"Soon after, Republican Congressman Matt Rosendale, during a cable news appearance, succinctly summarized the crisis: "We are being invaded on all sides." A few weeks later Sen. Jon Tester, a seven-fingered farmer whose 2018 Democratic Senate campaign I had worked for, led the bipartisan committee to investigate the "Chinese spy balloon," and pushed for a suite of anti-Chinese bills including a federal ban on Chinese individuals purchasing land in America."
"From the political divide emerged a rare bipartisan consensus that the greatest threat to American life was China and the Chinese. This was a flashback to the era of the "Yellow Peril." At the time, I believed China to be somewhere far away, secondary to the everyday concerns of Montanans: paying rent, filling up the gas tank, making it through winter. I wrote off politicians' Chinese fixation as mere opportunism; after all, xenophobia has historically been a winning political strategy."
I lived in a plain white house in Montana's Rattlesnake Valley in a neighborhood built over plots of bones. The bones' origins were widely known but narrated differently. The discovery coincided with 2023 events: a Chinese high-altitude balloon crossing North America and heightened anti-Chinese political rhetoric. Republican and Democratic leaders portrayed China as an existential threat and pushed laws restricting Chinese land purchases. That rhetoric resurrected historical xenophobia. Daily Montanan concerns like rent and winter remained immediate priorities, while local history and graves on nearby mountain slopes hinted at deeper, unsettled pasts beneath the community.
Read at High Country News
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