Are you a desirable or an undesirable alien?

The first refugees were French. That’s not to say there weren’t people — long before the existence of France — who were forced to flee their native lands for safety abroad. The word derives from réfugié — someone seeking a hiding place — which became “refugee” in English after thousands of Huguenots crossed the Channel to flee the violent anti-Protestant campaign that Louis XIV unleashed on non-Catholic Christians in 1685.

The first emigres were French, too, a word whose letters are a more faithful mirror of the accented original émigré. Though simply denoting emigrant in French, it has a snootier pedigree in English usage because it was first applied to French nobles and royalist partisans who fled the 1789 revolution that culminated in the guillotining of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. Soon after, it became the word of choice for politically, financially or socially prominent exiles who fled regime change in their native lands — morbidly appropriate since the letters in “emigre” can be rearranged into “regime.”

“Refugee” and “emigre” reflect a similar tribulation — displacement — but separated by social class. It was only much later that laws were established to differentiate migrants and distinguish between the acceptable and undesirable aliens.

Sometimes, I like to call myself an emigre — just like my literary idol Vladimir Nabokov, an exiled member of the Russian nobility who lived in six countries and wrote masterpieces in three languages. But my resume isn’t as romantic: I really just come from a long line of immigrants, some arguably refugees. None were particularly wealthy — or kept their wealth for long — but they were well practiced in generation after generation of moving away, if not outright fleeing. It’s a nervousness inculcated among many who’ve evaded downturns and dead-ends in country after country.

I envy aristos who now sketch out luxurious Plan Bs with houses in New Zealand or bank accounts in Zurich. But, even with those resources, it’s difficult to recognize the moment to run. The multinational Rothschild dynasty lost immense fortunes at least twice, first to Italian reunification and then, later, to the Nazis. And what if you escape and give up everything at home — and nothing happens? It’s harder to time the apocalypse than the stock market. You might get lucky. Or be dead wrong.

My grandfather was born just as the Qing dynasty’s collapse plunged China into political chaos. His father was one of the last men to take and pass the imperial civil service exams in 1904. That was the traditional first rung in the ladder of bureaucratic success. But the entire system was abolished in 1906, thus ending my great-grandfather’s upward mobility. He took his young family to the US-ruled Philippines to live with relatives who’d set up shop. He died there while my grandfather was still a little boy.

By the 1930s, my grandfather was a journalist for a prominent Chinese-language newspaper in Manila. He turned its editorials into a pulpit to denounce Japan’s invasion of his homeland. The Japanese embassy complained, but he felt he had impunity. He told his friends that Tokyo, for all its bellicosity, would never dare attack the Philippines. The US military presence would prevent that.

But the Japanese expelled the Americans so swiftly after Pearl Harbor that my grandfather had no escape plan. With a bounty on his head, he fled with his family into the thickly jungled hills outside Manila. When US troops finally returned in 1945, the Japanese army retreated into the very same hills. With nothing but bad options, my grandfather — a pious Christian convert — became obsessed with a verse fragment from the Book of Joshua: “Go down westward toward the coast.” He felt he had to take it literally. That would mean heading back home to Manila, but via a route that would have him and his family walk straight through panicked and vengeful soldiers falling back into the hinterlands.

He told his family, “When the enemy took to the plains, we took to the hills; now that the enemy is taking to the hills, we shall take to the plains.” It didn’t make anything but poetic sense. Some companions in their jungle hideout chose to flee deeper into the countryside. They were never heard from again. My grandparents and their children, my nine-year-old mother among them, made the harrowing journey to the coast — and survived.

I’m not sure what I would have done; and I am glad it wasn’t a decision for me to make. But the time may yet come. And it is seriously harder nowadays to just pick up and go, unlike that century between réfugié and émigré. Britain imposed its first immigration controls in 1793 to try to regulate the flow of radical ideas from its revolutionary neighbor. The US started delineating which migrants it wanted (and which ones it disliked) in 1875 to deal with the Chinese who’d moved to California to join the gold rush — the beginning of a monstrous epic of discrimination that culminated in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. The UK would introduce the legal concept of the “undesirable alien” in 1905.

Just as my immigrant ancestors developed antennae for trouble, I’m now picking up lots of static. Here in the UK, where I’ve become a citizen, a xenophobic, white tribal march through London last weekend left behind not just foul detritus but anxiety about civility and safety in a city I had come to love. In the US, where I am also a citizen, I’ve seen how people working for a big corporation or paying expensive tuition in Ivy League colleges or just standing in line at the airport can be labeled undesirable aliens — even whisked away for deportation. The children of immigrants — who’d made their American dreams come true — are accosted on the street and told to “go home.”

But we’ve been running toward home all this time.