I know it’s been a couple months, and while I’ve had periodic thoughts and drafts go by… it’s been busy (shortly after my last post, I changed jobs at the same company, and it’s been a bit of a transition for the positive side). So, y’know. I’m still alive. ~finger guns~
Yesterday, a shooter went to several Asian-owned massage parlors in the Atlanta area and killed eight people, six of whom were Asian women. There’s a mélange of feelings in me in response- grief, rage, sadness, fear. And, still going to put the caveat that it’s not Oppression Olympics and also I recognize that anti-Blackness is far more insidious in this country. This is not the place to argue for increased policing.
I remember a year ago, at the start of the pandemic in February thinking about how it was going to bring on a new flavor of xenophobia. At a birthday, an international friend joked that I brought coronavirus (he did apologize within the week). Stateside Lunar New Year celebrations were curtailed or delayed because of the lockdown overseas. When it finally arrived in the US, I worried that my horrible spring allergies would not go over well in public, and in the early days considered that wearing a mask might make me a target, finally conceding to public safety when our town was at about 50% mask wearing before the state mandate.
I find extremities in acquaintances: either I am some kind of Other to them, where they think they can relate to me by talking about their wife/adopted daughter/in-law/etc., or so colorblind that after a racist remark will say, “why are you mad; I don’t even think of you as Asian” as if to be Asian is explicitly to be foreign, and “normal” means white or white-adjacent.
Race is a construct, and yet artificial devices have longevity much like the manmade landscape of a city skyline. If someone’s familiarity with Asian women only comes from anime, porn, and caricatures, how are they going to perceive people like me?
It is 12:30 AM as I write this, and we still don’t have the names of the victims [as of publishing at 7:30 AM, still nothing] and yet there’s already a profile on the murderer, citing his pastor father and church background (the fact he was taken alive should also inform you about who he is and how much of a threat authorities perceive him to be). We are the Perpetual Foreigner; it manifests in peculiar ways such as Asian and Asian American films getting accolades without nods to the actors within, looking for yourself in the Other error bars of surveys split by race that only see Black and White.
Anti-Asian hate crimes have been on the rise since last year, and at the beginning of 2021 they explicitly rose towards our elders. A twitter thread (not sure I can find it now) suspects that the rate might be even higher, except aunties and uncles might not want to bother us with concerns of incidents they might encounter, and they might not report because why make waves (or language barriers, or fear of citizenship status being taken away). A lot of celebrities have spoken out, but does that make meaningful change? How do we get our neighbors and friends to see us as people, as fellow citizens and neighbors? Whether our roots grow back 150 years or we’re recent refugees, we have a right to be here. We do not need to prove our Americannness to be treated as citizens, as peers, as dignified human beings.
I’m so tired.