The Unexpected Consequences of My 2016 Trump Vote

Buzz Feed

5 hours ago

I am a Chinese woman, a daughter of immigrants, who voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election. It is almost a secret, though I sometimes offer up the confession like it is penance.
I cried driving away from my polling place and sobbed on a futon when he won. My chest was tight, my stomach churned, my face was hot — all blood and breath and acid had conspired inside me to signal alarm. I immediately hated my choice, but I did not yet believe it to be wrong. I had bought into the lesser-of-two-evils arc, with 'But her emails!' still echoing in my mind to assure me that this was the only option.
Earlier that fall, my church had just launched a new 'Adopt A College Student!' ministry. It was imagined as a mentorship and fellowship opportunity for the young adults in our congregation, a chance to share coffee and do laundry. We were invited to apply for the program, so that we could prayerfully be matched up with an adoptive family. I learned the family of one of our church's pastors had requested to be paired with me, and this thrilled me. I had secretly hoped to be matched with them, and I loved a narrative in which I was chosen.
My eagerness to sign up for anything that promised me love was what had brought me to church in the first place. The messaging was direct. They had cornered the market on love, and all I needed to do was say yes. The love would turn out to be a gimmick to get me signed up for the real program, one that I was even more primed to receive, and that I believed was simply the precursor to how to be loved: how to be good.
In addition to a behavioral and ideological rulebook, white evangelical culture provided me with one other thing I'd been chasing after my whole life: an entry point into dominant white culture. I wanted to un-other myself and believed that I could assimilate myself into safety, power, and love.
A deep sense of un-belonging had been with me since my earliest memories. When I was little, kids would ask me why my eyes weren't more Chinese — the asker would drag their own eyes out to the edges of their face in a sliver. I never had an answer but took it as a mercy that I was less Chinese than I could have been.
At my Baptist preschool, my favorite teacher, who had long brown hair that I loved to play with, asked me one day what the Chinese word for hair was. I answered, 'Tóufa' — and then it became my nickname for the rest of my years there. I internalized these differences as things that made me special, but over time this morphed into two beliefs: I was only as special as I was separate; and in this showcase of separation was where I was most likely to be endeared.
In church, I learned to further capitalize on this difference, twisting the isolation into testimony. I had felt much pain related to my Chinese identity, and the church was ready to pin Chinese culture as the culprit and this American gospel as the solution — as salvation.
I had grown up in a family that was not apolitical but that had not considered politics from a perspective that I could understand. My parents were Chinese immigrants who'd grown up during the Cultural Revolution and come to the United States following the Tiananmen Square massacre, and who'd told me exactly none of this over the course of my years at home. I was in high school when I learned about the massacre on the internet and in my 20s when I thought to ask my mother if she had been in Beijing when it happened (she had been).
Once, after a fifth-grade civics lesson, I wondered whether my parents were Democrats or Republicans, and I asked my neighbor down the street what she thought: Which was better, and which were my parents? She said my dad was probably a Republican because he owned a small business. Then she shared that she was a Republican, too. I remember feeling a frivolous pride teaching my parents the Pledge of Allegiance when they were preparing to become citizens, like it was my little American trick. The first time they voted in a presidential election, I was surprised. I knew they could, but it hadn't occurred to me that they would. They still felt so un-American to me, and U.S. politics felt like it didn't belong to them, or to us.
Over the next few years, I felt a growing sense that I both should and shouldn't find my place in political conversations around me. In churched spaces, the prevailing message was that politics were bad, divisive, and a scheme, but still, there was an unspoken alliance. I don't remember learning Christian nationalism, but one day it was just there, the innate understanding that Christians were Republicans, that liberalism was bad, and that it was good to root for our beliefs to be everybody's beliefs.
The church I attended had an American flag on the stage, the children said the Pledge of Allegiance before AWANA, and on more than one occasion, we sang about God and country during Sunday worship, declaring our patriotism through choruses of 'America, America, God shed his grace on thee.' My public school invited students to church lock-ins with the aim of proselytization, refrained from Halloween festivities, prayed before sporting events, and I had come to receive this breakdown of church and state as a blessing. By the time the 2016 election rolled around, I had spent a lifetime in sacred and secular institutions that had braided moral uprightness with a message of Christian faith.
In the months leading up to the election, I spent a lot of time with the pastor's family who had 'adopted' me for the college student ministry. The wife, in particular, spoke frequently to me about politics. She shared her beliefs with a parental (and pastoral) authority on gun control and racism, and Hillary Clinton. She presented ideologies as an assumed commonality, sparing me the opportunity to react wrongly.
One day in the car, she shared her 'all lives matter' ethic with me at a stoplight on the way to pick up her daughter from dance. I tensed for a moment — and then we were talking about something else. By November, we had had so many conversations about Hillary Clinton that I knew she was not an option. I don't remember any conversations about Donald Trump.
My first time voting in a presidential election was when I was 21. I had spent my few previous adult years priding myself on being good and moral, while managing to stay outside of political schematics. An impulse to challenge the things that unsettled me had begun to creep in, but immediately I would assert that I didn't care about politics, that this thing I was bringing up wasn't that.
I had begun the psychic separation of church and state, knowing that I would legally support gay rights, even if doctrinally I couldn't. But I wasn't watching the news, and I wasn't engaging with the worst of Donald Trump. I had reduced him to nothing more than the option that was not Hillary Clinton. I knew that I had a duty to civic participation and that I couldn't leave this world completely up to chance, but I also believed that my citizenship was not of this world but another. I believed there was a spiritual superiority in staying above the anxiety of politics. It's true that this ideology I had built my life on had begun to fray, that I expressed unease over my plan to vote for Donald Trump, that I fought to justify it because I knew it wasn't justifiable. But nuancing my culpability wouldn't do a damn thing for the mistake I would make in the end.
A few months before the election, I had just for the first time considered whether or not I was a 'person of color.' I had watched a recording of a diversity roundtable segment from a popular Christian women's conference featuring people of color discussing race and the church, and two East Asian women were on the panel. Afterward, I asked my white roommate if I was a person of color and cracked a joke about whether or not yellow was a color. I knew I wasn't white, but I had been white-adjacent enough to believe that a racialized experience wasn't something that belonged to me. I had only ever heard race discussed in the contexts of Blackness and whiteness.
Recently, my only Asian American friend from high school shared that her prevailing memory of me was that I hated being Chinese and wished I was white. She remembers me saying this over and over again. I had always felt the categorical otherness of being Chinese in a town that was over 90% white and had so minute an Asian population that the category was often omitted altogether in census data (other times, it came in at a decimal below 1%). But I lacked a framework to make sense of it. I didn't yet understand white supremacy, or the model minority myth or even systemic racism. I didn't know that I was a person of color.
I instinctively hated what was hated in me, but even that felt like pointing at a ghost. How do you gather evidence when all the evidence is just ways you are quietly not there? The movies you are not in, the books, the TV shows. The way your history is omitted, but you can't cite what you don't know, you can only know what isn't yours, and the history you learn never is. You singularly fill the gap that accounts for your existence, because if you haven't learned about you, then surely they haven't either. They ask you about your eyes or your food or your parents' names, but it's all in good faith (except when it's not). The systems that are designed to restrain us — the ones that succeed without our ever seeing them — breed a particularly maddening brand of self-hatred.
Following the election, the bubble of white-adjacent privilege I had quietly kept myself in popped overnight. All of the good behavior in the world couldn't save me from the pain that was now presented to me as my birthright. People I loved had received a blanket permission slip to say out loud any abhorrent things they had believed all along. Oftentimes racist ideology was shared with me with no awareness of its implication on me at all.
I'd spent so many years trying to convince white people and myself that I was one of them, and I'd almost done it. I'd prided myself on being the kind of Asian you could make Asian jokes to, ask your racist questions to. I beat people to the punchline for a quick laugh. I cracked jokes about pretending to be everybody's adopted Chinese daughter; one year, I wound up in three different families' church directory photos as a gag. I'd spent my life allying with whiteness, and I couldn't believe now how it had betrayed me.
When I share now that I voted for Trump in 2016, it drops like a bomb every time. People who didn't know me then are shocked because it feels aggressively counter to every value I hold now. People who did know me then just never clocked me as particularly Republican, and so even 'voting for the platform' doesn't quite explain what I did because was I ever so against abortion?
When I told my therapist a few weeks ago, she gasped and immediately asked me, 'Why?' The truth of the moment of decision is not particularly interesting or compelling. 'I was told I had to,' feels cheap and off-kilter. My understanding of that political era is so different now than it was then that it is hard for me to access my actual beliefs from that time. What did I truly believe about Hillary Clinton? How little did I think about my decision as my own before I cast it on a ballot? Most of my close white evangelical friends sat the election out because they said they just couldn't vote for him, and they couldn't vote for her. How, then, had I reconciled the cognitive dissonance that was voting for Donald Trump?
The short answer is, I didn't. The longer one is that two primary impulses compelled me to my vote: the desire to stay loved and the desire to stay close to whiteness — both repackaged as a desire to please God. I didn't believe Trump would get me any closer to these things, but I thought compliance might. I don't know what I really believed about the stakes of that election or the platforms of the candidates (though my body gave me signs I had betrayed myself immediately after I voted), but I do know that I truly believed that the church was the reigning authority on love. This belief, paired with my pleasing tendencies and my insecurities, made me incredibly susceptible to the church's ideological mandates. I felt like I had snuck into the group and had so much to lose. I wanted to stay trusted and to be seen as good, and I believed them when they told me how to do it.
I wonder sometimes how long it would have taken me to get here had Trump not won the election in 2016. My story of regret is not unique, and neither is it noble. I allied with whiteness until it had nothing left to offer me. I was swayed by the church's authority on love not because of how I hoped the church might dispense love to others but because of how I hoped it might dispense love to me.
I still live in the same small, white, churched town in West Virginia. Everyone I love either loves someone who voted for Trump or is someone who voted for Trump. I worry that there is a parallel universe in which I did again, too — in which I am a completely different person because I remained allied with power.
I have laid down much at the altar of white supremacy, but if Trump's first term gave me nothing else, it gave me an ultimatum. I am not grateful to have made the mistake of voting for Donald Trump in 2016, and I am not grateful for anything that has come from his politics or his presence, but I am grateful for the other side of a crisis point.