UPDATED: Jan. 19, 2017 at 1 a.m.

When Wing Luck Chin heard in the summer of 2015 that Donald Trump would run for president of the United States, he said, “This has to be a joke.” Now the president-elect is slated to be sworn into office on Friday.

Growing up, Wing Luck Chin didn’t conceptualize race until he was around 10 years old. He remembers being on the playground and thinking he was equal to his white friends until someone said something to the effect of, “you’re not white, you’re yellow.”

“That’s when I realized this world is not perfect,” he said.

In the same way, to Luck Chin, Trump’s impending presidency has become representative of his loss of innocence — his realization that the world is an imperfect place that does in fact see skin color. Heading into Inauguration Day, what has stuck in the minds of many, including some Syracuse University students, are the derogatory remarks toward different minority groups in the United States, including the Asian and Asian-American communities.

“Now that he’s president, there’s just this small feeling in the back of my head that we might go back to things like when the (Japanese) were in camps,” said Luck Chin, a sophomore music education major.

When looking back on Election Day itself, SU students Luck Chin, Alexander You and State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry student Jerel Francisco were just as shocked as the rest of the nation.

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You, a senior international student from China, said he enjoyed watching the 2016 presidential election unfold as an international relations and economics relations major.

You spent his election night group-chatting the results on the popular Chinese social networking app, WeChat, a spinoff of the Chinese equivalent of Facebook, Weibo. He and his friends spent the night sending screenshots of various coverages.

“It was quite intensive, all the communications and the discussions,” he said. “This night gone crazy. People were curious, people were excited, people were a mix of feelings.”

You watched election results roll in and, eventually, Trump secure the presidency. You said he dislikes the negative Cold War ideology in Trump, and thinks what he has said about China are insensitive and narrow-minded.

To You, the Chinese are not stealing American jobs — rather businesses naturally target cheap labor, which can be found in Chinese markets. He believes China’s recent embrace of capitalist ideology has put it in a powerful position to one day become the world’s superpower like the U.S. has been for decades.

“That is why I think those politicians in D.C., whose minds are still in the Cold War, are fearful,” he said. “They fear the collapse of American hegemony.”

Luck Chin was the exact opposite. He supported Clinton, and when Trump won, he became frustrated with American voters for electing someone he believes is unqualified and presented himself distastefully. He still thought it was still a joke.

Jerel Francisco spent his election night like any other — the junior SUNY-ESF environmental studies major was writing a lab report while his roommates watched election coverage downstairs. Occasionally, he’d run downstairs for a peek at the polls. He went to sleep before it was called for Trump and found out when he woke up.

“It was very demoralizing to have him elected as president,” he said. “I think people need to be more aware of the consequences of electing him.”

That next morning, he headed to a meeting with his adviser, who he said was “just not on planet Earth.” As a staunch and outspoken Bernie Sanders supporter, his adviser was unhappy with the election results. Francisco was updating her on his project — later in the day he would go to Oakwood Cemetery to inspect headstones for lab.

“Oh, you might as well bury democracy while you’re there,” Francisco remembers his adviser saying.

Later that day he received a phone call from his older sister, who was buying groceries at a supermarket near their home. As she was leaving the parking lot, a woman started following her, calling her derogatory terms and telling her to leave.

The joke had become a reality.

CORRECTION: In a previous version of this article, Alexander You was misquoted. You did not favor Donald Trump as a presidential candidate. The Daily Orange regrets this error.

Published on January 17, 2017 at 11:16 pm

Contact: cmrussel@syr.edu | @caseymrussell