When Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968, I can only imagine the tremendous emotion, chaos, and disorder that must have erupted—the screams, the tears, the rumbles that shook the ground as the riots erupted for days.

Was it anything like the way the ground shook for my father as a child, watching his father, my grandfather, beaten for no reason and publicly humiliated?  Born into poverty, with fifty-six cousins and both parents working as government officials under the new regime, my father, twelve-years-old in 1968, could not understand why his father was being punished by the very cause he supported.  Whether you were branded “black” or “red,” a result of your socioeconomic status prior to the Cultural Revolution, no one was safe from the inexplicable wrath of the Red Guards.  “Volunteer Army” was my father’s original name; “Beat the English” and “Beat the Foreigners” were those of his sisters.
This was my father’s story.  My mother was from the blackest of families, a long line of nobility, landlords, and a tradition of educating even their women.  There are black and white photographs dating back to when they were first available, of men surrounded by their multiple wives with bound feet and nails inches long.

Suddenly the fortunes of my father and mother had reversed.  To atone for the sins of her ancestors, my mother was not allowed to attend college or even high school.  In 1968, the Red Guards had reached their peak, outing “counter revolutionaries,” holding “educational” demonstrations, and disciplining their jurisdictions with “struggle sessions.”

This is what the sixties meant for my parents.  It was what color meant in China, a nation of 55 minorities and one major ethnic race comprising 92% of the population.  But just like in America, the color you were branded meant everything, from your social status to the opportunities available and, most importantly, the way you were treated by people of a different color from your own.

In China, it, too, was an identity.

When my parents immigrated to the United States in the early 1980s, ten years after the race riots burned through the nation, treatment based on the color of your skin was a novel experience.  By then it was Reagan’s America, a brand of Republican politics with which my parents fell firmly in love, and the issues on the plate were no longer so much civil rights as they were the Cold War and the Soviet Union.

There were still aftershocks from the civil rights movement, like the riot of 1980 following the death of Arthur McDuffie which caused the government to declare Miami a disaster area.  The concept of a civil rights movement was both surprising and expected.  It was an unthinkable occurrence back in the motherland, but here in wild, crazy America, it would naturally be a major part of history.

Discrimination was still alive and well in the 1980s.  In the Midwest, keenly aware of their differences, my parents watched marathons of Sesame Street and repeated lines as they listened to NPR in an effort to learn English.  Even if they had been fluent, life would not have been easy.

To my parents, Martin Luther King, Jr. is a man who made a difference, just like the many other figures in U.S. history who have made a difference.  He is a national holiday, a question on the U.S. citizenship test.  He sacrificed his life to better the conditions of his people, and this is a feat that my parents know and appreciate, though perhaps they lack the true appreciation borne from being directly involved in a movement.

But King wasn’t just a black leader.  By fighting for the equal rights of African-Americans he promoted the welfare of other minorities as well.  And as a leader, he set off a chain reaction of inspiration, rallying both his followers as well as other leaders.  Who could forget Robert F. Kennedy’s speech following King’s death asking for unison, asking “to understand and comprehend … to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world?”

Though racism was and still is deeply ingrained in our society, without King, who knows how deep and gaping the hole in our society would have been if he had not been who he was?

I remember very clearly a conversation I had with my father at the beginning of college.  “How does the fact that I’m not white change things?” I asked him.  “How would it impact my career?”

He frowned and said, “It’s easier on the coasts.  It’s easier living in areas with large numbers of Asians, because they’ll want to do business with you.”  Then he shrugged.  “It doesn’t really make that much of a difference.  You just have to work harder to get to the same place.”

How much of this is indebted to King?

To say that people do not band together based on their race and culture would be a lie, and maybe it isn’t even a bad thing.  But to cast someone off or shut down an opportunity solely because of one’s color is an injustice and a travesty.  It is what Martin Luther King, Jr. fought against, and what my parents, even halfway across the world at the time, know all too well.  They, too, were bolstered by his sacrifice.

They, too, celebrate his name, and remember his day