A Target on Our Backs

If the news refuses to call it what it is, then I will. I will fight back against stereotypes that Asians — and Asian women in particular — are subservient and quiet. I will fight back and call it by its name: The shootings were racist and demonstrated, in horrifying reality, what misogyny and the fetishization of East Asian women can become.

By Rachel Priest

I cannot even begin to express my deep sorrow at the shooting that left Delaina Ashley Yaun, Paul Andre Michels, Xiaojie Tan, Daoyou Feng, Soon Chung Park, Yong Ae Yue, Hyun Jung Kim, and Suncha Kim dead in Atlanta this past Tuesday. Six of them were Asian women like myself. I am horrified, I am hurting, I am grieving.

When the first New York Times notification about the shooting came across my screen, I was just sitting down for dinner. It was one of the rare evenings that my busy work schedule and my roommate’s busy grad school schedule let us meet in the kitchen.

“8 people dead in Atlanta shootings,” I read out loud. Both of us — weary and worn from the rise in anti-Asian violence against people who look like us — spent a moment reading it before moving on to other more mundane topics. 

It wasn’t that we didn’t care. We were exhausted, disheartened, so tired of more than a year’s worth of racist rhetoric surrounding the coronavirus pandemic that we just couldn’t bear to delve into the story and our complicated feelings after a long day. 

My roommate – who is Vietnamese – and I, a Chinese woman, have had a lot of conversations regarding race in the seven months we’ve been roommates in Atlanta. Sometimes, we try to make light of the racist incidents we’ve faced. Other times, we let grief, hurt, and anger into our conversations about how the Vietnam War impacted her family and about the identity reckoning I’ve had as a transracial adoptee.

Later that night, as I was scrolling through Twitter, reading and watching as the reports shifted, the wall of grief I’d been holding back hit me and tears sprung to my eyes. A year’s worth of reporting and crying and seeing my community abused, assaulted, and killed came to the surface. I texted two of my closest friends about the news, and then I called my parents close to midnight. 

“Are you scared?” my mom asked. 

I was silent for a second, trying to gather all of my tumbling emotions into a coherent sentence. 

“No … not in the same way as other Asian Americans have been. But this shooting is a lot closer to home,” I said.

In some ways, I’ve been able to distance myself a little bit from the violence happening to elderly Asian people because, unlike many of my Asian peers, my parents are white. I was adopted from China when I was a year old, and so I haven’t had to worry in the same ways other Asian Americans have had to about the safety of my parents and grandparents. 

I took a few more breaths and continued, pushing words past lips trembling with frustration and despair. “It made me realize that I could be walking around my city and any 21-year-old white man with a gun could shoot me because of what I look like.”

Only hours before the shootings, Stop AAPI Hate released a report detailing 3,800 reported incidents of anti-Asian violence, with a disproportionate number of those being directed at Asian women. 

The next morning, I woke up exhausted after a short night of dreaming about our nightmarish reality. I braced myself as I reached over to turn off my alarm, knowing that once I turned on my phone, I would be inundated with more news of the shooting. 

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s front page declared that eight people were shot dead at three massage parlors. Underneath, in smaller but still large text, the paper declared: “Investigators working to determine why victims were targeted.” Later that day, the Cherokee County police department said the shooter confessed to the murders and said he had a sexual addiction. The spas and massage parlors he targeted represented the “temptation he wanted to eliminate.” 

My blood hit a boiling point when I read that law enforcement placed the shooter, not the people whose lives he stole, at the center of the narrative. “He was fed up, at the end of his rope … yesterday was a really bad day for him and this is what he did,” said Capt. Jay Baker, a spokesperson for the Cherokee County Sheriff's Office.

If the news (and the AJC isn’t alone) refuses to call it what it is, then I will. I will fight back against my journalism training that tells me to remain unbiased and stick to the facts, reminding myself I’m an Asian woman before I’m anything else. I will fight back against years of colorblind conditioning that told me bringing race into every conversation is racist. I will fight back against the continuously perpetuated stereotypes that Asians — and Asian women in particular — are subservient and quiet. I will fight back and call it by its name: The shootings were racist and demonstrated, in horrifying reality, what misogyny and the fetishization of East Asian women can become. 

Last year, right before the pandemic shut down the country, my best friend and I took a trip to Nashville, Tennessee, for our senior year spring break trip, and I got the tiniest glimpse of what it’s like to be sought out because of my ethnicity. 

On the last night we were there, we went to a bar on Music Row. About an hour after we arrived, an older white man came up to me and asked where I was from. After hearing me say, five times,“I’m from Georgia,” he thought for a second and switched tactics. “What’s your nationality?”

“I’m American,” I said again and again and again. 

Exasperated, he leaned in too close and shouted: “No, no, I mean I’m English, I’m Irish, I’m white. What are you?”

I’d like to say that I walked away, that I told him to leave me alone — in possibly stronger language — but I didn’t. I stood there in utter embarrassment, disgust, and fear as he offered to buy me a drink and told me about his role as a “cool dad” who often talked to his two school-aged children about drugs and alcohol. This was a white man who was much bigger than I was. He also came to the bar with two other huge men who I had seen cornering others, even remarking to my friend that they were hunting for women. Sensing we might be in over our heads, my friend texted my mom who, on vacation with my brothers and dad, FaceTimed me. 

“I’ve got to go, my mom is calling me,”  I said and turned away before he could respond. I hid in the bathroom while my friend paid our tab and we sprinted for the exit. 

The fetishization of Asian women cannot be ignored when we talk about this shooting, and we need to hold people, news organizations, and Hollywood accountable for the ways in which they talk to and about Asian women. 

 While it’d be easy to point fingers and say the blame for the rise in anti-Asian hate crimes lay entirely at the feet of those who insist — including former President Donald Trump — on calling the coronavirus names like “China virus” and “Kung flu,” this country has always treated people of Asian descent, regardless of their ethnicity, with contempt. 

One of the few things I learned about Asian people in any history class (a problem in itself) was that Chinese immigrants were lured to California by gold and later a promise of freedom  for their labor in building the Transcontinental Railroad in the 1860s. In a move rooted in scapegoating and racism, the United States banned Chinese immigration with the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882. What I didn’t learn, however, was that American-born descendants of the Chinese immigrants already living in the U.S. weren’t allowed to become citizens until 1943 with the passage of the Magnuson Act (which also lifted the ban on Chinese immigration after 65 years.) I also was never taught about the Page Act of 1875, which banned “any subject of China, Japan, or any Oriental country” from immigrating to the U.S on the belief they were here for “lewd and immoral purposes.”

We can’t forget the thousands of Japanese Americans and others of Japanese descent who were placed in concentration camps during World War II. Nor can we ignore the destruction and death this country brought upon millions of Vietnamese people who would later flee to America for a chance at freedom — like my roommate and her family — only to be met with prejudice and racism. Nor can we ignore the other Asian communities in the country who have been harmed by xenophobia. 

My good friend and fellow journalist Katie Kim, who is Korean, spoke to our collective trauma and deep hurt when she wrote on Twitter: 

“On Feb. 14, 2020, I became a U.S. citizen. I did it because my parents brought me here to achieve the ‘American Dream.’ I did it because they wanted to see me succeed. I did it because I wanted to make them proud. And when I got my certificate, I *was proud. For a moment. But I am anything but proud today. What is the point of the ‘American Dream’ when America is shooting down people who look like my mom, my dad, my aunts, and my uncles? What did my parents bring me here for? What were all those 12-hour minimum-wage shifts for? What were all those days they had to stick me in daycare so I could pretend like I was any other white kid while their hands grew calluses and their hair turned gray for? I am tired. I am terrified. I feel invisible, yet I am hurting.” 

While this has been the worst anti-Asian crime in recent history in terms of body count, other incidents are no less egregious and terrifying for the AAPI (Asian American and Pacific Islander) community. In Houston, Texas, Mike Nguyen’s ramen shop was graffitied with the words “hope u dies” and “Go Back 2 China” and “Kung Flu.” In Oakland, California, Pak Ho, a 75-year-old Asian man, recently died from injuries he sustained from hitting his head on the ground after being punched. In the neighborhood of Queens in New York City, a woman was spit on three times while holding her baby, as the words “Chinese virus!” were hurled at her. And now Atlanta — the place I am proud to call home — joins the list. 

What happens when your home no longer feels safe? When questions about where you’re from are not just casually racist, microaggressions rooted in ignorance, but carry suspicion and danger? When every glance your way makes you feel studied, evaluated, sized up, hated? 

Another friend from college, who is also Chinese, invited me to her socially-distanced picnic birthday party this weekend. Not only did it feel like the safest way to gather but the nicest — soaking up the predicted sunny rays of the weekend forecast. But at 1:30 a.m on Wednesday, when I should’ve been getting caught up on sleep after a hectic work week, I lay there wondering if it would be smart for us to even go. I wondered if sitting out in public would put a target on our backs. 

But then I gently reminded myself to reject the fear, to not let one man’s actions be the reason I don’t get to celebrate my friend and enjoy the weather.

There’s a popular media trope of “giving voice to the voiceless.” But it’s important to remember we are not voiceless, we are not invisible. In fact, we’ve been speaking up, rallying, reporting hate crimes, and advocating for ourselves for the past year and beyond, but only recently has the national - media shifted to cover the issue of anti-Asian racism.. 

So what can non-Asian people do now and in the future?

It starts at the most basic level: treating others with empathy and love and calling out racism when you see it. Check in with your Asian friends, family members, co-workers, and neighbors to let them know you care. (And by check in, I don’t mean reach out to that one Asian person you knew a while ago but haven’t spoken to in years.) And then, it’s time to roll up your sleeves and lean in and learn. 

And finally, to my fellow Asian American brothers and sisters, I see you; I support you; I stand with you. We will get through this and, together, we will be a part of a better South and a better nation. 

This list is filled with educational resources, organizations to donate to, and places to safely volunteer. The Bitter Southerner has also decided to partner with Asian Americans Advancing Justice. Every time you buy an Abide No Hatred T-shirt, $10 will go toward our Better South Initiative, a fund that puts money into the pockets of organizations, including AAAJ, that work on the front lines of issues facing the South.

Updated March 19, 2021 to include the names of Soon Chung Park, Yong Ae Yue, Hyun Jung Kim, and Suncha Kim.