their entirety, acknowledging both their admirable and reprehensible actions. It challenges listeners to embrace the gray areas of history, recognizing that individuals can embody both good and bad traits simultaneously.

Embracing Complexity: Honest History and Empathy

Fournier and his guests discuss the necessity of honest history, which entails acknowledging the multifaceted nature of historical events and personalities. Diego Javier Luis articulates this sentiment:

"The utility is humanism... It helps us see the world as it is rather than how we want it to be." [16:24]

By confronting uncomfortable truths and recognizing the inherent contradictions in history, listeners can cultivate a deeper empathy for diverse experiences and foster a more inclusive understanding of the past.

Julian Sapariti emphasizes the role of historians in challenging systemic erasures:

"The erasure comes from ignorance. Sometimes it's like systematic scrubbing. And I think that's the job of the historian to challenge that with whatever evidence you can find..." [14:39]

Self-Reckoning and Personal Growth Through History

A recurring theme is the parallel between honest historical inquiry and personal self-reflection. Fournier posits that:

"Our ability to reflect on our own identities and accept our own contradictions and complications correlates with our ability to view and accept the contradictions and complications of history." [11:15]

Both Diego and Julian candidly discuss their struggles with self-identity and perfectionism, highlighting the universal challenge of reconciling personal flaws with aspirations for authenticity.

Diego Javier Luis shares his vulnerability:

"I'm never going to be fully Chinese in many people's eyes, you know, and that's okay." [11:15]

This openness fosters a connection with listeners, illustrating that embracing one's imperfections is a vital step towards genuine self-understanding and empathy.

Conclusion: The Imperative of Honest Historical Narratives

As the episode draws to a close, Fournier reiterates the critical importance of diverse perspectives in historical scholarship:

"Too long history has come from a single perspective which has led to the loss of stories and histories, either purposefully or accidentally." [13:47]

By advocating for inclusive research and the acknowledgment of marginalized voices, the podcast underscores the transformative power of history in shaping societal values and individual identities.

Charles Fournier leaves listeners with a heartfelt call to action:

"Our ability to reflect on our own identities and accept our own contradictions and complications correlates with our ability to view and accept the contradictions and complications of history. Looking at ourselves honestly will help us look at history more honestly and with more empathy." [27:52]

This final message encapsulates the essence of "The Historian's Table", urging listeners to engage in continuous self-reckoning and to approach history with an open, empathetic mindset.

Final Remarks and Acknowledgments

In closing, Fournier credits the contributors and supporters of the podcast:

• Diego Javier Luis: Author of "The First Asians in the Americas"
• Julian Sapariti: Composer of original music [nonoboymusic.com]
• Seth Boggess: Mixing and mastering

Listeners are encouraged to share the series and leave reviews to help expand its reach.

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Key Takeaways:

• Subjectivity in History: Recognizing that historical narratives are shaped by the perspectives of those who document them.

• Identity and Belonging: Exploring the complexities of personal and cultural identity through historical research and personal experiences.

• Honest History: Embracing the multifaceted nature of historical figures and events to foster a more empathetic and accurate understanding of the past.

• Self-Reckoning: Drawing parallels between honest historical inquiry and personal self-reflection to achieve deeper empathy and self-awareness.

Notable Quotes:

• "If we think of history as a photograph, the history we typically have access to often comes from a very narrow and specific lens." – Charles Fournier [00:51]

• "We can't change what happened in the past, but we can control how we react to it." – Diego Javier Luis [17:04]

• "There are no heroes in history. There's no one you can truly prop up as." – Diego Javier Luis [25:21]

• "Our ability to reflect on our own identities and accept our own contradictions and complications correlates with our ability to view and accept the contradictions and complications of history." – Charles Fournier [11:15]

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The Historian's Table invites listeners to continue contemplating these themes, fostering a community dedicated to honest and empathetic understanding of history and its enduring impact on our present and future.

Transcript

[Charles Fournier]

Hey, this is Charles Fournier, the host of the Historians Table. And before we start the episode today, I've got a quick announcement. To celebrate this season of the podcast, we're going to be doing a few giveaways. So if you're interested in participating and getting the chance to win a copy of Diego's book or one of Julian's albums or some stickers, head to our Instagram to get details. You can find us at thehistorianstable. Okay. Hope you enjoy the episode. Welcome to the Historians Table. This is season one, the first Asians in the Americas epilogue. This is our final episode, and at this point in our time together, I want to take you back to where we started. We took a look at the fact that even a photograph is subjective. And if we think of history as a photograph, the history we typically have access to often comes from a very narrow and specific lens. But hopefully, over the last four acts, you have started to see that the photo of history you have been looking at isn't the only one. I hope you have started to see the value of looking at the same moments in time from a whole variety of lenses. And that by doing this, you will likely come away with a more honest history, one that moves away from heroes and villains and focuses on humans who are complex and contradictory. This perspective might give you a more honest look at the past, and hopefully it will help with building empathy for both our present and our. Welcome to the final episode of the first Asians in the Americas. I'm your host, Charles Fournier. To finish things off, we're going to go to Missoula, Montana, to a weekend of conversations that fueled this podcast. Because the conversations of history and the exploration of history can lead to reflections of the present. But these conversations aren't always easy. They can be exhausting. But they are important. And hopefully, thinking through these conversations about the value of history will give you some tools to put honest history into practice on your own. And that practice may have an impact beyond just how you look at history. This is the Epilogue.

[Diego Javier Luis]

Hey. Hey. What's going on, Charles?

[Charles Fournier]

How you doing?

[Diego Javier Luis]

Good to see you. Great to.

[Julian Sapariti]

All right.

[Diego Javier Luis]

Made it. All right. How's it going?

[Julian Sapariti]

Good.

[Charles Fournier]

So good to see you.

[Diego Javier Luis]

I'll give you a hug in a second. Yeah. Nice spot, huh?

[Charles Fournier]

Cheesy. Very nice.

[Diego Javier Luis]

Yeah.

[Julian Sapariti]

Hey, buddy boy.

[Charles Fournier]

Diego. Julian, Julian's wife Amelia and I all met at this house in Missoula. Why Missoula? Well, it's beautiful, and I believe it has two of the best bookstores ever. And also when we were planning on a place to meet up to record for this podcast. It felt like it was a fair distance for all of us to travel. So we sat around a table, fueled by sandwiches, chips, and Pacifico, with intermittent trampoline and ice cream breaks, and I recorded while Julian and Diego talked about life, research and travel.

[Julian Sapariti]

I remember us going to the Cape, both Cape Sebastian and Cape Blanco, the places where we reckon that those Spanish got up to with those Asian sailors on board in Oregon.

[Charles Fournier]

Julian, who you hear speaking, and Diego took several trips together as friends and also to work on their individual research.

[Julian Sapariti]

And there's like, an ecological climate kind of experience. I remember very vividly all the truth trees along much of the Oregon coast. If they grow, they all grow against the wind, so they're all, like, swept towards the land.

[Charles Fournier]

A trend in both Diego's and Julian's approach to doing historical research is placing themselves in the place that they are researching.

[Julian Sapariti]

It's not even about the fiction of getting yourself back in time or something.

[Diego Javier Luis]

Yeah, yeah, I agree. You know, I remember how rocky that coast is, and I think that also puts into perspective, like, why, like, they said, they didn't land because, you know, they were too sick on the boat to.

[Julian Sapariti]

That's what the captain said.

[Diego Javier Luis]

That's what the captain said to launch people out to make landfall. But you have to imagine, like, if they did so, they would have gotten wrecked on those rocks.

[Julian Sapariti]

Oh, we couldn't even hire someone to fly a drone.

[Diego Javier Luis]

Yeah.

[Julian Sapariti]

Because it was too windy. You know, imagine like some rowboat going out, you know, from some, like, scurvy, toothless motherfucker.

[Diego Javier Luis]

Yeah.

[Julian Sapariti]

After. Oh, no, wait, what's the 5th of May?

[Diego Javier Luis]

Yeah. So seven months.

[Julian Sapariti]

Seven, eight months into a journey. Yeah. In an unusually cold and snowy Oregon winter.

[Diego Javier Luis]

Yeah.

[Julian Sapariti]

And you're sick as hell.

[Diego Javier Luis]

Yeah.

[Julian Sapariti]

People are dying all around you. You're definitely not going to go out there.

[Diego Javier Luis]

Yeah. It puts things in perspective. You kind of understand those decisions a little better.

[Julian Sapariti]

Why didn't you land? Like, you were right.

[Diego Javier Luis]

Come on, man.

[Julian Sapariti]

Or like, what? I was asking you about why that arduous last month of the journey east of the galleons, why they would be within landfall but never land and kind of like just rest up or reprovision. There's a number of reasons, but. Yeah. Like just.

[Diego Javier Luis]

Yeah.

[Charles Fournier]

The geography and ecology of a space can often provide context to historical moments that a textbook or a letter cannot. Again, because those things are often subjective.

[Diego Javier Luis]

Well, I mean, remember going into the archive right there, and it has the list. There was a big list of shipwrecks in that area. And I was like, yeah, okay, I understand why.

[Charles Fournier]

But the reality of history is that places evolve and change. This is a part of taking an honest look at history, this ability to come to terms with the fact that not everything is preserved or preserved honestly. And those things that are preserved can speak to the cultural consciousness about what is worth preserving. And the things that are lost, well, that speaks to the cultural consciousness, too, about what isn't worth remembering. And isn't that something we can try to note when looking at history?

[Diego Javier Luis]

Honestly, I remember, like, going to Manila, the district just to the east of the walled section. That's where the Chinese quarter used to be. And I remember, like, wanting to go and, like, think to myself, oh, I wonder what I'm going to find there? You know, like, what does it look like now, that place, of course, I knew I had burned down several times during the colonial period, but when I was there and I was standing on top of the old walls of the Intramuros, the Spanish section, looking out, all I saw was a golf course. And I was like, God damn it. Yeah, the colonialism worked. It worked. And I was like, wow, so much life there, you know, so many people had lived there, so much history, but it's all gone.

[Charles Fournier]

So traveling to Manila, what Diego hoped to see was now a golf course. This is a fitting reality to the nature of time and of history. History is built on events that are specific to a place and a time. And once the event happens, time moves on, and the place as a result, may change. This is often why historical events are glorified or demonized. When thinking about traveling to a place to try to grasp its history, both Diego and Julian had similar experiences.

[Julian Sapariti]

When I went to Vietnam, I'm like, this will be a powerful thing. And it's like, I'm a tourist.

[Charles Fournier]

Julian's mom had to flee Vietnam during the fall of Saigon in 1975. Going to a space that is historically charged for ancestors doesn't mean that it is charged for us in the present, because, again, the context and circumstances of that place have since changed.

[Diego Javier Luis]

I think there's always a kind of dropping of the curtains going back to my grandfather's village in China. It's like this magical moment, like, holy shit, I'm actually here. And everything we went through to get to this point. But then you also kind of see why it left.

[Charles Fournier]

This. Traveling for both Diego and Julian as an act of historical research has also served as a chance to come to terms with their own individual histories. And senses of self. Part of researching history is tied to seeking an origin or a sense of belonging in the present.

[Diego Javier Luis]

I think especially, like being a mixed kid, you're never going to be fully accepted. You know, like, we have very few ties left in my grandmother's village. And so when you go there, yeah, you do feel like a tourist. And also because everyone can see that you're a tourist, Even if you do look like people who are walking around on the street, you're dressed different, you walk different, you speak differently from them.

[Julian Sapariti]

In some cases, you're six inches taller than all of your fellow countrymen.

[Diego Javier Luis]

Well, that's definitely your case. Yeah, I think it's just part of that searching for an origin thing. You know, you're never really gonna find that place where you truly fit in, especially as a mixed kid. But you want to go through that search. And for me especially, because I never felt like I fit in.

[Julian Sapariti]

I just, at this point, it's more about belonging to self, defining self along which I think we have in common. I think we've both done a lot of work to, yeah, feel 100% authentic within the ethnicities genetically given to us or culturally bestowed on us or whatever.

[Charles Fournier]

Here's a point that I don't think can be overlooked. To be honest with ourselves and with our views of history, we have to be willing to accept the fact that both are made up of a series of competing and sometimes contradictory ideas. And there are aspects of both our senses of self and of history as a whole that we won't be proud of. But that doesn't mean those aspects of ourselves or those moments in history did not exist. Our ability to reflect on our own identities and accept our own contradictions and complications correlates with our ability to view and accept the contradictions and complications of history. Looking at ourselves honestly will help us look at history more honestly and with more empathy. And this act of acceptance can be humbling.

[Diego Javier Luis]

Well, yeah, I'm never going to be fully Chinese in many people's eyes, you know, and that's okay. Like, when I was in China, walking around on the street, I'd hear people point at me and say, oh, wai guo ren, like foreigner. That's a foreigner. Look at him, he's a foreigner. Or when you go to a tourist site, for example, and people come up to you and they want to take pictures with you because you're like this strange novelty, right? I came up against this kind of. This barrier. I'm never going to be, like, fully part of the fold. But that's okay. I mean, that's just part of who I am, part of my background.

[Charles Fournier]

But it can also be liberating to not feel restricted to a single identity or history or monolithic idea.

[Diego Javier Luis]

We shouldn't have to choose based on like political allegiance or whatever. You know, we have both of these cultural sides in our family and that's just who we are. But that's not to say at the exclusion of or to the detriment of the other side. Right. Which I think is how I think a lot of folks do end up thinking and how I thought about it when I was growing up. It's like I need to buy more into the Chinese side, which could save me from having to identify more with the Latino side, for example. So it's like it's oppositional versus now, I think, like, yeah, being able to go in and out fluidly, I think that is part of the embracing and.

[Charles Fournier]

Part of this ability to accept the complexities of ourselves can be aided by how we consider the past. Recentering, the beginning of Asian American history back three centuries can aid in the sense of belonging and self acceptance.

[Julian Sapariti]

Here's Julian that Trans Pacific first Asians in the Americas research becomes so important because for someone like myself growing up who is marked as vaguely Asian, Filipino, Japanese, Chinese, Korean is what people would read me as the fact that some of those folks have been here forever. If I had known that in that 8th grade history map, if I had seen those routes across the Pacific and seeing the thousands of people coming and the settlements set up and the jobs that they had and the slavery they endured, it would have given me a foundation for placemaking. It would have given me a map to belonging. And it would have given me ammunition against the people in my classes or in the wider culture, perpetuating other stereotypes that I could have used against them and said, no, motherfucker, 1520s, bro.

[Charles Fournier]

This is why history matters and why this specific history matters. Not only would Julian have schoolyard ammunition against childhood bullying based on what he looked like, but rethinking this history throws a wrench into how we have collectively viewed the Americas through a specifically transatlantic lens. Like any act of honest reflection that leads to self discovery, there is a level of humility, excitement and regret built into that knowledge. A God. What if we would have known that earlier? Or wow, that makes so much sense for why this is the way it is. And this is why historical research should be done by a wide variety of people with a wide spectrum of lenses. Too long history has come from a single perspective which has led to the loss of stories and histories, either purposefully or accidentally.

[Julian Sapariti]

The erasure comes from ignorance. Sometimes it's like systematic scrubbing. And I think that's the job of the historian to challenge that with whatever evidence you can find by starting from the position of no, all of these people who have been here matter. We don't have as much evidence. It's a 1 million to 1 ratio of, like, white Western men towards everyone else in this time period. But we do have a little bit. And if you're gonna operate from the truth that everyone is equal and deserves their story or their people's story to be told, then I think what's really important about the research you and your colleagues do is that you put something in the way of those systematic erasures.

[Charles Fournier]

And this effort to prevent erasure doesn't mean only highlighting what is good about a history for some moral or political utility. It means including the stories available, even if they are complicated or unsavory, because that is the honest thing to do, and that is an honest example of what real humans dealt with in the past.

[Diego Javier Luis]

The utility of doing honest history. I think the utility is humanism, you know, And I think that that's what you're talking about. And what that is and what it means is necessarily somewhat vague. But I think it helps us see the world as it is rather than how we want it to be. You can't change what happened in the past. What happened in the past is what happened. It can be constructed and construed in various ways. But at the end of the day, a historian has to believe that there are things that happened in the past, and those things to some extent are. Even if our access to them is imperfect, they can't be violated. There is something that happened in the past. For some fields, that's very controversial to say, but as a historian, I'm comfortable saying that there are things that happened in the past, and I can't change that as a historian, but I can control my reaction to it and how it makes me feel and who it makes me into, like that knowledge. And I think it's that drive, that inner drive, rather than the drive to change the past itself, is the utility of a kind of humanistic approach or an honest approach to the past.

[Charles Fournier]

Here it is, folks. We can't change what happened in the past, but we can control how we react to it. So if you find out that your country did something atrocious like take part in a genocide, your reaction to that information in the present Does a Lot to define who you are. As a finale for this series, let's consider an example that we have yet to dissect. This story takes place after the last Manila galleon made the Trans Pacific journey. So this isn't a world where the influence of the galleons on the Americas has been made. But the story of the railroad in the Americas has yet to begin. This is a story of a set of twins who arrive in the Americas in the 1820s.

[Julian Sapariti]

Chang, or as Diego says, chong and Ang Bunker. I say Chang because they're North Carolina citizens and they would not say Chong. Everyone around them, they say Chang and Ang Bunker. That's how they're referred to in their hometown today. Chang and Ang Bunker, the Siamese twins. Right? Siam, AKA Thailand. These two kids were born conjoined by a flap of skin in their, like, abdomen.

[Diego Javier Luis]

Yeah, Sternum.

[Julian Sapariti]

Sternum about 5 inches long. Could not be separated at the time through medical procedure. They're spotted swimming in a river. The guy thinks that they're an animal. Eventually, this, like, missionary who's over there gets in touch with a sea captain from Massachusetts. They become basically bought and enslaved with permission from the king of Siam. The shit is crazy. This is like, 1820s. They're brought to Massachusetts. They're paraded all over the United States, down to where Diego and I are from, like, Kentucky area and into the South. This guy gets rich off them. They finally get out of their contract, get free, move down to North Carolina because they had a friend there.

[Charles Fournier]

I'm going to pause this story here. I want you to consider what you think about this story. What do you think about these twins? Enslavement and ability to become free. Keep that in mind. Here's Julian with more of the story.

[Julian Sapariti]

And they become much like Catarina, model citizens, not through their faith, but through their entrepreneurship, their money, their class and behavior. They are often remarked. They had a very European sensibility. They were tuxedos. These are, again, people from Siam, from Thailand. People we never talk about in Asian American studies. And these people are here before those railroad workers in the 1820s. And they are so intrinsically American to the point where, when it's illegal for Asian folks to become citizens of the United States, or unprecedented, at least they are given the United States citizenship by the people around them because they're such a pillar of their community. They have a farm, in very typical Southern American fashion.

[Charles Fournier]

Okay, listener, I want to pause the story again. Some questions. How do you feel about this story? What do you think of these brothers? Ability to gain U.S. citizenship and embed themselves within the country. Okay, keep your answers in mind.

[Julian Sapariti]

They marry sisters, they have over a dozen kids between them, and they, like I said, in true Southern gentleman farmer fashion, own slaves. Some of their children go on to fight for slavery as part of the Confederate side of Civil War.

[Charles Fournier]

Now, what do you think of this story? A set of twins that were enslaved, bought their freedom, gained citizenship, married and had children, and then enslaved people themselves and supported the institution of slavery so much that their children fought for the Confederate side in the Civil War. It got complicated. Right? This is one of those moments where at the start of the story, you might have wanted to make these figures into heroes. And there is likely a very hard left turn you took into wanting to make them into villains. And isn't this the nature of honest history and honest reflections? These twins did some things in their early life that are admirable, and then they went on to do some things that are unforgivable. In an effort to understand history honestly, it is important to hold both of these truths at the same time because it allows for insight into that moment in history.

[Julian Sapariti]

So Chiang and Ang Bunker themselves are a great way to, I think, give an honest accounting of an Asian American history decades before the Chinese railroad workers get here, in their exceptionalism as heroes who escape slavery, in their villainy, as people who enslave other human beings. Not to mention all the miraculous things that they did, overcoming their disability, making all that money, which is the religion of America.

[Charles Fournier]

Diego frames the story of the Bunkers with that of Catarina de San Juan, who we heard about in Act 4.

[Diego Javier Luis]

I think both cases allow us to ask very provocative questions. And I think that this is one of the great uses of thinking about history for understanding the world as it existed morally. Then what were the possibilities? What were the limitations? And I think that that allows us to reapproach the world that we live in today and see it in a new way. For example, when we ask questions like, how could Catarina San Juan have been enslaved and then become a kind of local hero and a deeply race conscious society, how is that possible? Or when we look at the bunkers, how could it be that you have people who are brought to the US as slaves, who then become slave owners and supporters of the Confederacy, which was founded on the right to own slaves, how could that be possible? And it's really digging through and disentangling and fighting and meditating with those difficult or even impossible to answer questions from our 21st century perspective that really allows us to reach that lofty goal of humanizing our historical subjects because they are so complicated. They're not one thing or the other thing. They're not entirely good or entirely bad. History exists in a gray area, and our present exists in a gray area. I often come back to, you know, there are no heroes in history. There's no one you can truly prop up as. Like, this is an absolute model with no stain on them. And I think it's understanding that grayness that will help us understand what's the true nature of Asian American history as it existed. To get away from these kinds of narratives that are either a narrative that's meant to be like triumphalist or a narrative that's meant to. That has a particular purpose, right? And when you make a narrative like that have a purpose that's outside of the kind of intrinsic meaning that it has, then it becomes dishonest in some way. And I think that sitting with the grayness and becoming okay and accepted, accepting that grayness helps us become more honest students of history. And we know from studying history that, you know, the reality is really quite complicated. There were enslaved Asians and there were Asian slave owners. And I think that doing history honestly requires us to confront both of them. That's not to say that, you know, we should evaluate them equally. There were far more enslaved Asians than there were slave owners. The same is true of enslaved Africans versus free black slave owners in the Americas, of which there were several. You have to study both. That's all I want to say. You have to study both to arrive at a more honest conception of history and to ultimately be able to extend the empathy that you have for your own group to other groups as well.

[Charles Fournier]

Doing this isn't easy. We each bring our own biases and hopes and assumptions about the past and ourselves to any view of history. But to view history honestly and all of its complicated muddiness, we must have a self reckoning that allows us to do that. This is tough even for a trained historian like Diego. Over the conversations that led to this podcast, both in Missoula and elsewhere, Diego himself struggled with allowing an honest depiction of himself. And don't we all? Isn't this the damning quality of managing our personal histories with social media? It's constructed and likely not the most honest representation. And this avoidance of a self reckoning can be heightened by a lot of things, like a career or a family or just self consciousness. So, like history, it's important to have a variety of perspectives to allow for honesty. It's important to have friends who might call you out.

[Diego Javier Luis]

Well, I mean, you know, I want. The thing is, I want to be able to show the podcast to my students, you know, and I don't want them to think I'm not perfect when they hear the podcast, basically.

[Julian Sapariti]

See, that's fucked up.

[Charles Fournier]

And I like, that's what you want. I don't know if that's what you.

[Diego Javier Luis]

No, no. Yeah, no, no, I'm prepared to not. Yeah. Be perfect to a degree.

[Charles Fournier]

Creating that is like, you're talking about honest history. Like, you can't.

[Diego Javier Luis]

I know, I know. I'm full of contradictions.

[Julian Sapariti]

Yeah, there you go. You're human.

[Diego Javier Luis]

Yeah.

[Julian Sapariti]

I think you should admit. I think that's a great way to end the podcast. I think the last thing that people to hear is like sort of your openness about your contradictions. Like, part of me wants this to be a perfect model for my students and my colleagues, to ensure my sterling reputation in the academy, just like all these other people. Part of me does want to actually look at myself and reflect as a human being the way I look at my historical subjects. I'm probably going to opt for the first option, if that's possible. Thanks, Charles.

[Charles Fournier]

Diego, like all of us, is human. So if you scoffed or began to judge him at any point during his admittance that he wants to be perfect, then you aren't being very empathetic or honest with yourself, because I bet you've been there too. To some degree. You have wanted to look perfect or been perceived as perfect. And why is that? Even though we can't fully blame how we view history for wanting to be seen as perfect, having a view of history that is from a single perspective and only presents heroes and villains can't help. And this is what we've done to history. We collectively have too often tried to make our history look perfect. We've taken that snapshot from one vantage point and institutions defend this image of history. Schools have been removing materials from classrooms because the books point to an American history that includes blemishes. To me, this speaks more to an unwillingness to have a personal self reckoning than anything. So this recentering of Asian American history and Diego's path to recenter that history should serve as an example for how we might need to start thinking about history and ourselves. I said this earlier, but I'm going to say it again. Our ability to reflect on our own identities and accept our own contradictions and complications correlates with our ability to view and accept the contradictions and complications of history. Looking at ourselves honestly will help us look at history more honestly and with more empathy. And if we can do this, then maybe we can have more empathy for one another, because we need it now more than ever. This is the First Asians in the Americas I'm Charles Fournier. The series was written and produced by me. This podcast is based on the book the First Asians in the Americas, written by Diego Javier Luis, who also aided in editing. Original music for this podcast is from Julian Sapariti. Go check out the rest of Julian's [e-mail] Mixing and mastering for this series was done by Seth Boggess. This podcast was funded by Tufts University and before we leave you, I have two requests. First, please share the series with everyone you can think of. And second, while you're trying to think of all those people you want to share the series with, please take a moment to leave a rating and write a review about your experience listening to this podcast. Those things help a great deal to spread the series to other folks who would enjoy it. Thank you so much for listening.