Asian American Pain
When I was younger, there were only two things I was afraid of — failing at school and the darkness. I’m now 26 and while failure and darkness no longer leave me weak in the knees, the list of fears has grown. At the top of my list is the fear of being caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, needing to scream for help, but hearing only silence. This is what it feels like to be Asian American right now. It’s all I can think about every time I see yet another viral video of an Asian being attacked while onlookers shuffle past.
My fear began last spring, when COVID-19 first set in abroad and the internet became plagued with memes blaming the Chinese for spreading the illness. Then, the discrimination mutated from internet memes to verbal and physical assault. A meme can only hurt if I choose to interrupt my scrolling to give it the time of day. A verbal or physical assault is someone else’s doing. A meme is usually anonymous. An assault comes from a real person, someone whose face I can’t unsee. Verbal and physical assaults scar.
Before long, my feed became flooded with stories of Asian Americans being attacked, unprovoked, as they were going about their everyday lives. Asian American students of all ages were being bullied at school. Asian American men and women were being chased down streets. Some were spat on and cussed out. Others were beat, dragged, mugged and kicked. It was happening to Asians of all ages, all over the world. We were only in April of 2020 — just one month since the virus had touched down in the states, and just a few months since the virus made the international news.
I was terrified for my parents, friends and extended family. I prayed that the subject of the next viral video wouldn’t be someone that I knew.
Some days, the weight of what was happening in the world was overwhelming. As a society, we were forced to adapt to this “new normal” of working remotely, wearing masks out in public, and minimizing human contact. On top of these measures, Asian Americans now had to proceed in public with caution.
Growing up as a SoCal Asian
As someone who was born and raised in an upper-middle class suburban SoCal neighborhood with a high percentage of Asians, I hardly gave my race much thought. Sure, I had to check the “Asian” box on forms and exams like the SATs. I also went through a period of rejecting and resenting my culture that I eventually outgrew. These small moments where I ‘reckoned’ with my race always seemed trivial, inconsequential, a part of growing up and something that we just had to do as first-generation Asians reconciling both the immigrant experiences of our parents and the American experiences we saw on TV.
Then, I moved to the East Coast for my first full-time job after college. It was the first time in my life that I felt like a minority. After the initial newness of it all wore off, it was fine. There were places I could go for a taste of home and stores I could visit for Asian groceries. We had employee resource groups for Asian Americans at work that I became involved with. While I was (and still am) “the only” Asian in my immediate working group, there are other Asians at work. I made friends who celebrated some of the same holidays and shared the same lived experiences. I wasn’t an anomaly.
A slap in the face
Last spring, certain leaders vilified Asian Americans with their choice of language surrounding the Coronavirus. Suddenly, what I knew about the way I fit into society was turned on its head. It had all been a façade. It felt like the rug had been pulled out from under me. There was no amount of assimilation and “success” that could enable me to escape the systemic racism of this country. I would always be viewed as someone with smaller eyes, someone othered, someone foreign.
I couldn’t help but think about the implications of these perceptions in my workplace. If I didn’t take up space, ask lots of questions or continually demonstrate my ability to lead, I would always be viewed as timid, quiet and incapable, especially as an Asian female, two degrees removed from most of my other coworkers within engineering. My identity was defined by the absence of something. Asian Americans were in essence negative space — never the subject of the photo, always a prop. It felt like a slap in the face.
Taking action
I reached out to Asian influencers. I found tons of Asian advocacy groups. I joined different Zoom calls every week to see what people were saying. I wanted to do something about it.
Although I found many pockets of passion, it seemed that the Asian American community couldn’t quite mobilize as a unit. For some reason, the Asian American diaspora was too fractured, too broken to gain critical mass. There were too many intra-community differences. The differences in response between the Asian American and Black communities to acts of racial injustice against their own communities only made me more frustrated. Why couldn’t we mobilize the way Black Lives Matter had? I didn’t have answers.
Equip yourself with knowledge so that you can think critically about the way the world works, rather than accept what’s fed to you.
A pursuit of knowledge
Instead, I turned to history. For someone who hated history in school, this was a huge growing moment for me. I learned so much about the role Asian Americans played in shaping this country I call home. History became way more interesting once I learned that there were parts of it that were applicable to me. I realized that there were people who looked like me who made history. I owe some of this learning to PBS who created a five-part series to document the story of Asians in America.
In reviewing Asian American history, things started to make sense. My parents came to the United States after 1965. They did not already have degrees. They were simply students who’d come for a “better opportunity” to make a life for themselves. They were immigrants who were laser focused on survival and more concerned about making sure their sacrifice would allow my sister and me to live better lives than theirs. They probably didn’t know about how the Asian American and Black communities had once come together to demand civil rights. Instead, they only saw the history of racial tensions between the two communities.
After George Floyd was murdered, I immersed myself in documentaries, books and materials that shed light on the Black experience in America. I learned (and am still learning) so much about how tightly knit our communities are intertwined. I saw how we, like many other marginalized communities, are the ones who lose out in this beast called systemic racism. It doesn’t serve any of us to fight each other.
And this is just the tip of the iceberg of what I learned. I won’t delve further here, but knowledge is power. Equip yourself with knowledge so that you can think critically about the way the world works, rather than accept what’s fed to you.
Sitting with the feelings
Over the last year, my feelings of safety were compromised. I couldn’t run where I used to. I avoided going out alone after dark. I made sure to stay hyper aware and vigilant of my surroundings. At times, it felt useless. Up until I quit the gym, I had attended my cardio kickboxing classes religiously. Yet, in spite of knowing I can throw a decent punch and take your knees out with my runners’ legs, I didn’t know if I, a petite Asian woman, would be able to defend myself if outnumbered.
My feelings waver between sadness, hopelessness and defenselessness and empowerment, defiance and strength. When news of the attacks on the elderly started to surface, those feelings leaned heavily towards anger. How dare they attack the members of our community who are unequivocally regarded with the utmost respect? How dare they go after our grandparents? How cowardly.
Throughout it all, the cries for help were deafening to those of us within the Asian American community, yet it seemed like they fell on deaf ears outside of our feeds.
The boiling point
On March 16, 2021, a white man murdered 8 individuals in the Atlanta-area. Of those killed, 6 were women of Asian descent.
For the Asian American community, this was the boiling point. Of all the inequities we’ve faced, the way the mass shooting was covered in the media has been the most dehumanizing. Officers empathized with the shooter. The media tiptoed around calling the shooting a hate crime. Most infuriating of all, the victims and their stories were unfairly represented, their names butchered, treated as nothing more than collateral damage amidst the chaos.
When I heard about the shooting, I wasn’t surprised. My heart ached with the families of those who lost a loved one, but I couldn’t help but feel that all signs had been leading to this. It felt like it had just been a matter of time. Between March 19, 2020 and February 28, 2021, Stop AAPI Hate received nearly 3,800 reports of hate incidents — and that doesn’t include the number of incidents that go unreported. The failings of the media were the most disappointing. Animosity towards Asian Americans had been escalating over the last year. Why hadn’t any of it been covered until now?
Where to go from here
In spite of the pain I feel today, I am hopeful for a better tomorrow. It’s unfortunate that it took a mass shooting for us to get here, but I am optimistic about the ability of the Asian American community to set aside our differences to come together. I’m optimistic about the Asian American community extending a hand and asking for help from and giving help to our allies, including the Black, Brown, LGBTQ+, and other BIPOC communities. I’m committed to using my voice to support the Asian American community. We are not your model minority. We will not remain silent. We can dismantle this system that has so unfairly divided us. We are stronger together and we will prevail.
