by Emil Guillermo
As May is our month, now known as the all-inclusive Asian American Native Hawaiian Pacific Islander (AANHPI) Heritage Month, keep in mind it’s intended as a celebration of culture and traditions, not necessarily our history.
Our history is much more ironic and bittersweet. History is also not necessarily “inherited,” though patterns remain hard to break.
So while we try to be positive as we pass around the lumpia, history was the reason May was chosen as our month.
We remember the good days and the bad about being Asian in America.
May 6, 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act was approved, the first significant law restricting immigration to the US. That’s not so great.
But then there’s May 7, 1843, when the first Japanese immigrant to America arrived. But that would, of course, lead the way to a generation of Asian Americans who would later be incarcerated during WWII.
Then there’s May 10, the day of the Golden Spike in 1869, that connected east and west within our borders and completed our country’s transcontinental railroad.
A good day until you realize how most of those who commemorate that day tried for so long to forget it was all built on the backs of exploited Chinese immigrant labor from the Far East.
That’s the ironic and bittersweet parts that the anti-DEI folk wish we’d just forget.
Stephen Guillermo
For me personally, May 3rd has special meaning. It is the day my cousin Stephen Guillermo was murdered.
He was just 26, about to graduate from San Francisco State University, when after a night on the town, he returned to his family’s modest apartment on Mission Street in San Francisco.
He lived on the 5th floor but got off on the third. After a few drinks, apartment hallways all look the same early in the morning.
Only this time it led to Stephen trying to enter the wrong apartment.
He was shot and killed with a single bullet. The apartment resident who shot him turned himself in and spent three nights in jail.
And then the SFPD and the District Attorney let him go.
They didn’t want to prosecute because of California’s version of “stand your ground,” based on something called the “Castle Doctrine” which gives the right of self-defense to any home-dweller with a gun who feels threatened by an intruder.
In 2014, I tried to make the case that a reasonable man, especially the suspect who was twice the size of my cousin, should not have felt threatened.
Therefore, the suspect held should still be prosecuted for, at the very least, second-degree murder.
But there was no political will to challenge California’s law. No appetite to put a limit on self-defense as an alibi for a fatal mistake.
Authorities had the killer, but they didn’t charge him.
They let him go. My cousin was simply in the “wrong place, at the wrong time.”
Since then, people have started noticing how “wrong place” shootings occur more than we realize.
One stretch in 2023, in less than a week seven people made the news. All of them were shot, one fatally, just from being at the wrong place at the wrong time.
In Kansas City, there was Ralph Yarl, a 16-year-old African American kid, who went to pick up his siblings at a family friend’s home.
But he went to the wrong address.
That’s where Andrew Lester, then 84, heard the doorbell and grabbed his gun. He saw Yarl and thought he was attempting to break in.
Yarl was shot once in the head and arm and told police Lester said, “Don’t come around here.”
Lester was charged with first-degree assault. Missouri has a “stand your ground” law.
But unlike in California, no one in the “Show Me State” was scared to stand up for Yarl.
This year in February, Lester pleaded guilty to felony murder in the second degree. He was awaiting sentencing, which could have carried up to seven years in prison.
But as he waited, Lester died this past March. The Yarl family was sympathetic, but still say there’s been no justice.
There hasn’t. But at least Yarl survived the shooting.
My regret is that no officials in “liberal” San Francisco were willing to challenge the California law for Stephen.
The DA at the time, the same one who just lost in Los Angeles, told me, my cousin was just one guy. That loser DA was focused on big things like letting non-violent drug criminals loose.
To them, my cousin’s case was just a Filipino being shot by an African American apartment dweller, a case involving two poor people in America with more in common than not.
It was a case that was meant to go cold and die. And that is part of the broader history of Asians in America when we just don’t count enough.
My cousin’s Filipino treatment was nothing new. The Chinese were lynched throughout California in the 19th century.
Filipinos were beaten, lynched, shot, and killed in the 1920s and ’30s in California from the Central Valley to the Central Coast in Watsonville.
My father was in that group of Filipinos in California in the 1920s. Almost 100 years later, his grand-nephew, who came here dreaming of the same things as my father, is murdered.
Stephen’s story is a modern version of our Asian American experience, part of a pattern that we try to remember and break all at the same time.
But it’s not our heritage, it’s our history. We don’t have to relive it.
With knowledge and understanding, we can do something about it. At the very least, we can move forward together.
And not repeat the tragedies of the past.
That’s what I think about every May, during our month, Asian American Native Hawaiian Pacific Islander Heritage Month.
Stuff happened. And we grew stronger.
EMIL GUILLERMO is an award-winning journalist, news analyst, and stage monologuist. A former NPR host in Washington, DC, he has written a weekly “Amok” column on Asian American issues since 1995. Find him on YouTube, Patreon, and Substack.
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