My background reads much like many of the people who will read this. I was born in China, I immigrated to the United States before I was 2. I was raised in the tri-state area, where academics and doing well in school was a huge focus in my family. I went to a college in a metropolitan area, where most of my friends thought like me and most of them looked like me in some way. And then I got a white-collar job in a big city, where I continue to reside in my insulated bubble. By no means is my life so extraordinary that I felt people had to read about it. Yet the events from the past 2 days have made me feel because my life is ordinary, that I should share about my experiences.
At first, it was just a notification of another mass shooting in America, and I let 3 or 4 notifications buzz by while I was winding down in the evening. But when I finally clicked on the standard gray rectangle, the sensation of reading the headline of “Women of Asian Descent Were 6 of the 8 Victims in Atlanta Shootings” gripped me. I’ve been following the news ever since. I listen to “The Daily” podcast from the New York Times and on March 18, 2021, they released a podcast (A Murderous Rampage in Georgia) that discussed how difficult it was to label violence against Asian-Americans a “hate crime.” Though these violent crimes are often charged as violence and dole out the punishment that’s deserved, the lack of label of “hate crime” is a lack of validation of aggressions towards a community because of a shared characteristic: being Asian. The lack of validation is just another form of not being seen.
Though I love the weekday podcasts from the NYT, I rarely listen to the “Sunday Reads,” but Steven Yeun was interviewed for a recent one (The Many Lives of Steven Yeun), and my playlist had just autoplayed this particular podcast. Too lazy to move to my phone while I was vacuuming and cleaning, I just listened passively to the first 5 minutes of the podcast. But again, this was content that gripped me as it played on. The conversation blossomed when Steven Yeun had said, “Sometimes I wonder if the Asian American experience is what it’s like when you’re thinking about everyone else. But no one is thinking about you.” I cried as the podcast continued because the phrase stuck with me and it felt like it echoed my existence…and yet it didn’t fully. I didn’t recognize that something was missing until I did.
It wasn’t until the article “How Racism and Sexism Intertwine to Torment Asian-American Women” that I really felt completely heard and seen. Someone had written about experiences that I’ve lived through, one that I didn’t read too often that encompassed all the parts of me. The parts that make up my identity must be so obvious to other people: Asian, American, woman, immigrant, but becomes so much less obvious what it means when these identities intersect. And so I write this to share because it takes someone to start a difficult and vulnerable conversation that people can engage with. And my experiences in life have taught me that humans are kind and empathetic, and so I have faith that there are people who aren’t like me that read this who will also see and hear me.
These are experiences in life that I attribute to being a woman:
· When I walk home alone, I am hyper-aware of whoever is walking behind me. I hope they walk at a diagonal behind me so I could see if they pose any threat to me. It would be even better if they could speed up and walk faster than me, so nobody is behind me
· I count the number of women I see on the streets walking alone after it gets dark, where it’s not too late to be considered wild but could be too late to be considered dangerous, around 9 or 10PM. And if I’m also walking alone, I feel the shared sense of restriction and fear of safety as I recognize the mirrored fast walk, coat clench, and lack of eye contact
· I always tell my friends that I will text them when it’s time for me to go home alone, whether by walking 1 block or by car for 15 minutes since it’s important for me that someone knows I’ve gotten home safely because worst-case scenario isn’t robbery or assault, it’s rape and murder. And I ALWAYS text my friends to check-in if the situation is reversed
· When my best friend called me at 3AM in the middle of the night and said, “I’m on an Uber back from the airport,” I immediately knew by her words and her tone that she was worried for her safety and tried to direct the conversation to seem as normal as possible as to not arouse suspicion from her driver
· Being aware from a young age that having a car slow down next to me was something to constantly look over my shoulder for and would be an automatic trigger to get ready to run
· Knowing that my mom was always wary to have me in a room with an older or adult male by myself
· Considering my shoe choice before I leave the house, how long I would stay out, my method of transportation home and if I could fight or flee if need be
· Having the check always presented to the guy, even if I was paying, even when someone was reaching out to me to talk as a professional contact
· Being told I should “smile more” by random guys on the street
These are experiences in life that I attribute to being (east) Asian:
· Being told that when I talk with a group of only other Asians, it’s being “clique-y,” yet a group of white people all talking to each other is just status quo
· Hearing “ching chong”, “chink”, and “go back to your country” directed at me by various strangers at different times in my life
· People who aren’t Asian will ask me about current events relating to Korea/China/Japan without the appropriate context as it’s somehow a monolithic block and I’ve become the preeminent authority
· Tensing up or being on guard if some non-Asian stranger walks towards me and a group of my Asian friends and wondering if there will be racial slurs or harassment
· Being told that I speak “really good English for an Asian”
· Walking in the middle of Union Square (NYC) and switching to Mandarin so my mom can understand my sentiments better, then getting a side-eye from a random stranger. I immediately switched back to English to show that I belonged. He told me “Go back to where you came from” anyway
These are experiences in life that I attribute to being an American immigrant from another country, often a non-English speaking country:
· Being the 10-year old ordering the dishes at a non-Chinese restaurant instead of having my parents speak with their accents out of misplaced embarassment
· Getting on the phone to talk to customer service/insurance/utilities to resolve any issues from a young age
· Bringing homemade lunch as a young child before realizing that it would get extra questions and maybe brow wrinkles and nose sniffing before hearing “ew”
· Visiting my relatives in my parent’s home country and being a competitive swimmer meant that every time I would always get asked “Would you represent your parent’s home country or America in the Olympics?” (The answer was always “I would never make it there”)
· Having those same relatives say, “She just doesn’t understand, she grew up in America”
· Being told that I’m an “immigrant” in America yet those are just foreign “expatriates” or “expats” in the countries I’ve visited across Asia
· Not understanding the cultural implications of a song or movie if it was released before I could remember things
· Not understanding the game of American football until the fifth grade when we played it in gym because my father was a soccer and basketball fan
· Having a cultural and language barrier with my own parents, knowing they’ll never be able to fully realize the thoughts and agency I have as an adult because I can’t fully express myself the way I want to with words they understand. They will never understand my inspirations, dreams, fears and hopes the way that my friends who grew up under the same pressures and environments can
These are experiences in life that I attribute to being an Asian-American woman:
· Having a guy hit on me in the club with the line “You? Me? Banana cream smoothie?” and when I rejected him, hearing him say to his friend while looking me in the eye, “Whatever, there are hotter Asians out there”
· Listening to my married Asian massage therapist tell me about her non-Asian client who told her verbatim “I put baby in you” and immediately knowing the truncating of words was a fetishization, yet the mutual acknowledgement was silence
· Having “ching chong” and “go back to your country, chink” yelled at me various strangers at different times in my life, and especially regularly yelled at me by the old woman, wearing her down coat and carrying a suitcase, who is always in the public space at the end of my block. But she only yells when I’m alone
· Going into a female bathroom at a club to look for my friend and having one of the other girls in a group say, “Oh, are you looking for the other Asian one? I think she’s puking in the back” while sneering and pointing a finger
· That interaction in Union Square where the guy told me to “go back to your country,” he shoved me with his shoulder as we crossed the street, as I was trying to speed up and get away from him. It was hard enough to stumble but wasn’t hard enough to leave any physical scars. Would he do that if I were male and could shove back?
· Being in a club, where I was the only Asian female, while my friend went to the bathroom, I noted how a group of 5–6 guys began pointing at me, singling me out and walking towards me. I was unable to hide no matter how hard I tried to duck and weave in throughout the crowds and after my male companion returned, they dispersed and stopped targeting me. I’ve never felt such fear and panic in the moment which morphed into anger that my agency wasn’t recognized. They only backed off until another guy showed some type of ownership over me
To hear the Captain, who acted as the spokesperson in the Atlanta shootings say the shooter had a “really bad day,” and to attribute his motives to only eliminating “temptation” of his “sexual addiction” and not register it as an attack against Asian-Americans, who also happen to be women, is to completely wipe away and gloss over the experiences of people who happen to be both Asian-American and women. It’s no coincidence that most club incidents that have left an impression on me deal with both my race and gender. Recognize that there are experiences and situations that cover multiple facets of our identity. The sexualization of Asian women in this country and in western Media is not new; don’t discount and dismiss it because it’s real — I’ve lived through it, but some don’t.
And here is where I don’t intersect with the women that were murdered: I have a wealth and class privilege that they didn’t. I recognize that I had the privilege to enter the working world in an office job with a college degree. Where my physical pain and eye strain came from sitting at a desk too long and not standing up on my feet where I had to service other people, in ways that these women (know their names: Delaina Ashley Yaun, Xiaojie Tan, Daoyou Feng) wouldn’t have wanted to if they had other circumstances and opportunities. I also acknowledge the man shot by name (Paul Andre Michels) because a loss of an innocent human life is a loss of an innocent human life. The “model minority” myth, that all Asians are good at math and school, and that all of them are in well-paid jobs as good little workers, hurts those who don’t fall under those assumptions and even those that do. It only provides one narrative, when many more exist, and the hardest stories to listen to are often the ones not heard. Even when it’s painful to hear about human trafficking and paid sexual services against the wills of the women who perform them, it’s another part of the reality for Asian-American women.
I’ve had conversations about identity and shared experiences with people who are like me that may not agree with me on the stories listed above. These are personal and painful for me to recount, but I’m willing to bet many of them are still shared experiences. And I will also recognize that these are all negative experiences that have impacted me enough that I remember and think about them. There are times I know that because of what I look like, I don’t have to worry about certain things. Like when I go through airport security, I’m never stressed to be pulled aside for random inspection, or when I go through any interaction with law enforcement or security checkpoints, I’m not considered a threat, and I’m not usually worried about my life. Like that in my white-collar job, being polite and nice will get me a “great attitude,” so long as I don’t rock the boat with too many uncomfortable conversations.
A huge part of Asian culture is making sure you have “face,” to keep up a carefully-cultivated image, one that doesn’t show vulnerability that can be mistaken for weakness. Yet behind the pride is pain, something that compounds if it is rarely discussed, and it is the same armor that’s contributed to me feeling unseen and unheard outside of my immediate and intimate circles. I want others to know who’ve felt the same in their lives that they are not alone, and I‘ve exposed my own experiences to be validated, dismissed, dissected, but mostly discussed.
