Seven years in New York City have made me almost miss the squeeze of a subway, hurtling into a tunnel with an arm in your face, and someone quite literally breathing down your neck. In the Before Times, the subways were a place of commingling, not a place of separation, where you could be face to face, elbow to back, with every conceivable type of person, and never bat an eye. The constant churn of new voices and perspectives, the joy of walking down my street and regularly seeing other people of color, is why I love it here.
I grew up in a white suburb north of Atlanta called Alpharetta, but my parents now live alone in Cherokee County, a fact that was not lost on me this week when I grieved for the eight people (six of them Asian women) who were reportedly gunned down by a man who targeted three Korean- and Chinese-owned massage parlors in the area. Officials have identified the victims as Delaina Ashley Yaun, Xiaojie Tan, Paul Andre Michels, Daoyou Feng, Yong Ae Yue, Soon Chung Park, Suncha Kim, and Hyun Jung Grant.
Although this hasn’t been widely confirmed, South Korean newspaper Chosun Ilbo reported that a witness at Gold Spa heard the man say he would “kill all the Asians” before causing unimaginable carnage. According to The New York Times, the killer also told police that he has a sexual addiction and carried out shootings at the massage parlors to “rid himself of the temptation.” That, it seems, translated into killing primarily Asian women. It’s not being widely reported as a hate crime right now, but it absolutely should be.
This, among a torrent of other attacks against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders across the country since the start of COVID-19, has been relentless, sickening, and infuriating. A new report from the anti-Asian discrimination coalition Stop AAPI Hate shows that the organization received accounts of 3,795 hate incidents between last March and February of this year, with 68% of them reported by Asian women. Reports of violence against elderly Asian Americans in the Bay Area especially have skyrocketed since the start of the pandemic (though some incidents never get reported), and it pains me to see gritty elderly women that remind me of my grandmother fending off attackers by themselves.
I am angry and horrified following the news. In recent months I’ve been afraid to take the subway to avoid becoming another statistic, and paranoid walking alone on New York streets. I am tired of hiding in chats with other Asian American friends to talk about the systemic racism within media, who control much of the narrative on how incidents like this get told (if they’re reported at all). I am sick of seeing these incidents trivialized by the police, as if “having a bad day” could ever justify committing a violent hate crime. I am above all numb from following so many of these incidents and wondering why it seemed like hardly anyone else outside of the AAPI community was reacting to them before this week.
It’s telling, but not surprising. No one knows better than a person growing up in the South that the most sinister forms of racism are often the subtlest and the most pervasive, the ones uttered behind a false veneer of friendliness, or worse, openly and freely joked about among people you trust. The incidents that make others go, “How is that even racist?”
Sometimes I tell myself that what I’ve experienced is not that bad. I’ve never been called a racial slur to my face, or been attacked or openly denigrated because of my race. But what I have known is a lifetime steeped in internalized racism, and I fear I will never be able to completely disentangle myself.
My parents left post-apartheid South Africa for Georgia when I was six, fleeing violent systemic oppression against people of color—including the Chinese community—for a better, safer life in suburbia. For them, assimilation was a survival tactic, a means of advancement. My mother stopped speaking Chinese in favor of English as a child, and my father speaks Cantonese but never passed it on to me and my siblings. Having moved to America at such a young age, I took up the same mantle. I quickly picked up an American accent, and wanting to belong, I became the quintessential “Twinkie,” as my middle school friends liked to call it: yellow on the outside, white on the inside.
When has the constant striving and posturing ever been enough, though? The perceived proximity to whiteness hasn’t completely shielded us against violence or discrimination, and has only made it easier for people to ignore the very real struggles of AAPI. This myth of a hardworking, successful Asian minority has also been used to pit us against other oppressed people, and downplay the very different systemic injustices and police brutality that the Black community faces in particular.
In writing this, I wavered over what details to include about my family’s socioeconomic status, or privilege (or lack thereof), in order to justify that I have the right to speak on racism, but I also don’t want to promote the idea that anyone discussing their experiences with hate and discrimination needs to come from a place of “hardship” to have a voice in this. All marginalized groups and people of color experience racism in some form, no matter what our status is, simply because of the nature of how white supremacy works. This flawed notion that “Asians have always had it good” only normalizes erasure around issues of othering, invisibility, and bigotry.
I will never forget the girl in my high school literature class who looked me in the eye and told me that I was not American, or the waiter who praised me for my polished English (my first language). Or the white boys in middle school who routinely harassed me by hurling my last name, Keong, with the force of a slur, as if it were the resounding boom of a gong.
White men have objectified me, and tokenized me as “the first Asian woman they’ve ever dated,” or “complimented” me on looking half-Asian. People have assumed I am a Chinese tourist simply because of the way I look, and customs officers have spoken to me as if I didn’t have a perfect command of English. Strangers have asked me and my brother if we’re married or siblings, as if it were a binary—or peppered me with questions about my background, never satisfied until they’ve identified a “foreign” country of origin.
The othering, microaggressions, blatant racism, and “jokes” are little stings that fade with time but never go away. They’re easy to recall when you find yourself, with a certain amount of dread, in a room full of people who don’t look like you.
I am complicit in this too. I have certainly dodged racist comments and behavior in the past but also occasionally furthered them: signaling to people that I was “down with it” by openly distancing myself from my Chinese origins and self-deprecatingly perpetuating harmful Asian stereotypes at my own expense.
As someone who has spent her entire life shrinking and contorting to be accepted, I am still doing the work of unpacking the mindfuck of what it means to reject your heritage and model your identity after someone else’s. It has taken me a very long time to get to the place where I can recognize and acknowledge the extent to which white aspirationalism has distorted my sense of self, but working through the anger and pain has made me even more committed to fighting white supremacy in all its myriad—small and large—forms.
In the past few years, I’ve been reassessing my own complicated notions of race: reacquainting myself with my Chinese roots, trying to pick up bits and pieces of Cantonese from YouTube videos, and unlearning all of the truths I have told myself of not being enough, or of accepting tokenism because it means at least being included. I am pushing myself to speak up more for the struggles of the AAPI community and those of all people of color, to educate others about how harmful these offhand comments about race can be, and to challenge injustice and inequality when I see it. But there is so much more I could do.
It’s deeply personal work to shift your own thinking and awareness, but creating lasting change also means coming together to dismantle systemic white supremacy. None of the violence we’ve seen is bred in a vacuum, and to be clear, it dates as far back as the 1800s, when as many as 20 Asian Americans were killed in one of the largest lynchings in U.S. history.
All these subtle digs and warped ideas, when left unchecked, can calcify into hate and hateful actions and make room for larger transgressions: Misogyny and hypersexualization of Asian women can encourage instances of violence, like the mass shooting we saw this week, and domestic abuse. Cruel jokes about people who struggle with English dehumanize and belittle immigrants. Historical xenophobia during times of hardships—sloganized by deeply racist terms like China virus and Kung Flu—scapegoat Asian Americans as dirty foreigners that need to “go back to their own country.” This, despite America’s own colonialist past and interventionist policies in Asian countries.
America’s condescending “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” mentality has even made it okay to scorn some of the most vulnerable people in our community: low-income workers and laborers on the margins, some who are trying to make a better life for themselves despite language barriers and refugee statuses. How many people who praised Bong Joon-Ho’s Parasite in 2019 have actually examined their own classist beliefs and treatment of Asian American restaurant and delivery workers, janitors, and sex workers, along with those who survive by working for grocery stores, car services, nail salons, and laundromats? All of these people matter, and deserve our empathy and protection.
Now and always, I would encourage you to educate yourself on the long-running history of violence and discrimination against Asian Americans, start speaking up and looking out for others, supporting the Asian American community’s fight for justice, and reexamining the ways in which you condone and play a part in casual and explicit racism and bias toward all marginalized peoples. I am very much still learning and doing that work myself, and will continue to speak up against all forms of racism.
Most of all, I don’t want you to read these stories, think it is not your place to say anything, and do absolutely nothing. We need solidarity to amplify AAPI voices, and the struggles of all people of color right now, and we are the strongest when we realize we’re all sharing the same crowded space, careening toward the same destination together.
If you want to help or learn more, below, I’ve compiled an abbreviated list of educational resources and places that need your support:
Organizations to Support
Chinese for Affirmative Action: Founded in 1969 and located in San Francisco, CAA works for economic justice, immigrant rights, language diversity, and more. One of CAA’s initiatives, in partnership with the Asian Pacific Policy and Planning Council, is the Stop AAPI Hate coalition mentioned above, which collects data on incidents of verbal and physical harassment and assault against people of Asian or Pacific Island descent for accountability and targeted education. Anyone who has been targeted or witnessed an act of harassment can report it here. Donate here to support CAA’s community services, local and statewide advocacy, and more.
Asian Pacific Environmental Network: APEN is an environmental justice organization that’s been working with low-income Asian immigrant and refugee communities in California since 1993 to advance racial justice, economic equity, and climate solutions through projects that provide renewable energy resources, protect affordable housing, and mobilize Asian voters. Donate here.
Asian Americans Advancing Justice: AAAJ’s mission is to advance civil and human rights for AAPI, and for a more fair and equitable society overall. It offers a wide range of programming, from rejecting anti-Asian hate to legal advocacy and immigration rights, with chapters in Chicago, L.A., Atlanta, and Washington D.C. Donate here.
Mental Health Resources for AAPI
Asian Mental Health Collective: A community for Asian mental health support that aims to normalize and destigmatize mental health within the Asian community. Currently it’s working with therapists who are providing reduced-fee sessions for the Asian community, and generally provides resources for finding an Asian therapist, mental health articles for people looking to learn more, a Facebook group for people to learn and ask questions, and more.
Asians for Mental Health: Clinical psychologist Jenny Wang, Ph.D., has compiled links to directories of Asian Pacific Islander and South Asian American therapists on her Instagram, as well as anti-racism resources.
Boston College’s racist trauma tool kit: This resource focuses on discussing, getting help for, and healing from the trauma of daily racism.
Resources for Learning More and Standing in Solidarity
For more on how you can help prevent hate crimes as a bystander: Please see the Hollaback Guide to Bystander Intervention, which breaks down what to do and how to help if you see someone being harassed. Importantly, Hollaback also offers workshops and trainings on bystander intervention and conflict deescalation, which is generally recommended over simply reading a manual since intervening as a bystander can be really dangerous and better training is more effective.
For more on the model minority myth: The Southern Poverty Law Center created the Learning for Justice initiative in 1991 to stop the growth of hate through racial prejudice and has put together a guide on understanding why the model minority myth is harmful to Asian Americans; see it here.
For more on the history of violence against Asian Americans: This Time article gives a good digestible rundown of the violent attacks against Asian Americans throughout history, but for a deeper dive, PBS also has a five-hour docuseries that chronicles the successes and struggles of AAPI. Historian Erika Lee, Ph.D., has published a number of award-winning books on topics like the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, Asian American history, and a history of xenophobia in the United States. I’ve also found it helpful to read Helen Zia’s The Last Boat Out of Shanghai, which delves into some of the discrimination and exclusion that Chinese Americans have faced in America, along with context about some of the horrible conditions they fled from during the Communist revolution.
Related:
- Anti-Asian Racism Is Taking a Toll on Me
- How the Pandemic Changed—And Fueled—The Fight Against Anti-Asian Racism
- 16 Organizations That Need Your Support Right Now