Charlene Quan (not her real name) is a 36-year old, Chinese woman who is married with two children. She works as a scientific engineer for a government program in Palo Alto. Charlene lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, in a suburb about thirty minutes away from San Francisco. She describes the economy in her area as mixed, with some people doing very well and others struggling to pay high apartment rents and provide a living for themselves. Prior to moving to California, she lived in the Midwest, which had a much more homogeneous culture than the diverse Bay Area.
Her main reason for voting for Donald Trump is that she doesn’t think that government programs operate in a very effective manner. As a technical person she says she always looks for facts on which to base her decisions, but she doesn’t see her employer operating this way. She is tasked with supporting her agency’s decisions whether they are based on solid facts or not.
Did you vote for Donald Trump or against Hillary Clinton or both?
Both.
Who did you vote for last time?
I just recently became a citizen so this is the first time I’ve voted.
Did you vote for Donald Trump because you like him as a person, or because you like his policies or both?
Both. I like his personality because he’s real, he’s not a phony. I believe that he really wants to do something for the country and he’ll do things based on solid facts. I like his polices too. I think American is a great country, and one of the things I like is that the Democrats and Republicans balance each other. Right now I see that he policies are a little too much to the left, so it’s time to balance them to the right.
What are you hoping will change, and how?
Even though I’m Chinese, I feel that policies are too much in favor of minorities now, and it’s not fair to White people. One of my friends’ son can’t get financial aid for college even though he has a high GPA and they struggle financially. I think it’s because he’s White, and that’s not fair. Though Hillary Clinton’s policies favor my group of Chinese people more, and discrimination against minorities is bad, I still think the policy has gone too far to the left and it is time to pull it back a little bit.
I also like that Donald Trump wants more people to get work. I’m middle class. My husband and I work very hard and we pay a lot in taxes to help pay for people who don’t have a job. I don’t think that’s fair either. I think everyone should have a job.
A third important thing to me is same-sex marriage. I’m not against same-sex marriage, but it’s time for that to be balanced, too. Even though I think people should have the freedom to marry who they want, I don’t feel like I have the freedom to dislike same-sex marriage.
What would you like people who did not vote for Donald Trump to understand?
There are different voices in the world. Nobody’s perfect. This time, just by chance, the voice that was for Donald Trump was louder than the voice of people who voted for Hillary Clinton, so he won. If you read the book 1984 you read about a society in which everyone had to have the same opinion or get in trouble. That’s very dangerous. When Peter Thiel, who is gay, supported Donald Trump all the gay people around him hated him. And when Mark Zuckerberg stood up to support Peter Thiel, he was hated, too. It seemed to me that if you are gay then you had to vote for Hillary Clinton, and no one would give you the freedom to choose Donald Trump. I felt that if you were in a particular group you had to like Hillary Clinton, so it’s kind of like I betrayed my group of Chinese because I did not vote for her. I come from a communist country, and this kind of thinking is very scary for me.
If someone from another party would make the changes you want, would you consider voting for him/her?
Sure. I don’t claim to be a Republican. And I don’t think Donald Trump is a typical Republican. He seems more like an Independent leaning toward Republican to me.
What do you think about the anti-Trump demonstrations that are occurring?
Some people have very strong feelings about this election. Some people need to vent and make the world see that they are right, and they have the right to do that. Marching is one way to vent, to express their feelings. I don’t see a problem with that. The problem I see is violence. I don’t like violence. I also don’t think it’s right if they block traffic and affect other people’s lives.
Do you think that hate crimes have increased? If so, what do you think about that?
I think that hate crimes rose during President Obama’s term. I’m a minority person myself and so I don’t have any hostility toward any other minority groups. But because president Obama was a Black person, there were some people who intentionally increased the hatred between the Blacks and the Whites. And every time a police officer accidentally shot a Black man that hatred increased. And in my personal opinion, it was more the Black people hating White people during President Obama’s term.
Do you find any common ground with your friends/relatives who voted differently from you?
One of my friends is Chinese, middle class and a working mom like me. She didn’t understand why I didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton. Another friend was talking about a girl who is an illegal immigrant here, and she asked ‘Don’t you think this girl deserves to stay in the United States?’ I heard what she said. I think people just need to have an open mind. It’s not just one policy that is absolutely right. For example, Obamacare. I think it’s great, and it provides care for many people, but at the same time it’s creating debt. Everything has two sides. I think that if people can keep an open mind then both sides can come together. Donald Trump’s plans are not perfect, but I want to see if they will work. The Democrats went a little too far to the left and now Donald Trump will balance them out to the right a little bit. If he goes too far, then people can vote against him, and in four or eight years the government can come back Democratic again. That’s the American system.