the erasure of anti-Asian racism

In the dark, I lie awake imagining their faces, their last thoughts. My body is lead, my heart races, tears come unbidden.

I keep refreshing the news and social media, searching for stories about the eight victims of the Atlanta spa shootings, stories that will help ignite some of the same rage that galvanized protests and demands for legislative reform over the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery. I hope friends and allies will also speak out on behalf of the grieving, terrorized Asian American community. As I wait, indignities compound.

In the media, the six Asian victims’ names are misspelled and mispronounced. Major news outlets release them with their second syllables abbreviated nonsensically. The error is so ubiquitous I have to dig up the Fulton County medical examiner’s report to discover the full names of Hyun Jung Kim, Soon Chung Park, and Yong Ae Yue. Meanwhile, all three names of the gunman, both white victims Delaina Ashley Yaun and Paul Andre Michels, and survivor Elcias Hernandez-Ortiz, are consistently spelled out in full.

I call my sister. How are you processing? I ask her. This tragedy feels both near and far away, she says. I know what she means. My sister and I have been lucky. Our parents moved to the United States for college, and thanks to their labor we have enjoyed considerable privilege. Our jobs enable us to work from home, we can have most basic necessities delivered and so have been somewhat insulated from a world that is becoming increasingly dangerous for Asians.

The six Asian women killed in Atlanta on Tuesday did not have such privilege. Income disparity within the Asian American demographic is rising sharply, so while the median Asian American household income is higher than the national average, it is paradoxically the poorest minority group in many cities. 16% of Asians work survival jobs in the service industry, in restaurants, nail salons, and massage parlors with crushingly long hours and inconsistent wages, exacerbated by the pandemic. As we have seen this week, massage work is reflexively conflated with sex work, which made the victims especially vulnerable to violence.

My heart aches for these women, many of whose stories still have yet to be told, all while the media eagerly trawls the fetid bog of the gunman’s life, interviewing his family members and former roommates, broadcasting his image everywhere so that his face hounds my dreams. His motivations are speculated upon, his words are believed, he is humanized and given the benefit of the doubt by law enforcement, who managed to take him—an armed man who had just murdered eight people—into custody “without incident.” A week after the anniversary of police killing Breonna Taylor in her own home, this a galling reminder of white privilege.

As we wait for more information about the Asian women he killed, I wrestle with the fact that we may never get fully realized portraits of some of them. Many of their families, friends, and colleagues have stayed silent—some families not wishing to have victims’ names publicized at all. The reasons for this are myriad: language barriers and distance may frustrate their loved ones’ efforts to be heard, they may understandably distrust law enforcement and the media and wish to mourn privately. As the public speculates over whether the victims were sex workers, their families may be struggling with a complicated fog of grief, shame, and terror.

My grandmother, Chan Yuk Chun, circa 1951.

Although we may not hear all of the victims’ stories, they are no less human. I lie awake and wonder what made them laugh, whom they loved. Hyun Jung Kim’s two boys relied upon her, a devoted mother “who dedicated her whole life” to raising them. To her beloved granddaughter, Sun Cha Kim was “an angel…without an ounce of hate or bitterness in her heart.” Daoyou Feng was new at her job, I wonder if she had started to make friends there. I wonder what they gossiped about, what pictures they had saved as their phone screens. Yong Ae Yue’s sons say she loved karaoke; I wonder what her favorite song was. I wonder what delighted Soon Chung Park, what made each of these women feel proud. Many Asian Americans have a legal name and an anglicized name, like Xiaojie “Emily” Tan, the enterprising and kind-hearted owner of one of the spas—what did they like to be called?

In the lacunae of their stories, I’m reminded of my own grandmother, who left home as a teenager to look for work and landed in 1950s Saigon. Beautiful and clever, with a head for numbers but not speaking the local or the colonial language, she worked survival jobs too. The French and German men she dealt with in her work saw her as yet another anonymous Asian body they felt entitled to. They did not see her as human, and yet she was the beating heart of our family: the embodiment of joy and generosity and boundless love. I can still feel her arms wrapped around me in my memory, feel the papery soft texture of her skin, see her slippered feet shuffle around the kitchen as if in dance. Her bravery and sacrifice made our lives possible. I cannot help but think of her when I think about these six women. This is the kind of life that was ruthlessly extinguished.

The debate over whether or not these women were sex workers misses the point: the gunman sexualized them regardless. To him, they were not human beings but hollow avatars for his desire. The Cherokee County sheriff’s spokesperson—who himself has promoted anti-Asian rhetoric—said the shooter had “a really bad day” and saw these women as “temptations” to be “eliminated.” In a fever of sadness and rage, my mind casts about, clawing at the tangle of societal rot that underpins this violence: The sexual entitlement of toxic masculinity. The easy access to guns. The marginalization of minority workers. The evangelical doctrine of sexual purity that shunts the entire responsibility for male lust onto women and girls. Media and law enforcement have stopped short of calling this tragedy a hate crime because the shooter himself attributed his actions to “sex addiction”, misogyny instead of racism—as if we should take his word for it, as if it cannot be both.

For Asian American women, racism and misogyny have always been inextricable. For over a century, our bodies have been equated with illicit sexuality: the 1875 Page Act effectively barred entry to Asian women on the assumption that they were all prostitutes. This hyper-sexualization persists in popular culture today, and is the predominant way that racism is experienced by Asian women. Of the 3795 anti-Asian hate incidents reported to Stop AAPI Hate in the past year, the vast majority were perpetrated against Asian women. Our individuality is erased, our identities blurred, we are foreignized and fetishized and told we should be flattered by it.

I have lost track of how often this has happened to me, my sister, my friends. “The sexiest Asians are from Thailand,” a white man told me once, interrupting me to guess where I was from. “But…your English is pretty good,” he said, perplexed. I had just finished a PhD at Cambridge—on the dehumanization and sexualization of women.

When a journalist with the same name as mine lost her job at Newsweek for posting an inaccurate story about Donald Trump, the trolls came for both of us, assuming we were the same person. Their attacks were explicitly sexual, suggesting that she (I, we) get a new job in the porn industry and “do better things with that mouth.” Google alerted me that “Jess Kwong Nude” was suddenly the most popular search term leading people to my cooking blog.

The US has a long tradition of anti-Asian racism, shaped by its colonial history; the wars it has fought in Vietnam, Korea, the Philippines; its exclusion laws and internment camps. While academics like David L. Eng and psychologist Shinhee Han have been laboring to shed light on how this generational trauma affects mental health in AAPI communities, Asian Americans are continually gaslit by the systematic erasure of these histories. Our communities have internalized the white supremacist message that our suffering does not merit remembrance.

Stay silent, work hard, and you, too, could achieve the American Dream. This is the promise of the model minority myth, through which the successes of Asian Americans are touted as evidence that America is a colorblind meritocracy. By extension, it implies that other racialized communities suffer inequality because they’re not trying hard enough. The model minority myth not only obscures the high poverty rates and vast income disparities among Asian Americans, but also the history and heavy toll of anti-Asian racism.

It has been so deeply encoded in our psyches that we perpetuate the lie ourselves. Asian Americans are forever having to prove that we belong. In April of 2020, as Donald Trump repeatedly uttered the phrase “China virus,” former presidential candidate Andrew Yang wrote in an op-Ed in The Washington Post that Asian Americans should “wear red, white and blue” to broadcast our Americanness and prove “we are not the virus”. My own grandfather, an Air Force veteran who earned his USAAF wings in Oklahoma and flew bombers in World War II, could easily have been one of the elderly Asians attacked in the street this year, another frail body shattered on the pavement. We know what black and brown families have always known, that no amount of patriotism, industry, or success will protect us from the virulence of racism.

My grandfather Kuang Joa Ming at Enid Air Force Base in front of his B-25 in 1942.

The Atlanta gunman drove across two counties, sought out and slaughtered six Asian women, and yet he does not consider his actions racially motivated. The widespread refusal to call this a hate crime continues the longstanding erasure of anti-Asian racism. When Vincent Chin was beaten to death on the eve of his wedding in 1982, his murderers claimed they were not racially motivated; they paid a fine and served no jail time. This year, the two attackers who killed Vicha Ratanapakdee and Pak Ho were charged with elder abuse, not hate crimes.

Erasing the racial animus of these atrocities has allowed anti-Asian racism to escalate unchecked. Attributing horrific violence—whether mass shootings or police brutality—to one man’s “addiction” or “a few bad apples” lets everyone else off the hook: The white supremacist underpinnings of racial prejudice need not be addressed, the church’s destructive purity doctrine need not be examined.

We will not be gaslit. No matter how the gunman views himself, we see exactly how he fits into the grotesque history of anti-Asian hate in America, we see exactly how the facile scapegoating of Asian Americans—as exemplified throughout the pandemic at the highest levels of government—led him to blame Asian women for his problems, and kill them for it.

What do Asian Americans need right now? We need support for the victims’ grieving families. We need funding for grassroots organizations that advocate for these vulnerable workers. We need political leaders to denounce anti-Asian violence in the strongest possible terms. We need laws regarding hate crimes to better reflect how these are perpetrated today. We need community-based alternatives to heavier policing, which has never benefitted the marginalized. We need support for Asian-owned businesses that are struggling due to prejudice and the pandemic.

We need our non-Asian friends to speak out, to make sure the 149% spike in anti-Asian hate incidents does not continue to rise, to help dismantle the model minority myth that harms all racialized communities. We need non-Asian allies to help protect our elderly, to educate themselves on the history of anti-Asian racism in this country, to root out casual racism their own minds and circles, to amplify our voices in this fight.

All week, I have waited to hear my friends share my outrage. I can count on one hand the number of non-BIPOC friends who have done so, who have reached out with messages of solidarity and support. Friends, where are you? I am baffled by this silence, and it is painful to think too hard about it. We need you—I need you—to show up.