processing asian hate crimes ... please hold
Hi friends. I started writing this on the sixth day after the Atlanta-area shootings, where six Asian women – eight victims total – suffered at the horrific congress of racism, misogyny, and inhumane violence. After day five, the buzzing wasps’ nest in my chest finally quieted, and I was granted uneventful sleep before five in the morning for the first time in five days, thanks at the very least to self-medication.
The day after the shootings were reported, I took a rare mental health day off from work. As much as the news cycle is so frustratingly disappointing on such a consistent basis, the news of this drop-kicked me off a cliff and unlocked even lower lows than I previously could’ve ever dreamt of. The last time I remember feeling so hopeless was when Trump was elected in 2016. That was truly a dark day for many.
On the first day after hearing this news, I barely left my bed. I didn’t eat anything for fifteen hours. I cried so much that my throat scratched and the skin around my eyes stung. My brain was foggy, heavy. I couldn’t focus on anything; I didn’t want to talk to anyone. When I read the description for the GoFundMe fundraiser that Hyun Jung Kim’s eldest son made, how much gratitude he expressed in receiving any assistance with his mother’s funeral and in supporting his younger brother, how the same friends he was on Discord with when he found out about his mother helped him proofread it, I felt my insides being scooped out like pomegranate seeds, leaving only a hollow emptiness that continued into oblivion. I lost it all over again.
Reading it made me think about the Asian boys I know and grew up with, all of whom are silly and sweet and would drop everything for their moms and practically live on Discord too. It made me want to burrow into everything that makes me proud to be Asian American, things that I spent years pushing down, things that white America doesn’t get to take from me now.
A moment of silence for shrimp chips and lychee jelly and white rabbit candy. The quail eggs, river shrimp, and bamboo shoots reserved for me. The fish’s eye and half-gnawed bones for my dad. Sentences beginning in Mandarin or Shanghainese that end in English. The in-between slices of time waiting for my mother, who is always running late to pick me up. Verbal lashings from a round table of other adults, most of whom were also immigrants, hand-selected by my parents – sports coaches, math tutors, violin and piano teachers, art teachers, Chinese school laoshi.
Savoring each coded compliment on your appearance, like “you have big eyes for an Asian,” and “you could pass for half-white.” The noisy clatter of dim sum and KBBQ, where servers’ rudeness is an indication of how good the food is and you always lose staring contests with the live crabs in their tanks. My mother staying up for all of my late flights in, always with a steaming bowl of beef noodle soup. Apples and oranges and Korean pears, puckered by oxidation, neatly cut and arranged on a plate left by my father before leaving for work hours ago. Herbal remedies and teas with things floating in it, acupuncture, cupping, tiger balm.
Hoarding everything you’ve ever owned, including the boxes they came in, in perpetual fear of some unnamed authority seizing all of your property without warning. Kneeling at an altar of fruit and incense for ancestors who died for reasons your parents will only tell you when you’re an adult. Making a small amount of food last several days, lovingly wrapping up the leftovers each night, finishing every grain of rice in your bowl as a proxy to understanding true scarcity. I unwrap each of my childhood memories one by one and polish them carefully, displaying them on a shelf.
Between March 2020 and February 2021, Stop AAPI Hate reported over 3,975 hate incidents directed towards Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI), with these numbers reflecting only a fraction of incidents that actually take place. People report being shoved, spat on, verbally harassed, refused service, publicly shunned, having their business vandalized, and being told to “go back to their country” and that “their family deserves to die.”
“You Chinese bring the virus here and you dare ask people to keep social distance guidelines,” one person recalls having shouted at them, the logic of which is frankly playing 4D chess with itself. Every week, I see headlines of white men in their thirties bodying elderly Asian women, Asian men being beaten publicly by gangs of teenagers, bones broken, punched in the face, sharp rocks thrown, injuries requiring such expensive medical care that it forces the victims to move out of their homes in order to afford it. Apparently, there is currently a game gaining ground in the Bay Area called “Slap an Asian,” because, at this point, why not?
Of course the number of hate incidents reported accounts for a mere fraction of those that actually occur. How are you going to feel comfortable approaching an authority and expecting protection from them when you might struggle with the language? Or are undocumented? How about if the authority lacks the cultural competency to appropriately evaluate additional threats you may be facing that would be absent for a white person in your position? What if this authority actively views you as a threat, and also has a track record of strong-arming past legality, morality, humanity? Considering why there’s a gap in data tells us a lot about forced cooperation within a corrupted system.
Historical US immigration law and sentiment has done disturbing little to make Asian immigrants feel at ease in their new home. It becomes a comfort, Cathy Park Hong writes in her book Minor Feelings, “to peck yourself to death … You hate that there are so many Asians in the room. Who let in all the Asians? you rant in your head. Instead of solidarity, you feel that you are less than around other Asians, the boundaries of yourself no longer distinct but congealed into a horde.”
With the lifting of heavy immigration restrictions in 1965, the US government courted only the most educated and highly trained Asians as a part of their capitalism exchange program. The real model minority myth is that America’s self-advertisement as the land of opportunity belies the credit owed to individuals prior to their immigration, that there can be an ideal race or ethnic group who are inherently harder-working or more self-enterprising. It has been written into our contracts that being here and having our foreignness tolerated is predicated on discrediting black civil rights and stoking the good versus bad immigrant (or non-white) binary. We don’t ask for scraps like our Black brothers and sisters; we are happy to simply starve.
“If the indebted Asian immigrant thinks they owe their life to America,” Hong continues, “the child thinks they owe their livelihood to their parents for their suffering.” A parent immigrates to the US at great personal cost promised with a better life for their child, and the child inherits these anxieties within a context that no longer quite fits anymore – both anguish in and are devoted to their ill-defined debts without a clear picture of when these debts can be considered repaid. In reality, there is no transnational debt anyone really needs to carry in immigrating here. Americans born here are bestowed generational wealth and property; we inherit generational trauma and scarcity mindsets.
To be truly embraced by America, it seems, you must disavow your Asian identity, for the two are at odds with one another. But even then, a sense of belonging in America is an underproduced commodity, garrisoned by competitive quotas and arbitrary preconditions, that relinquishing your Asianness is actually a voluntary submission to ongoing indignity.
Chinese exclusion, Japanese internment, national origin quotas – this is not the anti-discriminatory rhetoric of the past when it is used to sanction the detention-deportation approach to border control and forced hysterectomies on migrant women of today. Our backs have been broken over for us in shame – not shame that is so often associated with our “repressive” cultures, from which America has “saved” us – but the shame in watching your elders be condescended to like children by other adults who can only speak one language and learning early on that you can’t depend on them. Hong concludes by suggesting that to be Asian American is to be pissed on at regular intervals while dutifully minimizing the odor of piss.
Propagating the model minority myth allows white, capitalism-motivated America to wipe its hands free of the role it has and continues to play in exploiting Asians abroad for their labor, in displacing many Asians in the viscous suspension of the diaspora, in leaving Asians who have immigrated here underserved and without any sort of safety net. Elders, refugees, labor workers, small business owners, the 1 in 4 Asian Americans in NYC who live in poverty1 – these are the Asian Americans who are actively harmed by the model minority myth, who are allowed neither the grace of acculturation nor the freedom to lean on a flourishing community of their expatriated kin. Meanwhile, the most privileged of us – those of us who have succeeded in making ourselves invisible in the most profitable way – now absorb the most airwaves and are the primary benefactors of a dialogue that is not ours to reinterpret or reduce.
The scrap of guilt that lingers with me even after the initial shock of the shootings is feeling the most insulated within a minoritized demographic under fire, and whether in thinking this I am legitimizing the conflux of factors that makes particular subgroups of Asian Americans more susceptible to socioeconomic volatility (and evidently physical acts of violence) or if I’m creating counterproductive distance between us.
In any case, I am cushioned by citizenship, language assimilation, and class status. I have never had to be singled out for my accented English, design every projection of the future around whether my ability to live in this country could be suddenly taken away from me, or put my own goals on hold to care for grandparents or younger siblings. I have always been fortunate enough to be able to be out in public and more or less expect to be left alone; I have parents who’ve financially enabled me to receive the best possible education available to me and to think solely about myself. If a racially-motivated situation were happening before me, I’m most afraid of not even noticing, or that I would even lean into the instinct to protect myself first.
In the aftermath of the Atlanta spa shootings, I saw a list circulating on social media among circles of people I went to high school with. This list was compiled by former classmates of Asian descent and enumerated specific examples of some of their xenophobic-tinged experiences, demonstrating how racism deftly mutates to the mesoculture of relatively progressive, modern America in the form of casual, not apparently hostile settings.
I will never say that a more developed, mainstream understanding of microaggressions should not be a priority. Microaggressions enlighten us as to which outdated cultural stereotypes remain in fighting health, how devastating they are cumulatively (and they often are), and what relationship they hold to generational shame. I’m not here to mollify or invalidate the harm caused by careless or uninformed remarks, nor do I want to imply that every Asian student in the same vicinity had the same experiences as I did. I understand why the creators of this list deemed worth in doing and sharing so, and I do not wish to take that away from them.
But it is troubling to me how even – especially – within the Asian American community, there is so little acknowledgement of how barriers to language, education, and opportunity characterize the experiences of Asian Americans that it feels regrettable for microaggressions to get to be processed in safe, civil spaces where the perpetrators ultimately do view you as human (referring to these high school circles, not all conversations about microaggressions are like this) and for that to look like the extent of our problems. In turn, this makes owing us reparations look a lot easier.
The most privileged Asian Americans have the greatest buffer from risk such that we can afford to be more vocal, and I feel encouraged that we are starting to speak up. But while we recognize our primary responsibility lays with protecting and uplifting the most vulnerable members of our community, our perceptions of who is a victim of what, how much so, and whether this is on an institutional or individual level are decontextualized to the point of stagnation. Some of us are content to cash in on the racialized stereotypes of success without heeding the rot crusting over its roots; to squabble over Affirmative Action; to be thrown the occasional diversity-requirement bone of a conventionally attractive, light-skinned, mixed-race Asian lead; to let Andrew Yang proclaim that we are all emotionless and good at math and for him to expect us to see ourselves in him.
There is no trickle-down social justice. And unfortunately, the solution isn’t so simple and clear-cut as to say that we’re better off excluding microaggressions from the larger discourse either.
In my own experience, it has often been other Asian Americans who’ve carried the most contempt for “Asianness” as an antithesis to “Americanness.” One of the first anthologies of Asian American literature to be published – Aiiieeeee! in 1974 – argued that “‘euphemized white racist love’ [has] combined with legislative racism to mire the Asian-American psyche in a swamp of ‘self-contempt, self-rejection, and disintegration.’”
I don’t want to unpack what was done by the individuals I’ve encountered on their behalf. I don’t think that they’d necessarily be proud of some of the things they’ve said and done if prompted about it now. The takeaway is that the allure of assimilation is just that intoxicating – it can be enough to compel you to denigrate a friend’s background as “foreign” and “weird” or joke about how you can’t tell Asians apart (somehow barring yourself from that logic) to get a laugh out of a white audience. You think that shifting the target off of yourself onto someone else is your golden pass into the in-group, which may not even exist as cohesive unit until you fear being ousted by it. So as progressive as our high school was, it’s dangerous to envision anywhere – most especially progressive-adjacent spaces – as post-racial.
In her letter to fellow Asian women, R.O. Kwon describes a reluctance to bring up this upsurge of anti-Asian sentiment with her parents, because doing so feels like it would diminish the sacrifices they made for her brother and her. Acknowledging that some people resent your existence so much that only military-grade arms can express that hatred shatters the protective barrier of denial allowing us to believe that, as long as we keep our heads down and work hard enough, we too can be exempted from this senseless strife like our paler neighbors above us on the race ladder. We know now that this was never the case, and it was never a ladder.
Misha and I frequently debate what it means to be a patriot in this country, in this era. I personally think that it is the right I am owed to be enraged on behalf of my parents and the gratitude they were forced to feel for shitty, isolating, dehumanizing experiences.
It took me twelve days after the shootings, but I finally did summon forth the courage to talk about it with my mom. I’m lucky that she has always been someone who got fiercely fired up over mistreatment, this person who raised me, and now that I’m older we can fuse our anger together.
If you have not read Chanel Miller’s memoir, Know My Name, you really should. Content warning: it’s full of sexual assault, depression, PTSD, and it’s hard to feel with all your feelings for so much of it. But that’s as much of a reason to try to anyway. And incredible light and goodness shines through, I promise. It’s an excellent meditation on individual and collective trauma, human empathy, and setting higher standards for how we treat each other. Above all, it’s a reminder on the importance of acting on and bearing witness to justice.
Asian Americans, so much of our healing and survival right now depends on seeking out joy and going where the love is, if you can. So this week, and the one after that, and the next: go where the love is, if you can.
Known fundraisers for the families of the victims and survivors:
Hyun Jung Kim - “In memory of HyunJungKim to support my brother & I”
Xiaojie Tan - “ATL Spa Shooting Family Survivor Fund: Jami Webb”
Suncha Kim - “In loving memory of Suncha Kim”
Yong Ae Yue - “Memorial for Yong Yue and Peterson Family”
Soon Chung Park - “For husband of Soon C Park, victim of spa shooting”
Delaina Ashley Yaun Gonzalez - “Delaina Ashley Yaun Gonzalez”
Paul Andre Michels - “Atlanta Spa Shooting victim "Paul Michels"”
Elcias Hernandez-Ortiz (survivor, medical expenses) - “Help Elcias Hernandez Ortiz cover medical bills”
Marcus Lyon (survivor, trauma counseling) - “Cherokee massage parlor survivor”
A reading list for going where the love is, if you’re looking for it:
“A Letter to My Fellow Asian Women Whose Hearts Are Still Breaking”, by R. O. Kwon
Minor Feelings, by Cathy Hong Park (collection of personal essays)
“‘Minor Feelings’ and the Possibilities of Asian-American Identity”, review by Jia Tolentino
Know My Name, by Chanel Miller (autobiography of the survivor of the Stanford rapist)
Chanel also makes a lot of heart-rending illustrations. You can find many of them here.
Severance, by Ling Ma (apocalyptic fiction)
The Best We Could Do, by Thi Bui (autobiographic graphic novel of author’s family fleeing Vietnam and relocating as refugees in the US)
The Farewell (available for free with Amazon Prime)
Spa Night (available for free with Amazon Prime)
Ms. Purple (available on Hulu)
Minari (A24 has a few more dates available through this weekend for their screening room)
In This Corner of the World (available on Netflix)
Consistent, accessible, disaggregated data is crucial in understanding what needs and experiences Asian Americans have. I like these graphics from the Washington Center for Equitable Growth and this NYC Government Poverty Data Tool.
When I said in my previous post that I would try to make my newsletters shorter... I lied :)
Homemade mapo tofu (mildly spicy because my mom knows I can't handle spice); all arrays of fruits peeled and cut into bite size pieces with a tiny fork stabbed into one for clean eating; herbal teas that I refused to drink; eye exercises at the window; a pitcher of boiled and filtered water always filled next to the kitchen sink; dan ta; lo bak go; tai yang bing!!
As a kid, I unconsciously brushed these aside to further myself from my otherness. As an adult, I now notice the cultural void that I'm left with. I'm embarrassed that I've let myself forget my roots, and I'm mournful for the upbringing of my future children who will only get a whitewashed version of my ancestors' culture.
Thank you for reminding me to cherish the memories and to celebrate the parts of me that are distinctly attributed to my Asian upbringing.